Below are six trivia questions. If you’d like to participate, you can either reply to this e-mail or submit your answers via Google Forms: https://forms.gle/UbHwGauYEw32RPKX9. Like most trivia, the answers can be readily found via Google, so you’re on the honor system (i.e., do not use external resources to help you answer any of the questions). The SIXTH question of each set is designed to be a question that cannot be easily Googled; correct answers to those will be tracked and recognized in the next newsletter. The answers, and the next set of questions, will be published on Mondays and Thursdays.
1) The most common non-genetic cause of rickets, the childhood disease that results in weak or soft bones, is a deficiency of WHAT specific fat-soluble secosteroids responsible for, among other things, increasing our intestinal absorption of calcium, magnesium, and phosphate?
2) In 2004, Kim Schifino and Matt Johnson, two musicians from New York, formed an indie electronic duo with WHAT straightforward name? Their music has been featured in several commercials and in films such as Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul and The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part.
3) The following passage is translated from Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
The final master-stroke at last impos'd,
And now, the neat machine compleatly clos'd;
Fitting his pinions on, a flight he tries,
And hung self-ballanc'd in the beaten skies.
WHAT character in Greek mythology, who will meet his demise in a few lines, is described by this passage?
4) In a landmark sequence of events in the creation of occupational disease labor law in the early twentieth century, groups of female factory workers, who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with self-luminous paint, sued their employers in Illinois and New Jersey. WHAT two-word name is generally given to these workers, due to the radioactive element they were exposed to?
5) In his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1781, Thomas Jefferson wrote that WHAT 981-mile-long river, which does not today border or lie within Virginia, “is the most beautiful river on earth. Its current gentle, waters clear, and bosom smooth and unbroken by rocks and rapids, a single instance only excepted”?
6) WHAT distinction, in addition to being this newsletter’s theme, is shared by each of the following U.S. states? Alaska, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas.
Here are the answers from last time:
1) Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and The Dropout are all works about WHAT company and its founder, who allegedly conned many folks in California?
This question described THERANOS, founded in 2003 by Elizabeth Holmes.
Plenty has been written about Holmes, and I don’t have anything interesting to add. Theranos at its peak had a twelve-person board of directors, almost all of whom had no expertise in anything relating to blood/medicine but instead were, likely, selected for their connections to the U.S. government. Henry Kissinger, Jim Mattis, Bill Perry, Sam Nunn, and Bill Frist are some of the big names that were on the board. While the Theranos board couldn’t have passed the Bechdel test (since it was made up of Holmes and eleven men), it could have passed the Bechtel test (since Riley Bechtel, then the chairman of the Bechtel Corporation, was on the board). Yeah, sorry.
2) The Mackenzie River is the longest Canadian river that is entirely within Canada. The Yukon River and the Saint Lawrence River partially go through the United States, but WHAT river, which meanders solely through Manitoba, drains Lake Winnipeg, ends in the Hudson Bay, and is the second-longest river that is entirely within Canada?
This is the NELSON RIVER. Winnipeg is the capital of Manitoba and by far its most populous city. Of Canada’s ten most populous cities, SEVEN of them have at least one of the following two properties: (a) it is a provincial or federal capital, or (b) it is the most populous city in its province. NAME one of the remaining three cities—i.e., a city that is one of the ten most populous cities in Canada, but that is not a provincial/federal capital and is not the most populous city in its province. All three answers are in the same province. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
3) On November 7, 2020, prevarications in Pennsylvania were promulgated at a press conference outside WHAT small business in the neighborhood of Holmesburg, Philadelphia, which was not a hotel and definitely was not composed by Antonio Vivaldi?
This is FOUR SEASONS TOTAL LANDSCAPING.
The Fifth Season is a 2015 sci-fi novel by N.K. Jemisin; it’s the first installment in her Broken Earth trilogy (the other two novels are The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky). The idea is that the “Fifth Season” is a period of cataclysmic climate change that occurs every few centuries. That’s a good one to know for trivia because (i) The Fifth Season won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, making Jemisin the first Black person to win that award, and (ii) the other two installments in the trilogy also won the Hugo Award, making Jemisin the first person to win the Hugo Award three years in a row, or for all three books of a trilogy.
The first two novels, by the way, did not win the Nebula Award, but were both nominated. The Stone Sky did win both the Hugo and the Nebula, one of twenty-six novels to win both (some of which you have probably heard of, such as Dune, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ringworld, Neuromancer, Ender’s Game, and American Gods).
4) Washington Irving’s short story “Rip Van Winkle” concerns the titular character napping in New York, of course. However, throughout the early nineteenth century, WHAT other state, home to counties such as Wake, Mecklenburg, and Gaston, was given the derogatory nickname “Rip Van Winkle State” due to a perceived lack of development and growth?
The “Rip Van Winkle State” is NORTH CAROLINA.
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. is the collection of essays and short stories by Washington Irving in which “Rip Van Winkle” (and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”) first appeared. The collection was one of the first works of American literature that was widely read in Europe; Sir Walter Scott called it “positively beautiful” and Lord Byron said “I know it by heart.” William Godwin, the political philosopher (and husband to Mary Wollstonecraft), wrote of the collection “Everywhere I find in it the marks of a mind of the utmost elegance and refinement, a thing as you know that I was not exactly prepared to look for in an American.”
5) WHAT term, used in architecture to refer to any building with a circular ground plan (and sometimes covered by a dome), is also sometimes used to refer to a round room within a building? A famous example of one rests on the original grounds of the University of Virginia.
This is a ROTUNDA.
The rotunda, the immediate area around it, and Jefferson's nearby home at Monticello combine to form one of only six modern manmade sites in the United States to be internationally protected and preserved as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. The other five are the Old City of San Juan, the San Antonio Missions, Independence Hall, the Statue of Liberty and the architectural works of Frank Lloyd Wright.
6) WHAT distinction, which otherwise fits with the theme of this newsletter, is shared by each of the following individuals? Jacob Chestnut, William Evans, John Gibson, Billy Graham, Rosa Parks, Brian Sicknick.
These are the six civilians who have LAIN IN HONOR in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. By custom, only presidents, military commanders, Supreme Court justices, and members of Congress may lie in state; lying in honor is the name of the similar honor given to civilians.
Regardless, our goal here was to get you to think of the phrase “lying in state” to think of what these individuals might have in common (and answers that said something about “lying in state” or really anything about lying in the rotunda were accepted). That’s why each question had an alliterative phrase that is, loosely, a synonym for “lying” in a particular state or province, using the different meanings of “to lie,” with alliteration featured a few times to try to signal that these were important to the theme and related to one another:
Question #1: “conned…in California”
Question #2: “meanders…through Manitoba”
Question #3: “prevarications…in Pennsylvania”
Question #4: “napping in New York”
Question #5: “rests…Virginia” (this one was trying to get you to “rotunda” to focus on the U.S. Capitol)
Title: “Snoozing in Sonora” is another example of this; Sonora is a state in Mexico.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
Mississauga, Brampton, and Hamilton (all in Ontario, and all with 500,000+ people). Surrey (BC) is next on the list.