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/82Jy78J3kiG2JHEX7. 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) Today’s date matters: WHAT French astronomer looked to the skies on this date in 1801 and saw his first comet? He discovered or co-discovered thirty-six more in his lifetime and is credited by the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers as the world’s most successful visual discoverer of comets.
2) At WHAT minimum temperature (in Fahrenheit) should the interior of poultry be cooked before consumption, according to the FDA? The same number is the sum of the sums of the divisors of the first fourteen positive integers.
3) The photograph below, taken on (or about) January 1, 1965, is of WHAT woman, whose name is also obscured therein?
[A woman holds a handwritten sign up to a door. The sign reads “Rep.” and “(D - Hawaii)” with obscured text in between.]
4) The initials that follow are the initials of the titles of all seven feature-length films directed by a certain director. NAME the director; the first of these films was released in 1998 and the last of these films was released in 2017. P; RFAD; TF; TW; BS; N; M!
5) The Elements of Style, the American English style guide, contains the following passage:
The first means "sickening to contemplate"; the second means "sick at the stomach." Do not, therefore, say, "I feel [BLANK]," unless you are sure you have that effect on others.
WHAT (arguably) commonly misused eight-letter word fills in the blank?
6) Exactly one U.S. president is missing from the following otherwise-complete group; NAME the president. Rutherford Hayes, Chester Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon.
Here are the answers from last time:
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?
As we go on, we remember
All the times we had together
And as our lives change, come whatever
We will still be friends forever
Wait, no, wrong vitamin—this one is VITAMIN D. According to a 2013 user-submitted article on “patch.com,” whatever that is, the “D” in Vitamin D stands for “definitely important.”
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.
These folks’ duo is called MATT AND KIM. If you own a time machine and have terrible judgment about what to use it for, you can go see Matt and Kim in Kalamazoo, MI on June 4, 2022; their next tour date is unannounced.
Kalamazoo is sort of the Timbuktu of the American Midwest in that it punches way above its weight in cultural cachet because it’s kind of fun to say “Kalamazoo” out loud. For example, Kalamazoo is one of the 90+ places listed in the song “I’ve Been Everywhere” by Johnny Cash…which is a cover of a Hank Snow song…and which itself, of course, is an adaptation of the song “I’ve Been Everywhere” which was written by Geoff Mack in 1959 and popularized by Lucky Starr.
This original version of “I’ve Been Everywhere” contains lists of cities not in North and South America, but instead in WHAT country? The original’s first line is “Well, I was humpin’ my bluey on the dusty Oodnadatta road.” The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
This is ICARUS.
The youth in vain his melting pinions shakes,
His feathers gone, no longer air he takes:
Oh! Father, father, as he strove to cry,
Down to the sea he tumbled from on high,
And found his Fate; yet still subsists by fame,
Among those waters that retain his name.
That last line (again from Ovid) refers to what is called the Icarian Sea, a small part of the Aegean Sea. Therein lies the island of Icaria, which also takes its name from myth. Icaria, which is slightly larger than the city of Boston in size, has had an interesting history—for centuries it was part of the Ottoman Empire, and later it briefly declared itself a free state in 1912 in what is called the Icarian Revolution before becoming part of Greece. The Italians and Germans occupied it during World War II, and in the Greek Civil War in the late 1940s, the island was used to exile communists—this is why the island is sometimes also called “Red Rock,” as the island today is said to be sympathetic to left-leaning ideals.
About a decade ago, researchers found that Icaria has the highest percentage of 90-year-olds of any place on the planet, as nearly one of three people make it to their 90s. This makes Icaria one of the five “blue zones” where people live much longer than average, according to research by Gianni Pes, Michel Poulain and Dan Buettner; the others are Okinawa, Sardinia, Nicoya (Costa Rica), and Loma Linda (California).
As a last note—and I promise we won’t do this kind of thing very often, because you’re here for trivia and not for me—here is our dog, Icarus, sharing his thoughts on the newest installment in the Jurassic Park franchise:
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?
These are the RADIUM GIRLS. Women were seen as especially suited for the work of painting watches due to having smaller hands, arguably better for the exacting and detail-oriented work. Radium at the time was seen as something of a miracle element, having very recently been discovered. The workers, having no idea of the dangers of radium, were instructed to use their lips to bring their paintbrushes to a fine point. The dust to which the women were exposed would literally cause their skin to glow; some women wore fine dresses to work so that the dresses, too, would glow.
A years-long legal struggle ensued as the relevant companies, as you can imagine, vociferously denied that there was any causal connection between exposure to radium and the various horrific medical fates that befell these women. The cases were ultimately one of the factors that led to the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, better known as OSHA.
Kate Moore wrote a book called The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, released in 2017. Grace Fryer, one of the Radium Girls, is discussed at length in the book:
And Grace Fryer was never forgotten. She is still remembered now—you are still remembering her now. As a dial-painter, she glowed gloriously from the radium powder; but as a woman, she shines through history with an even brighter glory: stronger than the bones that broke inside her body; more powerful than the radium that killed her or the company that shamelessly lied through its teeth; living longer than she ever did on earth, because she now lives on in the hearts and memories of those who know her only from her story.
I like that passage, but why don’t we give Grace the finale here, in her own words?
And it hurts to smile, but I still smile.
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”?
This is the OHIO RIVER. Your two big clues here are, I think, (i) “hey, 981 miles is pretty long; isn’t that more than a third or so of the distance between New York and Los Angeles, for example?”, and (ii) “why would someone write about a river in a book called Notes on the State of Virginia if that river doesn’t border Virginia?” The answer is that the Ohio River bordered Virginia in 1781, but then later West Virginia split off from Virginia, and the part of the Ohio River that bordered Virginia is exclusively part of the West Virginia border.
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.
Each of these is A STATE THAT IS SPLIT INTO TWO TIME ZONES. I omitted a couple of states that could have been included because a portion of the state observes, or doesn’t observe, Daylight Savings Time, as that list rapidly changes—we were focused on the physical borders, so to speak, of the time zones.
I actually think your best path here was to just think about the states and what they have in common. I’ve co-opted a “270 to Win” map to illustrate:
You didn’t get to use a map, but thinking of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas as one group and Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee as another group may have made the pattern more evident.
Of course, we do have the theme, and when I think of time zones, I think of Daylight Savings Time and when sunrise/sunset occur, so that’s where our newsletter started:
Question #1: Vitamin D deficiencies are often caused by a lack of sunlight
Question #2: Matt and Kim’s biggest song, by a mile, is “Daylight”
Question #3: Icarus flew too close to the sun2
Question #4: The Radium Girls painted watches, used to tell time
Question #5: Oriented you towards a state being split into two parts (“what are some other things that might split states?”)
Newsletter Title: “Damage Nightly Visits” is my little joke, since having a time zone split up your state might make it logistically challenging to meet someone if you don’t communicate clearly about the time difference. More importantly for you, it’s an anagram for “Daylight Savings Time.”
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
AUSTRALIA (Tullamore, Seymour, Lismore, Mooloolaba, Nambour, Maroochydore, Kilmore, Murwillumbah, Birdsville, Emmaville, Wallaville, Cunnamulla, Condamine, Strathpine, Proserpine, Ulladulla, Darwin, Gin Gin, Deniliquin, Muckadilla, Wallumbilla, Boggabilla, Kumbarilla!)
Seth Godin’s The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly? argues, in order to make some kind of “follow your dreams” point, that Western audiences far too readily favor the “don’t fly too high” lesson of the Icarus story and pay short shrift to the other side of the story—Icarus was warned by his father Daedalus not to fly too low, as well, or he would crash into the sea. Godin contends, as part of his self-help/believe-in-yourself point, that we should understand the myth to mean that settling for too little is just as dangerous as flying too close to the sun.