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/4YkrTkrtrEHEX4a1A. 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) Dolce, the Italian word for “sweet,” is a term used in music instructing one to have the piece’s sound eradiate in a tender and adoring manner. WHAT person, twice ranked by Forbes as the most powerful woman in the world, was named after a longer version of the same direction that translates to “with sweetness”?
2) WHAT two-word alliterative phrase describes each of the following? (i) a song released by the Bee Gees in 1967; (ii) the name of the seventh Bee Gees album, released in 1970, the only one released without any vocal contributions from Robin Gibb, and (iii) a made-for-TV British comedy film starring the Bee Gees, also released in 1970, with appearances by Vincent Price, Eric Clapton, Roger Daltrey, and Mick Jagger? What, it’s not sporting to make all three clues based on the Bee Gees’ early work? Okay, it’s also something that would put portcullis protectors in a pickle.
3) In the 2016 film Moana, the character Tamatoa, voiced by Jemaine Clement, sings to Moana and her crewmate Maui that “you can’t expect a demigod to beat a decapod—look it up!” WHAT kind of animal is Tamatoa in the film?
4) In a famous folk tale, the character Cassim stands in front of large rocks and shouts the word “barley,” to no effect. One translation of the tale says he then “named several different sorts of grain, all but the right one, and the door still stuck fast.” WHAT was the “right one” that Cassim failed to name? Had he done so, he would have been reunited with his brother.
5) A “mole” is the SI base unit of amount of substance; there are 602,252,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules contained in one mole of any substance. That’s a pretty long number to write out, so instead the number is often called WHOSE number, after a scientist noted for his revolutionary contributions to molecular theory?
6) WHAT U.S. state is missing from the below galaxy of places, which is otherwise a complete list? [Note: States (and D.C. and Ontario) here are divided into tiers; so, for example, whatever this distinction is, Texas has it to a higher degree than Illinois, and Colorado and Utah have it to an equal degree.]
[BLANK]
Washington, D.C.
Ohio, Texas, Washington
Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, New York, Ontario, Oregon, Utah
Here are the answers from last time:
1) In 1990, the nation of Namibia formally gained independence from WHAT nation following a decades-long struggle sometimes called the Namibian War for Independence and sometimes called the “Border War”?
The nation is SOUTH AFRICA—the small hint here was “border.” In addition to South Africa, Namibia also borders Angola, Zambia, and Botswana. Here is a map of Namibia:
See that little horizontal strip of land in the northeast? That strip, a legacy of European partitioning in the late 1800s, is generally called the Caprivi Strip, after the German chancellor who was in office from 1890 to 1894 and who traded with the British for a claim to the land. “Itenge” and “Okavango Panhandle” are less colonialist names for the area.
The story goes like this—the Germans asked for this strip of land from the British as part of the aforementioned partitioning, since the strip was viewed as a route to the Indian Ocean and Germany’s other claimed lands in Africa. After all, the eastern part of the strip ends at the Zambezi River. However, what the Germans didn’t account for is that the Victoria Falls are forty miles east of where the strip ends, thus making the river not at all useful for navigation in that direction.
Ken Jennings of Jeopardy! fame has a nice short writeup of the area, accessible here: https://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2013-03-04/caprivi-strip-namibia-zimbabwe-maphead-ken-jennings. A second article by Jennings, accessible at the following link, delves into whether the region features the only point in the world where the borders of four nations currently meet (short answer: probably not): https://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2011-12-19/the-african-quadripoint
2) Football players Derrick Henry, Leonard Fournette, Herschel Walker, Darren McFadden, and Tre Mason make up the top-five players all time in rushing yards (single-season) for WHAT college athletic conference?
Henry (Alabama), Fournette (LSU), Walker (Georgia), McFadden (Arkansas), and Mason (Auburn) all played in the SOUTHEASTERN CONFERENCE, generally called the SEC. Henry and Fournette set those two records (2,219 and 1,905 yards, respectively) in the same year, 2015. Henry, though, played three extra games compared to Fournette that year (the SEC Championship, and then two playoff games), so Fournette holds the record on a “yards per game” basis. Which of these metrics matters more? It depends on whether you’re talking to a LSU or Bama fan, I think.
Herschel Walker is the Republican nominee in this year’s U.S. Senate election in Georgia; his inclusion was meant to give you a “current events” hook into this question in addition to the more straightforward football point of entry.
3) The term “areography” refers to the study of the geographical features of WHAT, specifically? One of the (many, many) challenges previously faced by areographers: How do you come up with a reference point equivalent to “sea level” when there are no oceans?
Areography refers to the study of MARS—the path here is that Mars is named after the Roman god of war, whose Greek equivalent is “Ares,” which is where the term areography comes from.
In 2021, Forbes identified Mars, Incorporated, the candy (and other goods) company, as the fourth-largest privately held company in the United States (Forbes looks to revenue for the prior fiscal year for these rankings). Name ANY of the other top-five privately held companies, as identified by Forbes; each has 100,000+ employees. The answer is at the end of this newsletter.1
4) To be, or not to be, that is not the question—instead, WHAT five-word phrase fills in the blank in the excerpt below from a famous play? Arthur Schopenhauer wondered whether the verb omitted below was a typo and should have been “shuttled.”
To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have [BLANK],
Must give us pause.
The phrase is “SHUFFLED OFF THIS MORTAL COIL.” This is part of the “to be, or not to be” soliloquy in Hamlet, which is why the question refers to it.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a (really depressing!) sci-fi short story in 1962—the thrust of the story is that the United States has cured aging and individuals have indefinite lifespans. In order to achieve population control, no one is allowed to be born unless someone else dies, whether by accident or by volunteering oneself. The name of the short story is the phone number for the Federal Bureau of Termination that characters call if they want to be “volunteers,” which phone number is “2 B R 0 2 B” (the 0 is pronounced “naught”) and, of course, a reference to the Hamlet soliloquy. The story’s conflict comes into focus when a character learns his wife is about to give birth to triplets unexpectedly.
5) The most-followed Twitter account of a person born on the continent of Asia, with over eighty million followers, is WHOSE Twitter account? His most recent tweet, as of this writing, was sent out at 6:45 PM (GMT+5:30) on Tuesday, July 12, 2022 and read as follows: “Addressing the closing ceremony of centenary celebrations of Bihar Legislative Assembly.”
The question was trying to nudge you towards India by referring by referring to the time zone and to Bihar, which is a state in the northeast portion of India. Thus, the answer here is NARENDRA MODI, the prime minister of India, who is sometimes criticized for advancing populist and illiberal policies.
Uttar Pradesh is the most populous state of India’s 28 states and 8 union territories, with about a sixth of the country’s population—Maharashtra and Bihar clock in at #2 and #3. Those three states combined have about 25% more people than the entire population of the United States.
6) WHAT distinction, also this newsletter’s theme, is shared by each of the following television shows and films? The Simpsons (1989—), South Park (1997—), The Big Bang Theory (2007-19), Iron Man 2 (2010), Machete Kills (2013), Rick and Morty (2013—), Why Him? (2016), Young Sheldon (2017—), Men in Black: International (2019).
Each of these works featured business magnate and inventor ELON MUSK, who is sometimes criticized for a whole bunch of things, in a cameo appearance.
The list of works may have provided a hook, as there are a few works (such as The Big Bang Theory and Rick and Morty) with science-oriented plotlines and themes. The other clues were as follows:
Question #1: Musk was born in South Africa and spent the first seventeen years of his life there.
Question #2: Musk has repeatedly gotten in high-profile trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission (also called the SEC) for his loose attitudes towards U.S. securities laws.
Question #3: Musk has long promoted the colonization of Mars and is the founder of SpaceX, an aerospace manufacturer.
Question #4: “Coil” is our link to “Tesla,” the automotive company that Musk is CEO of; a tesla coil is a famous invention of inventor Nikola Tesla.
Question #5: Musk owns about 9% of Twitter’s stock and in recent months has proposed buying the company outright; hijinks ensued.
Title: “Boring” refers to “The Boring Company,” another of Musk’s companies, focused on intra-city transit systems.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
Cargill, Koch Industries, Publix, Mars, and H-E-B make up the top five. (The next five are Reyes Holdings, Pilot Company, C&S Wholesale Grocers, Enterprise Holdings, and Fidelity Investments.)