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/TNCPkVjEQEBNLrTK8. 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) NAME the person who said the following on November 24, 1992: “[This] is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilis.” The speaker was referring to several unhappy events that had befallen the speaker’s family, including marital separations, run-ins with tabloids, and a fire at an official residence.
2) In the card game Omaha Hold’em, unlike Texas Hold’em, players each receive HOW MANY cards as a starting hand before community cards are revealed? For you Marvel fans, the same number is the number of Infinity Stones Thanos had in his own hand while fighting Iron Man, Dr. Strange, Spider-Man, and part of the Guardians of the Galaxy during the events of Avengers: Infinity War.
3) NAME the person who wrote the Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue,” was the leading cartoonist for Playboy throughout the 1950s and 1960s, co-wrote the 1988 film Things Change with David Mamet, and won two Grammy Awards and was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. This person, who sometimes used the pen name “Uncle Shelby,” is most famous not for any of those things, but for works he wrote in 1964 and 1974.
4) The #1 song in the Year-End Billboard Hot 100 singles for the year 1973 contains these lyrics in its first verse:
If you received my letter telling you I'd soon be free
Then you'll know just what to do
If you still want me
WHAT instruction, also the song’s name, is next given to the listener?
5) Take a word that can describe humans, animals, or objects used to represent a group with a shared public identity (such as sports teams or brands) and remove one letter—now you have an object associated with formal wear, and in American popular culture probably most closely associated with the animated character Fred Jones. WHAT was the original word?
6) The following nations share an unusual distinction. NAME another nation that fits with the theme of this newsletter and also belongs in this group: Austria, Botswana, Georgia, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Laos, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Switzerland.
Here are the answers from last time:
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”?
The term is con dolcezza, and so the person is CONDOLEEZZA RICE. Rice’s mother was a teacher and church organist who loved opera, and so she named her daughter after the musical term. When Rice was named Secretary of State in 2005, she became the highest-ranking woman in the presidential line of succession in American history. This distinction was taken by Nancy Pelosi in 2007, and then by Kamala Harris in 2021.
Today there are fifteen executive departments that make up the Cabinet. Of those fifteen, TWO have never had a female leader—so, for example, the Department of Education is an incorrect answer, as Betsy DeVos (and others) have been the Secretary of Education. WHAT are those two Cabinet departments? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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.
First of all, even though it amused me a great deal, I’m a little sorry for writing a question with three parts where all the parts are obscure facts about the Bee Gees. Apparently, the band just loved the name CUCUMBER CASTLE, our answer here, and kept using it.
The Bee Gees are most famous for songs like “Stayin’ Alive” (off of the soundtrack for the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever), but what I didn’t know is that they enjoyed a long and successful history before their pivot to disco in 1975, with multiple Billboard-charting songs in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.
As for Cucumber Castle, I tried to help you out in the last sentence. A “portcullis” is one of those big metal gates that closes vertically, typically associated with medieval fortifications. If you’re a “portcullis protector” (i.e., a defender of a castle), having a cucumber-comprised castle would put you “in a pickle” for two reasons—such a castle would be very hard to defend from attackers, and also the cucumber might literally begin pickling from just sitting there.
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?
Tamatoa is a CRAB; a decapod is a member of the Decapoda order, which includes shrimp, crabs, lobsters, and other such creatures. Clement is likely most notable as part of the musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, together with Bret McKenzie. Clement also co-wrote, co-directed, and co-starred in the film What We Do in the Shadows with Taika Waititi (Clement is the vampire Vladislav in the film and subsequent television show).
[My apologies for misspelling Jemaine Clement’s name in the original e-mail distribution of this newsletter.]
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.
Cassim would have had better luck if he shouted “OPEN SESAME!”, as this question was referring to the folk tale “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” from a translation of the collection of folk tales known as One Thousand and One Nights. The translations refer to “several different sorts of grain” or variations on that phrase, which is too bad because it would be a much funnier story if they wrote out exactly which grains he yelled out (“open sorghum! open amaranth!”)
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?
This is AVOGADRO’S NUMBER, named after Amedeo Avogadro. The mole is one of the seven SI base units—the others are the second (time), metre (length), kilogram (mass), ampere (electric current), kelvin (temperature), and candela (luminous intensity).
Throughout the nineteenth century, a lot of very smart people agreed that it would be a good idea to create universally accepted definitions of certain units of measurement, rather than just hoping that everyone’s definition of (say) a kilogram was exactly the same.2 After some international conferences, some of those smart people defined “one kilogram” in 1889 as “the mass of a particular cylinder of platinum and iridium that we’ve put into a vault in the outskirts of Paris.” That cylinder, known as the International Prototype of the Kilogram (IPK), was the reference point for what a kilogram equaled from 1889 until 2019. By then, some more smart people had realized that the IPK’s mass had decreased by 50 micrograms over time (because stuff generally decays over time) and that it probably wasn’t a good idea to have the official definition of a kilogram tethered to a thing that decays.
Now, the IPK is just a piece of metal, and a kilogram is defined by fixed values; or, more specifically, a kilogram is the mass of a body at rest whose equivalent energy equals the energy of a collection of photons whose frequencies sum to [1.356392489652×10^50] hertz.
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
This is a list of states that have hosted teams that have won a championship in Major League Soccer, sorted by the number of championships; the missing state is CALIFORNIA, with seven (five for the Los Angeles Galaxy, and two for the San Jose Earthquakes—no team has more than the Galaxy).
How in the world were you supposed to get to soccer? So the moment DC and Ontario came up, without other places, your “wait, is this sports?” alarm might have blared, but also we had MLS teams all over this newsletter:
Question #1: “sound eradiate” includes “sounder,” referring to the Seattle Sounders FC
Question #2: “sporting” refers to Sporting Kansas City3
Question #3: “crewmate” refers to the Columbus Crew SC
Question #4: “reunited” refers to D.C. United
Question #5: “revolutionary” refers to the New England Revolution
Question #6: “galaxy” refers to the Los Angeles Galaxy (cluing you onto the right answer)
Newsletter Title: “Roleplaying with Fire” refers to both the Chicago Fire and to the fact that soccer is, literally, roll-playing.
In addition, we added a sub-theme that may have been more helpful to those trying to identify the missing state without relying on MLS knowledge:
Question #1: Condoleezza RICE
Question #2: CUCUMBER Castle
Question #3: CRAB
Question #4: SESAME (seeds)
Question #5: AVOGADRO’S number (sounds like “avocado”)
Newsletter Title: “Roleplaying with Fire” refers to a sushi “roll”
Those ingredients can make up a CALIFORNIA roll, the common variety of sushi roll.
If you’ve read this recap all the way through, why not help us celebrate our nine-month anniversary (!) and our 75th themed newsletter (!!) by sharing this newsletter?
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
The Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“Isn’t a kilogram just 1000 grams?” Sure, but what’s a gram?
To try to head off a complaint: Sporting Kansas City’s corporate headquarters is in Kansas City, Missouri. The team played its home games in Kansas City, Missouri from 1996 to 2007 (winning one ring there) and has played its home games in Kansas City, Kansas since 2008 (winning a second there—they are the only professional sports team to play home games in Kansas today). Having no idea whether Missouri or Kansas should properly get credit for both rings, I decided to try to avoid a second Bleeding Kansas and instead just split them, giving MO the credit for the ring when the team played there and KS credit for the ring when the team played there.