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/LPPKYMMeYBSavoWb6. 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) Below is an image known as “Photo 51,” taken by Raymond Gosling, a student, in 1952. NAME the person, once called the “Sylvia Plath of molecular biology,” who was overseeing Gosling at the time.
2) NAME the political figure who was a first responder at the site of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, is the author of the 2020 work Healthy at Last: A Plant-Based Approach to Preventing and Reversing Diabetes and Other Chronic Illnesses, and who despite his current position has said that “I’m not a domesticated leader. I’m a global leader.”
3) NAME the 1973 film, a modest commercial success that was nominated for two Academy Awards, that is one of the very few films that film critic Roger Ebert has walked out on. The film, with a soundtrack by Neil Diamond, was called by Variety “a combination of teenybopper psychedelics, facile moralizing, Pollyanna polemic, and superb nature photography.”
4) Melissa Viviane Jefferson is the given name of WHAT musician? Her most successful single, released in 2017, is surely the most popular song of all time to explicitly reference a certain NFL team, whose leading receiver last year (in receptions and yardage) shares her last name.
5) NAME the American visual artist, the recipient of a MacArthur Grant and long identified as a major influence for contemporary portrait photographers, whose breakthrough work was “Untitled Film Stills,” a series of black and white photographs of this artist as stereotypical female roles inspired by films from the 1950s and 1960s.
6) The following films share a specific distinction. NAME another film that fits with the theme of this newsletter and shares the same distinction. The Hustler (1961), The Shining (1980), Blade Runner (1982), Tron (1982), Mad Max: Thunderdome (1985), Top Gun (1986), Coming to America (1988), Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991), Dumb and Dumber (1994), Trainspotting (1996).
Here are the answers from last time:
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.
This is QUEEN ELIZABETH II.
Annus horribilis, Latin for “horrible year,” apparently was first coined in 1891 by an Anglican publication to refer to the year 1870, when the Roman Catholic Church declared as a part of the First Vatican Council (sometimes called “Vatican I”) the doctrine of papal infallibility. The phrase was then shelved for a century until Elizabeth II used it to describe her family’s unhappy year, which included a fire at Windsor Castle.
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.
You start with FOUR cards in Omaha Hold’em, and Thanos had FOUR stones at that point in the events of Avengers: Infinity War.
“Hold ‘em” refers to one of three separate ways to dole out player cards in a poker game—the alternatives are “draw” (your hand is only concealed cards) and “stud” (each player’s unique hand contains a mix of visible cards and concealed cards). “Hold ‘em,” in contrast, uses community cards shared by all players.
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.
This is SHEL SILVERSTEIN, also the children’s author notable for The Giving Tree (1964) and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974). What OTHER WORK by Silverstein, first published in 1981, was the first children's book to break onto the Adult New York Times Best Sellers list, remaining there for 180+ consecutive weeks? The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
Sometimes, trivia is about applying things you already know to new situations. For example, when someone asks you to name two state capitals that have phoenixes in their flags, you might think “Okay, one is probably Phoenix, but what’s the other? Well, what are phoenixes famous for—fire, rebirth? What’s a state capital that famously burned down?” Sometimes, trivia isn’t about that process at all, and instead it’s about being able to surprise yourself and your friends by saying things like “wait, Shel Silverstein wrote ‘A Boy Named Sue’?”
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?
The song is “TIE A YELLOW RIBBON ROUND THE OLD OAK TREE.” The song, by Tony Orlando and Dawn, regularly features in lists of the biggest songs of all time; the song is even the origin of the yellow color of the Liberal Party of Corazon Aquino, the party that ousted the Marcos dictatorship in the People Power Revolution of 1986.
The idea of a loved one wearing or displaying a yellow ribbon to signify acceptance dates back to well before the song; for example, there’s a 1949 John Wayne film called She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. The NFL Draft used to be much longer than it is today, and teams occasionally played a bit fast and loose with their late-round picks—so, in the 17th round of the 1972 NFL Draft, the Atlanta Falcons attempted to select John Wayne, then 64 years old, as their draft pick; the commissioner did not let that pick go through.
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?
The words here are ascot and MASCOT.
Fred Jones is the blond teenager from the Scooby-Doo franchise usually depicted in an orange ascot. In Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, the original 1969 television series, Jones was voiced by Frank Welker; since then, Welker has voiced Fred in virtually all of Fred’s appearances in Scooby-Doo media, and in the past twenty years regularly voices Scooby-Doo himself, including in the 2020 film Scoob!
Frank Welker has also voiced, well, everyone else. He voiced Cujo in Cujo, Jabberjaw in Jabberjaw, the gremlins in Gremlins, the graboids in Tremors, Santa’s Little Helper and Snowball II on The Simpsons (from 1991 to 2002), the anaconda in Anaconda, Nibbler in Futurama, George in Curious George (2003), a whole bunch of Transformers, multiple characters in Mortal Kombat (1995), at least six characters on Garfield and Friends, a bunch of The Smurfs, and so on. With his 860+ acting credits, he is currently #3 on the list of highest-grossing actors of all time (if you include cameos and voice acting), behind just Samuel L. Jackson and Stan Lee.
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.
These are some of the countries that have flags that are both horizontally and vertically symmetrical—so, when rotated 180 degrees (or upside down), they look the same as they do right-side-up. The sub-theme this week was “ties,” and so the goal was for the reader to realize the tie theme, use that to reach the nation of THAILAND, another nation whose flag has this quality, and guess that as an answer:2
Question #1: Elizabeth II is of the House of Windsor, and the question referred to Windsor Castle; the Windsor and half-Windsor knots are common tie knots
Question #2: “four cards in one’s hand” and “four Infinity Stones in Thanos’s hand” meant to allude to the common “four-in-hand” tie knot
Question #3: “Uncle Shelby” alludes to another common tie knot, the Shelby knot
Question #4: Song title explicitly includes “Tie”
Question #5: Ascot is another type of tie
Newsletter Title: “Hawkins, Indiana” is going for the Stranger Things connection; in the show, the town contains the gateway to the “Upside Down,” a clue about the theme of the newsletter.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
A LIGHT IN THE ATTIC.
I have been in this community long enough to realize that any vexillology topic tends to lead to lots of spirited arguments—right now, you can find many arguments about which national flags are truly symmetrical and which ones are not—and so, recognizing the myriad potential good-faith interpretations of the theme here that may have existed, I leniently gave credit to submissions that were plausibly close to the theme with respect to the national flag in question.