A note: There will be no newsletter distributed on Monday, August 1. Trivia Newsletter LXXVIII, which will include the recap of this newsletter, will be published on Thursday, August 4.
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/G8sP1eYSXD4x3he2A. 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 two-word alliterative edition of Barbie doll released in 1992, the name of which conveys that the doll is an adolescent that articulates thoughts out loud. The doll caused controversy because one of its pre-programmed phrases was “Math class is tough!”; this controversy was later parodied by The Simpsons, an episode of which showed a “Malibu Stacy” doll saying phrases such as “Thinking too much gives you wrinkles!” and “Don't ask me, I'm just a girl.”
2) Sheet, tubular, funnel, tangle (associated with the family Theridiidae), and spiral orb (associated with the families Tetragnathidae, Araneidae, and Uloboridae) are some types of WHAT that can be find in the wild (or at home)?
3) In 1964, a famous speech known as “A Ballot or the Bullet” included the line “And when I speak, I don't speak as a Democrat or a Republican, nor an American. I speak as a victim of America's so-called democracy.” Later that same year, another speech known as “A Time for Choosing” was given in support of presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and included the line “And therein lies the road to war, because [peace activists] don't speak for the rest of us.” NAME either speech’s speaker.
4) NAME the artist who released a song in 2000 that includes the lyric “This is for the ones who stood their ground / For Tommy and Gina who never backed down.” The lyric is a reference to a previous song by the same artist that tells us about Tommy, a dockworker, and Gina, a waitress—they’re going through tough times, but they have each other, and that’s a lot.
5) The species of fern known as G. monstraparva (from Latin for “little monster”) was given its name after the fans of WHAT singer/actress, whose given name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta?
6) The following films all share a specific distinction. WHAT film, in addition to being this newsletter’s theme, shares the same distinction as the films in this incomplete list? Gone with the Wind (1939), All About Eve (1950), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Tootsie (1982), The Color Purple (1985), Almost Famous (2000), Gosford Park (2001), Chicago (2002), Babel (2006), Up in the Air (2009), The Fighter (2010), The Help (2011), The Favourite (2018).
Here are the answers from last time:
1) Below is an image known as “Photo 51,” taken by a student named Raymond Gosling, a student, in 1952. NAME the person, once called the “Sylvia Plath of molecular biology,” who was overseeing Gosling at the time.
Gosling’s supervisor was ROSALIND FRANKLIN, the British chemist and X-ray crystallographer. This image was critical evidence in identifying the structure of DNA (a double helix). Her contributions in this field went mostly unrecognized during her life.
In 1968, James Watson (who first proposed the double-helix structure in an article with Francis Crick, which proposal was based on Franklin’s work and on this photograph) published a memoir, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. In 2012, it was named as one of the 88 “Books That Shaped America” by the Library of Congress, and is generally renowned for its descriptions of the underlying landmark events. Unfortunately, the book also makes clear Watson’s dismissive attitudes towards Franklin. Lest you think that’s just revisionist history or an attempt to find a narrative, let’s go to the source:
I suspect that in the beginning Maurice [Wilkins, a physicist on the team] hoped that Rosy would calm down. Yet mere inspection suggested that she would not easily bend. By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English bluestocking adolescents. So it was quite easy to imagine her the product of an unsatisfied mother who unduly stressed the desirability of professional careers that it could save bright girls from marriages to dull men. But this was not the case. Her dedicated, austere life could not be thus explained she was the daughter of a solidly comfortable, erudite banking family. Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place. The former was obviously preferable because, given her belligerent moods, it would be very difficult for Maurice to maintain a dominant position that would allow him to think unhindered about DNA.
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.”
This is ERIC ADAMS, the current mayor of New York City. I fact-checked this one five or so times—surely, he said ‘domestic’ and not ‘domesticated,’ right? But no, The New York Times clearly credits him as having said “domesticated.”
Eric Adams sometimes refers to himself in the third person—for example, he once said that “FDR, like ELA, understood that people needed an honest reckoning of the problems and bold plans to solve them,” with “ELA” referring to his own initials. The term for this practice is illeism, and once you start to look for it, you’ll start seeing it more. The ur-example may be Commentarii de Bello Gallico, Julius Caesar’s account of the Gallic Wars, written in the third person. Illeism is used often to indicate that someone has a loose grip of the language (“E.T. phone home” or “Hulk smash!”) or an inflated sense of self (Terry Crews’ character from Brooklyn Nine-Nine is one example). You’ll also see it in politics quite a bit (“You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore.”).
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.”
This film is JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL, based upon the same-named novel by Richard Bach. The book was pretty wildly popular at the time for its self-help fable (it’s one of these “maximize your potential by following your dreams and refusing to conform to the expectations of ordinary people” stories, with the tiny exception that every character is a seagull). Roger Ebert, who apparently hated this book and film more than anyone has ever hated anything, said the book was “so banal that it had to be sold to adults; kids would have seen through it.”
I am not sure how to describe the film Jonathan Livingston Seagull. If I say “they filmed a bunch of seagulls and then recorded people talking over them, and that’s the entire movie,” that sounds ridiculous, but…
Film critics made an art out of teeing off on this movie, directed by Hall Bartlett and starring the voice talents of James Franciscus (what, they couldn’t get Steven Seagull?). My own favorite is The Washington Post: “Try as he may, [director Hall] Bartlett cannot put Bach's words convincingly into the beaks of even trained seagulls. It's an impossibility and an abomination, an affront to man and bird and the general fitness of things.” That’s top shelf, right? Have you ever done anything in your life that could be called “an affront to man and bird and the general fitness of things”?
The thing to know about Hall Bartlett, the director, is that he also directed Zero Hour!, the 1957 film that the 1980 film Airplane! is a parody of (and liberally borrows from).
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.
Melissa Viviane Jefferson’s stage name is LIZZO. The song referenced in the question is “Truth Hurts,” her biggest hit, which includes the line “New man on the Minnesota Vikings / Truth hurts, needed something more exciting.” The top wide receiver for the Vikings in the 2021 season was Justin Jefferson. Lizzo once explained the lyric by saying “Meanwhile, this Minnesota Viking was in my DMs, we were chatting, we were texting, we went on a date.”
“Truth Hurts” is Lizzo’s only song to hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100—or, it was until July 25, 2022 (three days ago), when WHAT SONG by Lizzo hit #1 for the first time? You might say that it is [the song’s title] that the song hit #1, given that it was released three months ago. The answer is at the end of this recap.1
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.
This is CINDY SHERMAN. Take it away, MoMA’s website:
For four decades, Cindy Sherman has probed the construction of identity, playing with the visual and cultural codes of art, celebrity, gender, and photography. She is among the most significant artists of the Pictures Generation—a group that also includes Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo—who came of age in the 1970s and responded to the mass media landscape surrounding them with both humor and criticism, appropriating images from advertising, film, television, and magazines for their art.
Sherman was always interested in experimenting with different identities. As she has explained, “I wish I could treat every day as Halloween, and get dressed up and go out into the world as some eccentric character.” Shortly after moving to New York, she produced her Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), in which she put on guises and photographed herself in various settings with deliberately selected props to create scenes that resemble those from mid-20th-century B movies. Started when she was only 23, these images rely on female characters (and caricatures) such as the jaded seductress, the unhappy housewife, the jilted lover, and the vulnerable naif. Sherman used cinematic conventions to structure these photographs: they recall the film stills used to promote movies, from which the series takes its title. The 70 Film Stills immediately became flashpoints for conversations about feminism, postmodernism, and representation, and they remain her best-known works.
Here’s an image of Untitled #96, a print of which sold in 2011 for $3.89 million, making it (at the time) the most expensive photograph ever sold:2
You can go see different prints of Untitled #96 at MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, or the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
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).
Each of these is a film that had a sequel come out 20+ years after the listed movie. There are other films that share the same distinction, but this was a newsletter about the Declaration of Independence,3 and so INDEPENDENCE DAY was the intended answer, as Independence Day: Resurgence came out twenty years after Independence Day did.
The Committee of Five of the Second Continental Congress was the group responsible for drafting and presenting the Declaration of Independence to the full group of congressmen. Those five individuals were Benjamin FRANKLIN, John ADAMS, Robert LIVINGSTON, Thomas JEFFERSON, and Roger SHERMAN, and so our first five questions had answers sharing those names (except, in Jefferson’s case, we spotted you his name in the question). This is also why the newsletter, in our judgment, made the Franklin/Adams/Jefferson questions easier than the Livingston/Sherman questions, with the expectation that the latter two would be less helpful for the theme.
In the painting Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull (a modified version of which is on the back of the two-dollar bill), you can see the Committee of Five standing together:
This newsletter was Trivia Newsletter LXXVI, or #76, meant to be another clue pointing to the year 1776 and the theme of the Declaration of Independence and Independence Day. Finally, the newsletter title, “Freedom from Annihilation,” besides again trying to clue you into “independence” by way of “freedom,” was my attempt to quote from Bill Pullman’s famous speech as the American president in the original Independence Day (without actually writing a phrase from the speech that could be easily Googled to find the answer). We’re just going to quote the whole thing to end this newsletter:
Good morning. In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in this history of mankind. Mankind: that word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps its fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting FOR OUR FREEDOM, NOT FROM TYRANNY, OPPRESSION, OR PERSECUTION, BUT FROM ANNIHILATION. We're fighting for our right to live, to exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice: “We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive!” Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
The Lizzo song is “ABOUT DAMN TIME.”
That title is now held by Le Violon d'Ingres, a photograph by Man Ray (1890-1976), an American visual artist—it sold for $12.4 million a few months ago. An interesting bit of trivia—the six most expensive photographs ever sold are (1) that Man Ray photograph, (ii) a large-format, digitally edited photograph of the Rhine by Andreas Gursky, (iii) Spiritual America by Richard Prince, (iv) Untitled #96 by Sherman, (v) Untitled #93 by Sherman, and (vi) a non-fungible token (NFT) of a photograph by Justin Aversano, sold in late 2021.
For those interested in a peek under the hood: The original theme of this newsletter (abandoned about eighteen hours before publication) would have kept the five original questions and “76th” as a hint, but Question #6’s movies would have been American Pie, The Blair Witch Project, and The Scorpion King, with a prompt for another movie. The newsletter would have been called “Turn the Page,” and the missing movie would have been National Treasure (another movie about the Declaration of Independence). All four movies are movies that have a sequel with the word “book” in the title without actually having “book” in the original name of the movie. “Turn the Page” is a clue for “book,” for the American colonies turning the page on their relationship with Great Britain, and for the plot point in National Treasure where Nicolas Cage and friends must literally turn the Declaration of Independence around in order to find its secrets). I decided that I liked this newsletter’s final theme more than a theme that required you to know about some direct-to-video sequels no one has ever watched.