This newsletter marks the final newsletter of “Series 4” for those of you who follow the Question #6 leaderboard. Our next newsletter, Trivia Newsletter LXXXI, which will be sent out on Monday, August 15, will mark the beginning of “Series 5” and a new Question #6 leaderboard, so you have a chance to start anew and win the competition (for absolutely no prizes) even if you’re a recent subscriber.
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/TEbUZ8SW5ykYAVYd6. 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) The 1996 song “Tha Crossroads” by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony is dedicated to, among other people, WHAT rap icon who had passed away the year prior and who had served as a mentor and executive producer to the group?
2) NAME the reclusive entrepreneur most famous for starting a self-named company in 1979 that produced whimsical commercial designs for school supplies and other products; the company’s popularity peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
3) Justin Henry is as of now the youngest person to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, at age eight. One year after Henry’s nomination, Timothy Hutton became (and still is) the youngest person to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, at age twenty. NAME both relevant films; each was given as an answer to a 2021 tweet asking “What are some very good films about messed up families?”
4) The number e, Euler’s number, is approximately 2.71828; a definition of it is that it is the limit of (1 + 1/n)^n as n approaches infinity. WHAT two-word phrase correctly fills in the blank in the following, where x is a positive number? “The [BLANK] of x is the power to which e would have to be raised to equal x”? For example, the [BLANK] of e itself is one, because e^1 = e.
5) No, it’s not a description of a person who would sell you a Embraer Phenom 300 or a Gulfstream G650ER; instead, WHAT is the name of the major newspaper that circulates in Cleveland, Ohio? “I think that by all odds,” Winston Churchill reportedly said, “[it] has the best newspaper name of any in the world.”
6) WHAT distinction is shared by each of the following persons and groups? A single word is sufficient. Pierre Bouvier, Joel and Ethan Coen, Paris Hilton, Anna Kendrick, James Kerr, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Randall Munroe, John Ritter, Billy Bob Thornton, K.A. Tucker, Hikaru Utada.
Here are the answers from last time:
1) Surrealist painter René Magritte, describing his painting The Treachery of Images, said the following: “[I]t's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a [BLANK],’ I'd have been lying!” WHAT word fills in the blank in Magritte’s quote?
This is The Treachery of Images (or, well, an illustration of a person looking at a depiction of it):
Ceci n’est pas une pipe is French for “this is not a pipe,” so our answer is PIPE.
Magritte’s most famous painting is likely either the above or The Son of Man, which is “that one with the apple in front of the guy’s face”:
Magritte said of it the following:
At least it hides the face partly well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It's something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.
2) “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” is the opening line of WHAT novel by Daphne du Maurier? The novel was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock into a 1940 film, his only film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
This is REBECCA. The character Rebecca is not seen in the novel or film (as she has passed away shortly before the story begins), but her memory looms large in the events of the story. A key character in the story is Mrs. Danvers, the cold and overbearing housekeeper of Manderley (the manor in the story). Someday, if you remember that, you will correctly answer a trivia question that relies on her having the same last name as Carol Danvers (currently Captain Marvel in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and sometimes Ms. Marvel or Binary depending on which comic book you’re reading).
Daphne du Maurier has been accused of plagiarizing the 1934 novel A Sucessora by Brazilian author Carolina Nabuco in her publication of Rebecca. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but this not-short blog post appears to thoroughly dig into the question rather than just repeating the allegation with little evidence.
Born in 1890, Nabuco spent her childhood in a city located about forty miles northeast of Rio de Janeiro and named after WHAT MONARCH, the last monarch of the Empire of Brazil, who is generally regarded as one of the greatest Brazilians of all time? The answer is at the end of this newsletter.1
3) Peter Gurney was an author and campaigner for the proper care of WHAT animal? Not only does the animal not originate from anywhere near Africa’s western coast, it is not closely related to Snowball’s species from Animal Farm.
These are GUINEA PIGS—the second sentence of the question was trying to tell you that guinea pigs are not from the part of the world traditionally known as Guinea, and are not pigs.
Peter Gurney passed away in 2006, and even a cursory search of the man will make it extremely clear that he really, really liked guinea pigs, and people who like guinea pigs thought very highly of him. Here’s a picture of him:
A long-defunct website called the Guinea Pigs Daily Digest offers up a touchingly straightforward obituary of the man:
Peter’s love for cavies was always apparent in his writing; he was one of the first people to write a book that was actually about correct care rather than an elaborate ad for pet supplies (The Proper Care of Guinea Pigs), and also the first to publish a book on alternative therapies (Piggy Potions). He was also deeply devoted to helping bring a bit of joy to critically ill children. Nancy Pistorius (mother of Alyssa Buecker, producer the famed “Carrot Wars” videos) noted:
“He took it upon himself to distribute copies of my daughter Alyssa's movie, CARROT WARS, to children who were patients at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London. He paid weekly visits to children there, bringing his piggies along in a wooden wheeled contraption that he hauled onto the Tube (subway). While he waited for the lift (elevator) at the hospital, he would hum or sing a little tune. I will never forget accompanying him on his rounds, the way the children's faces would light up when he entered the room.”
No one’s ever going to ask you a trivia question about Peter Gurney again, but he seemed like an interesting person.
4) Food historian Andrew Smith is describing WHAT cold beverage, similar to an ice cream float and almost always served as a fountain drink, in the following quotation? (Note that each of “Blank 1” and “Blank 2” is one word, and each word is repeated.) “During the 1880s, a popular specialty was made with chocolate syrup, [BLANK 2], and raw [BLANK 1] mixed into soda water. In poorer neighborhoods, a less expensive version of this treat was created, called the [BLANK 1] [BLANK 2] (made without the [BLANK 1] or [BLANK 2]).”
This is EGG CREAM. We’re going to hand this one off to a blog as well:
…[A]ccording to Elliot Willensky, author of When Brooklyn Was the World: 1920-1957, “A candy store minus an egg cream, in Brooklyn at least, was as difficult to conceive of as the Earth without gravity.”
For a couple pennies, young soda jerks could make you an egg cream in a few seconds. All they needed were seltzer, milk, and chocolate syrup. No eggs and no cream. So why the name “egg cream”? Theories abound. Maybe it once featured eggs and cream, but lost the ingredients after the Great Depression (plus, the drink does resemble those made with frothy egg whites, such as the Ramos Gin Fizz). Or perhaps it was a case of a young soda jerk misunderstanding a Parisian’s heavy-accented order for chocolat et creme. Others suspect the name is an American approximation of the Yiddish echt keem, meaning “pure sweetness.”
Candy shop owner Louis Auster is often credited with inventing the drink. Unfortunately, Auster took his original chocolate syrup recipe to the grave. Today, most classic egg creams come with Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup. Investigators (yes, there are egg cream investigators) agree that the drink has a Jewish background and was born in Brooklyn or Manhattan, but its actual origins are as murky as its frothy top.
5) The objective of WHAT game, playable by up to six people, is to move all of one’s pieces across a hexagram-shaped board into the opposite of one’s starting corner? One name for the game is Sternhalma, but we’re looking for its different and alliterative name.
This is CHINESE CHECKERS, which is neither from China (it’s of German origin) or particularly similar to checkers.
The relative simplicity of Chinese checkers makes it ripe for computational analysis, and it seems that two-player Chinese checkers has been “solved” by computers. Here’s an interesting and readable paper that lays out the case for the minimum number of moves to complete a two-player game of Chinese checkers (27 moves).
6) WHAT distinction is shared by each of the following songs? “Best Song Ever” (One Direction), “The Bilbao Song” (Andy Williams), “Crocodile Rock” (Elton John), “Jailhouse Rock” (Elvis Presley), “Monster Mash” (Bobby “Boris” Pickett), “Tribute” (Tenacious D).
These are all SONGS ABOUT OTHER SONGS2—so, for example, in “Crocodile Rock,” the singer describes how he was hopping and bopping to the Crocodile Rock, heavily implying that the Crocodile Rock is some song different than the song we are hearing when we listen to “Crocodile Rock” (because it’s implausible that the song that he was hopping and bopping to also contains a description of him doing so).
The newsletter generally invited you to think about the gaps between things and their labels/titles:
Question #1: Magritte discusses the difference between things and the representations of them
Question #2: Rebecca is an example of a work where the title character does not appear
Question #3: “Guinea pigs” are arguably doubly inaccurately named
Question #4: Same with “egg cream”
Question #5: Same with “Chinese checkers”
The newsletter title, “A World of Différance,” refers to différance, a term coined by Jacques Derrida, a twentieth-century philosopher who developed what academics generally call deconstruction. Différance is a pun (in French):
Différance is a term that Derrida coins on the basis of a pun that the French language makes possible. An understanding of this term is helpful because it can explain a lot about Derrida’s apparently “mischievous” playing with language and ideas. I put “mischievous” in quotation marks because many people have misunderstood the powerful implications of his witty strategy. The pun is possible because in French the word différer can mean either to differ or to defer, depending on context. Différence can mean to differ from something or to defer something.
If I was comparing two different objects of the same generic type (this hat is different from this one) I’d use différer just as I would if I was putting off an appointment (let's defer it until a time when we’ll both be free). The one, take note, implies spatiality (difference), the other implies temporality (deferral). What Derrida is asking us to do is to combine both, normally mutually exclusive, meanings in the one new term différance.
…
The pun involves the use of the little letter “a.” The French différence might mean either difference or deferral. Derrida’s new term, spelt with an “a” instead of an “e,” should be taken to mean both difference and deferral simultaneously. The first part of the pun we can call the performative--or auto-referential--aspect. What this means is that by both differing from itself (it means two different things at once) and deferring until infinity any final meaning (it cannot at any one time mean both differ and defer) the word itself is a performance of its meaning. Differance just is what differance means. The second part of the pun involves the fact that Derrida’s misspelling is only noticeable when the word is written. Saying différence and différance makes no difference in French, it is pronounced the same way with or without the alteration. What this brings to our attention is the difference between phoneme (audible mark) and grapheme (written, visible mark) and a certain imperceptibility of the difference.
Certainly I am not remotely qualified to summarize anything Derrida said to anyone ever,3 but the idea (or part of it) is that, in language, there is necessarily not a one-way connection between the signifier and the signified—definitions of fundamental concepts are necessarily undermined by the very effort to employ them. Hence, I borrowed the term to point to the gap between “the song title” and “the song that the song is about” to lead you in the right direction. This article from The Onion will probably do a better job explaining it.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
PEDRO II (the city is Petrópolis)
There exists a genre of “Monster Mash song deniers” who insist that the Monster Mash is not a song but is instead a dance. We did not include dances (or else I would have included “Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show), but the lyrics of “Monster Mash” make it abundantly clear that the vocal group “The Cryptkicker Five” PLAYED the Monster Mash.
The standard place to start, for those of you interested in what Derrida’s all about and arguments against structuralism, is a lecture Derrida gave at Johns Hopkins University.