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/NV4XnhqG3LqgT5XFA. 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 Italian poet Dante Alighieri wrote about his passion for WHOM in his work La Vita Nuova, a collection of lyric poems? In the third and final part of the Divine Comedy, this person is also Dante’s guide, as he is not barred from entering paradise.
2) A thing that I enjoy is that the following persons share the same name, which is WHAT? (1) Of the core animators of the Walt Disney Company from the 1930s through the 1970s known as the “Nine Old Men,” the last alphabetically, responsible for iconic scenes such as the spaghetti dinner scene in The Lady and the Tramp, and (2) the only MLB player in the 1990s to win the American League Most Valuable Player Award in back-to-back seasons.
3) Paulo Coelho wrote WHAT international bestseller, originally published in 1988, about a boy who has a recurring dream of finding a hidden cache of wealth in Egypt? The novel takes its name after a type of person who might be interested in chrysopoeia, another term for what is essentially wizardry relating to gold.
4) In 2018, The CW began airing a reboot of WHAT television show that had originally run on The WB from 1998 until 2006? It wasn’t just fans who criticized the reboot and instead wanted to see a continuation of the original story in exactly the manner it already existed; Holly Marie Combs and Alyssa Milano both also criticized The CW for not involving the original cast and crew. The reboot, praised for its focus on diversity and representation, aired its final episode on June 10, 2022.
5) NAME the actor who won both (1) the MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss (with Will Ferrell) for a sports comedy film, and (2) in the same year, the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for a different film that he also wrote and produced, which centers in part around a character’s attempt to tell Pamela Anderson “I want to tie the knot.” The relevant films did not come out in 2009!
6) WHAT song, which is otherwise this newsletter’s theme, completes the following ordered list of songs sharing a particular distinction? (As always, a [BLANK] may represent one word or more than one word unless specified otherwise.)
“Drop It Like It’s Hot” (Snoop Dogg), “Don’t Forget About Us” (Mariah Carey), “Ridin’” (Chamillionaire), “Hips Don’t Lie” (Shakira), “This Is Why I’m Hot” (Mims), “Don’t Matter” (Akon), “Nothin’ on You” (B.o.B.), “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)” (Kelly Clarkson), “Can’t Hold Us” (Macklemore & Ryan Lewis), “God’s Plan” (Drake), [BLANK]
This brief interlude between today’s newsletter and the recap of the last newsletter has no intentional relation to today’s theme.
The Mystery League is a Chicago-based company that I’ve been a big fan of for a few years now. Their day job, so to speak, is putting together “escape games” for private/corporate events and the such, and they are very good at doing that. I played their escape room The Last Defender at The House Theatre of Chicago a couple years ago, and it was one of the three best escape rooms I’ve ever done (sample size there is about 35 rooms). Sandor Weisz, the commissioner of The Mystery League, is also teaching a class at the University of Chicago this fall, which I have so many questions about.
In addition to The Mystery League’s primary endeavors, they run a community called Signals for folks who like puzzles. There’s a weekly (paid) newsletter chock-full of fun puzzles and interesting updates in the puzzling community that I subscribe to and recommend. There’s also a monthly (free) version of the newsletter—they were nice enough to highlight what we’re doing here at Trivia! (gosh, we need a better name) in their latest edition, linked below. It’s always a great read.
(And, to those of you who signed up because you saw us in Signals: welcome aboard!)
Here are the answers from last time:
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?
This is EAZY-E, who is most notable for being a member of N.W.A. with Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. (I expected Tupac to be a common guess, but he was killed in 1996, not 1995.) Bone Thugs-n-Harmony is generally credited as the only group that has worked with Tupac, the Notorious B.I.G., Eazy-E, and Big Pun while they were all still alive. The group continues to be active—for example, you can buy tickets to see them in one of a dozen venues or so this fall and winter.
The genre of “very serious figures in gangsta/hardcore rap going on to do charmingly mundane and mainstream stuff” is high art to me. (This is not a criticism, by the way.) The #1 example will always be Ice-T being a major character in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, with 495 (!) episodes and counting. The #2 example, though, may be the time when Bone Thugs-n-Harmony “announced” a name change to Boneless Thugs-N-Harmony due to their love of Buffalo Wild Wings.
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.
This is LISA FRANK. The company made the notebooks and such that looked like this:
Information about Lisa Frank (both the person and the company) is not easy to find, which seems to be the way Lisa prefers it. In recent years, the company has stopped making products and has instead turned to licensing others’ products. For example, for reasons I do not quite understand, you can purchase a portable blender with the Lisa Frank logo on it for the low, low price of $64.95 from Lisa Frank’s website. (We aren’t linking to that one because this newsletter hasn’t quite gone the way of Boneless Thugs-N-Harmony, yet.)
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?”
The films are Kramer vs. Kramer and Ordinary People. Ordinary People is a movie about how everything is totally fine and nothing bad happens to these nice mundane people, so no need to look up the plot! Both films are based on novels that came out shortly before the films (Kramer vs. Kramer, the novel, came out in 1977, two years before the film, while Ordinary People, the novel, came out in 1976, four years before the film). Jeopardy! occasionally wants you to know that Ordinary People was Robert Redford’s directorial debut.
We’re going to go out of order here—below is an image of a cartoon that appeared in The New Yorker in 1981. I’ve removed a few words.
A German composer (we’re about to ask you who he is) wrote a certain song in the late seventeenth century that fell into obscurity for some three hundred years. In 1968, a French conductor named Jean-François Paillard released a recording of it, and the piece immediately rose to popularity. The piece’s chord progression appears in a whole bunch of popular songs (including songs in the 1970s and also more modern examples such as “Basket Case” by Green Day and “Don’t Look Back in Anger” by Oasis). The song was also part of the soundtrack of Ordinary People, which further increased its popularity (and apparently, if the cartoon is a clue, caused a backlash in terms of how overplayed the song was).
NAME the 17th-century German composer whose name I’ve removed from the above cartoon. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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.
The answer here is NATURAL LOGARITHM. The next few paragraphs are about math, as a warning.
e is an irrational and transcendental number. “Irrational” just means that the number in question can’t be expressed as the ratio of two integers. Rational numbers include numbers like 5 (because you can say 5 equals 10 divided by 2) or 0.3 (because that can be 3 divided by 10) or even non-terminating numbers like 0.3333… (because, while you can’t write it all out as a decimal, you can say it’s 1 divided by 3).
A thing I learned recently is that the square root of every integer (except integers that are squares of natural numbers—so, 4, 9, 16, 25, etc) is necessarily an irrational number. Why? That’s left as an exercise to the reader, but try starting with “if the square root of n were a rational number, then we could identify two integers, a and b, both of which are not even numbers (because if they were both even, we could reduce the fraction to a simpler fraction), such that a divided by b equals the square root of n.” In the unlikely event you’re actually playing along, next try squaring both sides.
A “transcendental” number is a number that is not algebraic—meaning, it is not the solution of an algebraic equation with rational-number coefficients. That might not be a helpful definition. One way to think about it is that, while the square root of two is irrational, it is not transcendental, because you can just write the equation (x^2) - 2 = 0, and in that equation x equals the square root of two. However, there is no equation satisfying the above terms that works for a number like e, so e is transcendental. Every transcendental number is irrational, but not every irrational number is transcendental.
In 1882, a German mathematician named Ferdinand von Lindemann proved that pi is transcendental. One consequence of that proof is that it also proves that it is impossible to “square the circle,” as the ancient Greeks tried to do (i.e., construct a square with the area of a circle by using only a finite number of steps with a compass and straightedge). The Indiana General Assembly didn’t know that, though, when fifteen years later, it almost passed a bill that would have, by legislative fiat, made pi equal to 3.2.
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.”
The newspaper is the CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER—the first part of the question was intended to make you think of a “plane dealer,” as those are types of private jets.
In 2008, Diana Keough, a medical journalist, won a Missouri Lifestyle Journalism Award (at one time a prestigious award for feature writing) for an article that appeared in the Plain Dealer about a Cleveland Clinic neurologist and his process of breaking bad news to patients. The article, which I went ahead and read, is grim and haunting and well written.
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.
Each of these have some relation to something that has the word “SIMPLE” in the title. Going fast:
Pierre Bouvier: Lead singer of the band Simple Plan
Joel and Ethan Coen: Directors; their first commercial film was Blood Simple
Paris Hilton: Appeared in the reality television show The Simple Life
Anna Kendrick: Appeared in the 2018 film A Simple Favor
James Kerr: Lead singer of the band Simple Minds
Lynyrd Skynyrd: “Simple Man” is a notable song by the band
Randall Munroe: Cartoonist who published Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words
John Ritter: Appeared in television show 8 Simple Rules
Billy Bob Thornton: Appeared in 1998 film A Simple Plan
K.A. Tucker: Author of The Simple Wild series
Hikaru Utada: Wildly popular Japanese singer-songwriter; notable to some international audiences for the song “Simple and Clean”
Each question’s answer contained a word that is a synonym in some fashion to the word “simple”:
Question #1: Eazy-E (“easy”)
Question #2: Lisa Frank (“frank”)
Question #3: Kramer vs. Kramer and Ordinary People (“ordinary”)
Question #4: Natural logarithm (“natural”)
Question #5: Plain Dealer (“plain”)
The newsletter title was “Green Eggs and Ockham.” This was a reference to the book Green Eggs and Ham, which was purposefully written as a “Beginner’s Book” for new readers. Dr. Seuss had made a bet with his publisher, Bennett Cerf, that he could not write his next book using fifty or fewer distinct words.2 Seuss won the bet by writing Green Eggs and Ham, so I thought it was a fitting reference to something simple.
The use of “Ockham,” besides the “ham” pun, was a reference to William of Ockham, the English philosopher credited with “Ockham’s razor” (sometimes stylized “Occam’s razor”). Ockham’s razor is the principle that, if you are presented with competing theories or explanations, the simpler one should generally be preferred. Worded differently: When you hear hoofbeats, think horses and not zebras. Thus, in order to figure out this newsletter, we asked you to pick the simple explanation, so to speak.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
JOHANN PACHELBEL (the song is “Pachelbel’s Canon” or “Canon in D,” it’s that song you hear at weddings)
Those fifty words, by the way, are a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, (and) you. We’ve missed the chance, but I think a fun question would have involved removing “eggs,” “green,” and “ham,” and asking for the three missing words while not explaining the provenance of the list.