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 by using the button below. 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) Toy collector Mike Becker founded WHAT company in 1998? According to the company’s mission statement, it started as a small project to bring back low-tech, nostalgia-themed products in today’s high-tech world. Their most famous product line has recorded more than ten million sales in the past three years.
2) Garfield Sobers, the legendary cricket player, had five siblings and was born with an extra finger on each hand. He became on August 31, 1968 the first batsman ever to do the following in a first-class cricket match: “hit [BLANK] [BLANK] in a single over of [BLANK] consecutive balls.” WHAT WORD (in one case plural) fills in all three blanks?
3) As a marketing campaign for the 2007 film The Simpsons Movie, certain 7-11 retail locations in the United States sold pink donuts, Krusty-Os, Buzz Cola, and WHAT product, actually just Slurpees with a different label?
(Uh-uh)
4) According to the work A Companion on Latin Literature, more than 75% of the surviving literature written in Latin between 106 BC and 43 BC was written by WHAT statesman, also the author of Orator and De Oratore?
5) NAME the person who said the following in an interview published in 2002, when asked why he had changed his name: “My cousins who lived in California had changed their last name to Lawrence. So I just thought, ‘I'm going to pick a nice last name’—it wasn't particularly connected to anything or anyone. I was 16, and it was years before I became a designer. It had nothing to do with Jewishness[.]”
6) WHAT U.S. city, which shares its name with the work with which this newsletter’s theme is associated, fills in both blanks in the following ordered but incomplete list? [BLANK], Miami Beach, New York City, New York City, San Francisco, Atlanta, New York City, [BLANK], Los Angeles, Boston, Denver, Charlotte, Philadelphia, Milwaukee.
Trivia Newsletter LXXXVI Recap
(There were almost twice as many questions, so we put just about half as much work into each answer.)
1a) NAME the fictional character whose name fills in each of the blanks in the following incomplete list: Truck, [BLANK], Schrute, [BLANK], Miner, [BLANK], [BLANK]/Halpert, [BLANK], Vickers.
This is a list of some of the regional managers in The Office, and so the missing answer is Michael SCOTT. Dunderpedia, the “wiki” for information about The Office, wants me to consider Dwight the manager for a few hours in the Season 3 episode “The Coup,” where Michael pretends to resign as a result of learning that Dwight attempted to convince corporate to give Dwight the regional manager job, and I suppose I don’t agree with that designation.
Do you remember in the show’s finale, when the “cast” is at some fan event, and people in the audience are asking questions? One of those people was Jennie Tan, who in real life ran a fan site called OfficeTally. Here’s a post where she wrote about the experience and cameo.
1b) WHAT fictional character is the UK equivalent of the answer to Question 1a?
This is DAVID BRENT, the Ricky Gervais character.
2a) Madeleine L'Engle, the author of A Wrinkle in Time, gave a speech in 1983 at the Library of Congress arguing that children’s literature ought to engage with difficult questions in order to challenge readers. That speech is sometimes called “Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?”, as L’Engle repeatedly quotes WHAT T.S. Eliot poem, published in 1915?
This is “THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK.” Jeopardy! will rarely (but more than never) prompt you for the title, or part of it (‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,’ wrote T.S. Eliot in ‘The Love Song of’ this man”). In our kitchen, we have this framed next to our coffeemaker and teapot:
It’s just a great poem that you should read.
2b) In the poem that is the answer to Question 2a, the following lines appear: “Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter / I am no prophet — and here's no great matter[.]” These lines refer to a story in the New Testament of the Bible about the beheading of WHOM?
This is JOHN THE BAPTIST. Salome’s presentation of the head of John the Baptist to her stepfather King Herod is very commonly depicted in art.
3a) NAME the pope of the Catholic Church known as the “Warrior Pope” who repeatedly personally led soldiers into battle. He ratified the Treaty of Tordesillas between Portugal and Spain, formed an anti-Venetian military alliance known as the League of Cambrai, and took his papal name not in honor of a prior fourth-century pope but in honor of a historic general and leader.
This is POPE JULIUS II. Our clue about the fourth-century pope was trying to help you give an ordinal number (other than “the first”), and the general and leader is Julius Caesar.
Surprisingly commonly, Jeopardy! wants you to know who Lucrezia Borgia is. The Borgias rose to prominence during the Renaissance and produced two popes: Pope Callixtus III, whom no one will ever ask you about, and Pope Alexander VI, Julius II’s predecessor (if we can be allowed to ignore Pius III’s 26-day reign). Alexander VI became pope in 1492 (hey, that year seems to come up a lot, doesn’t it) and was infamous for his immorality, to the point where “Borgia” became shorthand for being a libertine. Lucrezia Borgia was daughter to Alexander VI, and often comes up solely for the proposition of being a famous Borgia.
Julius II was not a fan of the Borgias:
I will not live in the same rooms as the Borgias lived. He [Alexander VI] desecrated the Holy Church as none before. He usurped the papal power by the devil's aid, and I forbid under the pain of excommunication anyone to speak or think of Borgia again. His name and memory must be forgotten. It must be crossed out of every document and memorial. His reign must be obliterated. All paintings made of the Borgias or for them must be covered over with black crepe. All the tombs of the Borgias must be opened and their bodies sent back to where they belong – to Spain.
3b) WHAT word, most notably used in a different context, generally means anything that relates to one of five specific popes (and not one more than that), but particularly an uncle of the pope described in Question 3a?
This word is SISTINE, which means anything that relates to one of the popes who went by the name Sixtus. There are five popes with that name; hence, the parenthetical clue.
4a) Perhaps counterintuitively, WHAT 1990 film was until the release of The Blair Witch Project in 1999 the highest-grossing independent film of all time (worldwide, not adjusted for inflation)? Two direct sequels were released in 1991 and 1993. A reboot of the franchise, and that reboot’s sequel, were released in 2014 and 2016, respectively.
This is TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES. You know, the movie where during a fight scene everyone stops and dances at a Vanilla Ice concert:
4b) In the same week that the 1990 film referenced in Question 4a was released, WHAT musical artist released what would become the year’s best-selling single? The song’s title, as a noun, means “the prevailing fashion or style at a particular time.”
This is “VOGUE” by Madonna.
Some of the norms and traditions in this newsletter are flexible—a living, breathing newsletter, if you will. For example, we almost always ask you six questions, but this time we asked you eleven. Sometimes the theme is independently ascertainable via Question #6, and sometimes it is not. Past performance is not indicative of future results in a lot of places in life; so too, here.
What is inviolate, though, is the TRIVIA FACTORIAL GUARANTEE. Can we get the big font?
The central theme of a newsletter will never be “All of these people/things were mentioned in the song ‘Vogue’ by Madonna or the song ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ by Billy Joel.”
“Vogue” contains this spoken-word section:
Greta Garbo, and Monroe
Dietrich and DiMaggio
Marlon Brando, Jimmy Dean
On the cover of a magazine
Grace Kelly, Harlow, Jean
Picture of a beauty queen
Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire
Ginger Rogers dance on air
They had style, they had grace
Rita Hayworth gave good face
Lauren, Katharine, Lana too
Bette Davis, we love you
Ladies with an attitude
Fellas that were in the mood
And we won’t use that as a central newsletter theme—it’d just be too easy, and too expected, to ask you about those people and use the song as a unifying theme. That’s the TRIVIA FACTORIAL GUARANTEE.
Similarly, the lyrics of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” are a treasure trove of names and terms that in theory would be ripe for any sort of common-bond/mystery-theme quiz. Speaking of which—there are four people named in that song who are alive right now. (We aren’t counting the line “England's got a new queen” as the naming of a person, but if we were, then that number changed just a few days ago.) NAME any of those four people. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
5a) NAME the American author born in 1903 notable for his biographical novels about famous persons, such as Lust for Life (Vincent van Gogh), Immortal Life (Jessie Benton Frémont), The President's Lady (Rachel Donelson Jackson), and another book adapted into a 1965 film of the same name directed by Carol Reed.
This is IRVING STONE. More on him in a bit.
5b) If you take an anagram of the first name of the answer to Question 5a, and keep his last name the same, you now have a new phrase: That phrase loosely describes marble and grief-stricken depictions of, in a sense, the answer to Question 4b. WHAT five-letter word is more commonly used in art to describe such depictions?
This is a Pietà—in art, it specifically refers to depictions of the Virgin Mary cradling the body of Jesus after he was crucified. In art, a representation of the Virgin Mary is often called a Madonna, so we borrowed her from Question 4b. I got a little cute and encouraged you to take an anagram of “Irving Stone” to get you to “Virgin Stone.”
6) WHO is the theme of this newsletter?
This quiz is all about MICHELANGELO, the Renaissance artist. The “A” questions generally dealt with him and the people around him, and the “B” questions dealt with the things he made—hence, our newsletter title was MAKER AND MODEL, to encourage you to realize that dichotomy of questions between Michelangelo, the maker, and the things he made (and as a little pun on “make and model,” how people refer to cars).
Question 1a: We prompted you for last names, but at the end of the given list, the first names were MICHAEL and D’ANGELO.
Question 1b: David Brent is a reference to Michelangelo’s most famous work, David.
Question 2a: Twice in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” its most famous line appears: “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.”
Question 2b: Much of Michelangelo’s work, like many artists of the time, was religious in nature. At least one of his sculptures was of St. John the Baptist.
Question 3a: Many of Michelangelo’s greatest works were commissioned by Pope Julius II, including…
Question 3b: The painting of the Sistine Chapel.
Question 4a: One of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, of course, is Michelangelo.
Question 4b: Several of Michelangelo’s works, in some fashion, depicted the Madonna.
Question 5a: Irving Stone’s most famous book is The Agony and the Ecstasy (that’s the one we alluded to but didn’t name), which is a biographical novel about Michelangelo.
Question 5b: Michelangelo’s sculpture of the Pietà is one of his great works—for what it’s worth, it’s the only piece of art he ever signed.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Brigitte Bardot (1934—), Chubby Checker (1941—), Bob Dylan (1941—), and Bernie Goetz (1947—).