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 generally 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) In a phonetic sense, Madame Medusa, Baron Silas Greenback, Professor Norton Nimnu, Warren T. Rat, Tom, and Chef Jonah Robert Skinner might all be fans of WHAT Canadian electronic music producer and DJ who has been nominated for six Grammy Awards, including one for the song “Raise Your Weapon”?
2) Stanley Ipkiss, a down-on-his-luck bank employee, and Tina Carlyle, a glamorous jazz singer played by an actress making her film debut, are two of the main characters of WHAT 1994 film? The film featured an appearance by the neo-swing band Royal Crown Revue and was credited by The Washington Post as providing “neo-swing’s first mainstream break.”
3) The musical Love Never Dies, set in 1907, begins with the soprano Christine Daaé and her husband Raoul arriving in Manhattan so that Christine can make her American singing debut. First publicly performed in 2010 and with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Love Never Dies is the sequel to WHAT 1986 musical?
4) The following is a passage (from which two words have been omitted) from WHAT short story, first published in 1842?
With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “[BLANK].”
5) NAME the clinical psychologist, the first female president of the American Psychosomatic Society, famous for her expert-witness testimony regarding brainwashing, including with respect to high-profile cases such as the People’s Temple, Jonestown, the Patricia Hearst bank robbery trial, and the Branch Davidian and Heaven’s Gate cults. She regularly traveled under an assumed name due to the many death threats she received for her work.
6) WHAT distinction, closely related to this newsletter’s theme, is shared by each of the following persons (and, as of today, no others)? Wayne Brady, Kandi Burress, Nick Lachey, Jewel, LeAnn Rimes, T-Pain, Teyana Taylor.
Trivia Newsletter LXXXVII Recap
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.
This company is FUNKO, INC., most famous for their Pop! Vinyl line of figurines. Here’s an example:
Some articles from early 2020 indicate that the most preordered Funko Pop! of all time is Baby Yoda, and that the best-selling Funko Pop! of all time is Baby Groot—in the ensuing 2.5 years, it’s unclear if another figurine has taken that throne.
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?
Sobers is the first player to hit SIX SIXES in a single over of SIX consecutive balls. I mentioned that he has five siblings because he was one of six siblings, and that he had an extra finger on each hand because each hand had six fingers.
I would love to tell you why it is notable or interesting to hit six sixes in a single over of six consecutive balls, but I don’t know the rules of cricket. I realize that “huh, I have no idea” is not a particularly interesting thing to read in a trivia newsletter, but here we are. Once every few months, I make an attempt to learn enough about cricket to understand what is happening in a match, and it never takes—I follow along and then someone says something like “you have to get 20 wickets” and I’m lost again. I am not so egocentric not to realize that many of my interests would seem just as esoteric to someone who is an outsider to them. Cricket would probably be entirely understandable if I just bought a book or devoted a weekend to it, but I haven’t gotten there yet.
I do know that the Marylebone Cricket Club claims responsibility for maintaining the Laws of Cricket; one day, that fact may help me in trivia.
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?
These are SQUISHEES. A “Slurpee” is 7-11’s brand of slushie, a type of partially frozen beverage made with crushed ice and syrup. In the universe of The Simpsons, the Kwik-E-Mart sells Squishees.
In the late 1950s, a guy named Omar Knedlik owned a Dairy Queen franchise in Coffeyville, Kansas. The legend goes that he didn’t have a working soda fountain, so he’d improvise by freezing bottles of Coca-Cola and selling them halfway frozen. These became a big hit, so he tinkered with an ice cream machine and made it so it would consistently produce slushies. He patented that machine and started his company, The Icee Company. 7-11 made a deal with Icee to buy some of the machines, conditional on 7-11 using its own brand name, and thus the Slurpee was born.
Coffeyville, Kansas, located in southeastern Kansas, appears to have topped out at 17,382 people in the 1960 U.S. Census. Despite those numbers, quite a few notable people were born there or spent meaningful time there. You’ve got the guy who invented ICEE, one of the greatest MLB pitchers of all time, the first woman to fly a B-29 (that’s the type of bomber that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), a three-time world-champion in wrestling, the guy who did the score for 12 Angry Men, the guy who produced the song “Monster Mash,” a three-time winner of the Indianapolis 500, the drummer from the band Kansas, and plenty of others. Is there something in the water in Coffeyville? That’s a statistical analysis that would be pretty hard to do; I prefer to just think that there are stories everywhere, if you look for them.
What Coffeyville would most like you to know about it is that it is the location where the “Dalton Gang,” an infamous Wild West group, was stopped (and four of its members killed) while attempting to rob two banks at the same time. Coffeyville would probably prefer you not remember a 1927 race riot in which 1,500 to 3,000 white people stormed the streets and attacked anyone of color, destroying the Coffeyville city hall and requiring a four-day occupation of the town by the Kansas National Guard. Until they do an episode of Watchmen on that, you’ll have to settle for this very good summary of those events and the ensuing legal proceedings.
(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?
This is CICERO. I spotted you the names of some of his many works as a hint—Cicero was a famous orator, and that word is often used in trivia to identify him.
Shortly after the assassination of Julius Caesar, Cicero gave a series of fourteen speeches, sometimes collectively called the Philippics, condemning WHAT PERSON? The speeches convinced the Roman Senate to declare this person an enemy of the state, but ultimately this person, after joining what is generally called the Second Triumvirate with Octavian and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, got the upper hand and had Cicero killed. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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[.]”
This is RALPH LAUREN, born Ralph Lifshitz. That entire interview is here. The relevant part:
Oprah: Right. I know your name used to be Ralph Lifshitz. Where did the name Lauren come from?
Ralph: My given name has the word shit in it. When I was a kid, the other kids would make a lot of fun of me. It was a tough name. That's why I decided to change it. Then people said, "Did you change your name because you don't want to be Jewish?" I said, "Absolutely not. That's not what it's about." There were also people who thought that because I was Jewish, I had no right to create these preppy clothes. Harvard, Yale, Princeton: "Why do you like these kind of things?"
Oprah: Why did you choose the name Lauren?
Ralph: 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, it had nothing to do with not being proud of who I am. It had to do with not wanting to be at a detriment for no reason in a world that makes fun of things.
Oprah: Yes—Lifshitz is a hard one. I don't know if I'd want to buy the Lifshitz towels.
Ralph: If I had it to do over, would I change my name today? I'm not so sure.
Oprah: Do you still celebrate your Jewishness and honor the holidays?
Ralph: Absolutely. I'm very proud of my history and of my life. But there are always people who will shoot at you.
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.
This happens to be a list of cities since 1968 where the Democratic National Convention has been held since 1968, and the missing city is CHICAGO. This newsletter didn’t have any way for you to realize that connection, so unless you’re incredibly sharp at DNC trivia, that probably wasn’t the path. Instead, we tried to ease you into the other path by spotting you the fact that the newsletter’s theme is related to a work that has the same name as a city.
In the 1975 musical Chicago2 (and its 2002 film adaptation starring Renee Zellweger, Richard Gere and Catherine Zeta-Jones), during the acclaimed and regularly covered song "Cell Block Tango," six women sing about their alleged killings of their significant others. The song begins with, and repeatedly features, the women chanting a one-word summary of their stories: "Pop, Six, Squish, Uh-uh, Cicero, Lipschitz"--for example:
Those six words feature throughout this newsletter:
Question #1: Pointed you to Funko POP
Question #2: Repeatedly led you to SIX
Question #3: Squishee meant to refer to SQUISH3
Question #4: “(UH-UH)” appeared before the question, and the answer was CICERO
Question #5: Ralph Lauren, and his name change, meant to give you a chance at LIPSCHITZ.
Newsletter Title: Besides being a thematic clue generally, the line “It was a murder, but NOT A CRIME!” appears twice in the song.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
MARK ANTONY. Antony’s wife, Fulvia, was said to have taken Cicero’s decapitated head and used her hairpins to repeatedly pierce Cicero’s tongue, which had so eloquently argued against her husband.
The musical, of course, is itself based upon a 1927 film called Chicago…and that film is based upon a 1926 play called Chicago. To avoid confusion when the 1926 play is performed, it is now called Play Ball when it is performed. The play entered the public domain just a few months ago.
Yeah, we do a lot of The Simpsons around here, but I was hard-pressed to find another way to “squish.”