A few programming notes:
As a reminder, our regular programming will be paused until Monday, March 14.
Today, and also on Thursday, March 10, in lieu of our regular programming, subscribers will receive a variety pack of trivia questions I’ve written in the past. These questions are unthemed and will have no connection to the Question #6 leaderboard.
Below are twelve trivia questions. You can reply to this e-mail if you’d like to participate. 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 answers, and the next set of questions, will be published on Mondays and Thursdays. There is no theme—these questions are questions I’ve previously written and are intended as a holdover until our regular series resumes.
1) Visible from Earth with binoculars, WHAT is the largest moon in our solar system? The moon regularly appears in works of science fiction, including a novel written in 1991 by Bradley Denton, the plot of which opens when television sets throughout the world suddenly begin broadcasting a concert by an apparently living Buddy Holly, who says he is on this moon.
2) "This unhappiness was widespread—a pervasive problem that had no name." These words appeared in a book published in 1963, and the book's title represents the author's attempt to name this "pervasive problem" she identified. WHAT is the book’s name?
3) There are three U.S. states that border exactly two other states via land borders—let’s call those three states “two-border states.” WHAT is the only state that borders, in addition to other states, two of those three two-border states?
4) The Persians is an ancient Greek tragedy written by Aeschylus. Shortly after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began in 2003, references to The Persians permeated throughout high culture, and reproductions of the play were regularly put on, as Aeschylus's depiction of a son attempting to wage a war against an enemy who defeated his father resonated with some Americans. For purposes of the analogy with the Bushes, WHO are the relevant father and son in The Persians?
5) Since 2000, there have been exactly three songs that have been #1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 for at least one week that have a properly spelled English word containing the letter "z" in their titles (so, a song like "Trollz" by 6ix9ine or "Grillz" by Nelly would not count). NAME any of the songs.
6) Be proactive. Begin with the end in mind. First things first. Think win-win. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Syngerize! Sharpen the saw; growth. According to Stephen Covey, these are the seven WHAT?
7) Featured on TV episodes "Homer Badman" (The Simpsons) and "Armless but Not Harmless" (The Tick), NAME the statue created sometime between 130 BC and 100 BC that is thought to be the work of Alexandros of Antioch and was discovered in 1820.
8) NAME the actress who starred as Carrie Heffernan on the long-running CBS sitcom The King of Queens as the wife of the titular character, and is today perhaps most notable for her public criticism of the Church of Scientology following her exodus from the organization in 2013.
9) In 2013, Aileen Lee adopted the name of WHAT mythical animal to describe a privately held startup company that is valued at over one billion dollars? Google estimated that there were 465 such companies in April 2020, including Stripe and Airbnb.
10) In mathematics, two quantities are in WHAT type of ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities? Stated more mundanely--take the square root of five, add one to it, divide all of that by two, and you get this number, which has historically been intensely studied by Pythagoras, Euclid, Kepler, Fibonacci, da Vinci, Bernoulli, Euler, and many others.
11) Edward Louis Bernays, born in 1891, was named one of the one hundred most influential Americans of the 20th century by the magazine Life. In the late 1920s, he spearheaded one of the most critical advertising campaigns in history, whereby he ensured that women in New York's 1929 Easter Sunday parade would be seen bearing "Torches of Freedom" (which became the campaign's name). WHAT is a “Torch of Freedom”?
12) NAME the painting by Johannes Vermeer that depicts a man and two women performing music. The painting was stolen in 1990 and remains missing; experts generally believe it is the single most valuable stolen object in the world. In the plot of the historical novel (and film adaptation) Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer paints this painting at the same time he paints Girl with a Pearl Earring.
Here are the answers from last time (note: as part of our short-term hiatus, the recap is limited to the answers without additional commentary):
1) “Calling birds” appear in modern versions of a certain popular song. Some groups that appear in nineteenth-century variations of the song that do not appear in our modern version, however, include “hares a-running,” “ships a-sailing,” and “bears a-baiting.” WHAT is the song in question?
This was “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”
2) Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, named by Time as one of the 100 most important thinkers of the 20th century, authored the book On Death and Dying as the result of her studies and research with terminally ill patients at the University of Chicago’s medical school. Now commonly critiqued but still highly influential in culture, WHAT model (sometimes known by the initialism DABDA) was first set out by Kübler-Ross in On Death and Dying?
These are the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
3) In the first, and again in the 26th, chapter of a certain book of the Bible, Moses is ordered to take a census of all of the adult Israelite males. These censuses give the Bible book its most common name in the King James Version, which is WHAT?
The answer here was Numbers.
4) In 2015, the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement was renamed the Grammy Award for Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella. NAME the first group to win this renamed award, doing so in both 2015 and 2016; they also won the third season of NBC’s show The Sing-Off and their YouTube videos have amassed billions of views.
This group is Pentatonix.
5) Acheron, Cocytus, Phlegethon, and Lethe are all examples of WHAT? Another member of this group shares its name with a long-running rock band formed in 1972 that has amassed sixteen top-40 singles.
These are rivers, or more particularly rivers of Hades in Greek mythology. The unnamed river in the question is Styx.
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of the following films as of today’s date (but not at all times since each movie’s release)? Sudden Impact (1983), Shaft (2000), The Sum of All Fears (2002), Live Free or Die Hard (2007), Rambo (2008), Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011), The Bourne Legacy (2012), Jurassic World (2015).
Each of these is (i) the fourth feature-length theatrical release of a film series, for (ii) a film series that currently has exactly five entries. So, for example, Jurassic World will no longer be part of this list later this year. The answers in this newsletter generally tried to point you to groups of five things, and at times fourth item in those sets (like how Numbers is the fourth book of the Pentateuch). The name of the newsletter is “Go Forth,” pointing to “fourth.” Finally, this was newsletter #39, and the Roman numerals in the title (XXXIX) were a graphical representation of what we were looking for. The clue “(not at all times since each movie’s release)” was meant to make you realize that there’s more going on here than just “the fourth movie in the series,” since if it were just that, then the parenthetical wouldn’t be true.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*updates may be significantly delayed until our regular programming resumes