As a reminder, our regular programming is paused until Monday, March 14.
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) NAME the woman who was president of the National Council of Negro Women for forty years and was called by President Barack Obama in 2010 “the godmother of the civil rights movement and a hero to so many Americans.” She is credited as the driving force behind a campaign to place a statue of Mary McLeod Bethune in Washington, D.C.; the statue, unveiled in 1974, was the first statue of either a woman or an African-American person to be erected on federal land.
2) In 2005, the American Film Institute published a list of the top 100 quotations from American cinema; for example, the top quote is “Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn” from Gone with the Wind. Two of the quotes on the list are each a single word. NAME either word.
3) On March 2, 2022, 141 of the 193 members of the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution condemning, in its words, Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine. Four members (in addition to Russia itself) voted against the resolution, and of those four members, three of them are nations whose common English names end with the same letter, which letter is WHAT?
4) “Our whole universe was in a hot dense state” are the first words of the theme song for WHAT television show, which aired 279 episodes over twelve seasons?
5) NAME the work of art by Judy Chicago that is permanently displayed in the Brooklyn Museum and that functions as a symbolic history of women in civilization; it shows thirty-nine different elaborate place settings at a table for (obviously enough) thirty-nine different mythical and historical women.
6) Gian Carlo Menotti created twenty-five operas, including a one-act opera that was the first opera specifically composed for television in the United States and that was the debut production of the Hallmark Hall of Fame, the longest-running primetime series in television history. NAME the opera, which was apparently inspired by Menotti seeing the painting The Adoration of the Magi.
7) A southwest suburb bordering Chicago with a population of about 19,000 happens to have a five-letter name that is made up of the symbols of three elements that appear consecutively from “left to right,” so to speak, on the periodic table. NAME the suburb.
8) How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (or, in German, Beobachtungen zu einer neuen Sprache) is a documentary film by Werner Herzog primarily focused on WHAT profession, which typically entails the rhythmic repetition of numbers and filler words in order to facilitate one’s bidding? Herzog calls the profession “the last poetry possible, the poetry of capitalism.”
9) In WHAT year did “Black Monday,” the worst single-day percentage drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, occur? It is commonly speculated that the roots of the crash lay in a series of monetary and foreign trade agreements, such as the Plaza Accord and the Louvre Accord. [Note: The answer is not 1929 or 2020.]
10) Jared Diamond posits in his 1997 transdiscplinary book Guns, Germs, and Steel that mankind has successfully domesticated few wild animals throughout history because many different factors are required for successful domestication; the failure of any one of them, in its own way, will lead to failure. This is a specific application of WHAT principle, named for a novel published in the 1870s, that essentially states that a deficiency in any one of a number of factors dooms an endeavor to failure?
11) Three years after writing A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen wrote WHAT play, which tells the story of a medical officer who tries to report to a community that its bathwater is tainted, causing the community to turn against him? While Donald Trump probably is unaware of the play, he tweeted the play's name (except changing “an” to “the”) from his official Twitter account dozens of times during his presidency.
12) WHAT is the cosine of pi radians? The answer is also the designation given to a “world” players can enter in the original Super Mario Brothers video game by triggering an infamous glitch while entering a warp pipe.
Here are the answers from last time (note that, due to our hiatus, answers are presented with no commentary):
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.
GANYMEDE
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?
THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE
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?
GEORGIA (BORDERS FLORIDA AND SOUTH CAROLINA)
[Note: This question incorrectly states that there are three such states—Washington, Florida, South Carolina, and Rhode Island border two states by land, and Rhode Island has a small maritime border with New York. State/national border questions are always tricky, but hopefully the path to the answer, which is still correct, was not obscured by the error.]
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?
DARIUS AND XERXES
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.
"AMAZED" (LONESTAR), "CRAZY IN LOVE" (BEYONCE), "WOMANIZER" (BRITNEY SPEARS)
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?
HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE
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.
VENUS DE MILO
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.
LEAH REMINI
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.
UNICORN
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.
GOLDEN RATIO (ACCEPT “PHI”)
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”?
A CIGARETTE
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.
THE CONCERT
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*updates may be significantly delayed until our regular programming resumes