As a reminder, our regular programming is paused this week. This e-mail is split into three parts:
Trivia Newsletter Variety Pack 3, a set of twelve unthemed trivia questions. Think of these as questions retrieved from our cutting-room floor.
A brief aside about a Trivia Factorial field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, with a link for you to read more about that adventure if you’d like.
The recap of Trivia Newsletter LXXXIV.
Our next mainline edition, Trivia Newsletter LXXXV, will be distributed on Monday, September 5.
Trivia Newsletter Variety Pack 3
Below are twelve 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/j4XeJfSiFww3uAfF6. Like most trivia, the answers can be readily found via Google, so you’re on the honor system (i.e., do not use any resources other than those provided in this e-mail 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, and this Variety Pack has no connection to our Question #6 leaderboard; instead, these are general-knowledge trivia questions.
1) Political prognosticator Nate Silver rose to fame in part by correctly predicting the outcome of the 2008 U.S. presidential election in 49 out of 50 states. WHAT state, a solidly Republican bastion in every other presidential election since 1968, did Barack Obama win by almost 30,000 votes in 2008, causing Silver’s only missed prediction?
2) An intaglio is a type of carving where the design is cut into the flat background of a stone or other item. WHAT complementary term, also the name of a website called in 2020 “The Most American Startup Ever,” refers to a type of carving where the design projects out of the background, rather than being cut into the background?
3) “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika” are the names of the two parts of WHAT play by Tony Kushner, later adapted into an HBO miniseries, that has been called by one professor “a turning point in the history of gay drama, the history of American drama, and of American literary culture”?
4) The Theodosian Walls, originally built in the fifth century, stood outside WHAT city? The walls helped the city withstand attempted invasions for hundreds of years, though they did not prevent the city’s capture in the year 1453.
5) The 1980 film Coal Miner’s Daughter is about the life of WHAT country-music singer? In 1970, she became the first woman in country music to have an album (Don't Come Home a Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)) certified gold.
6) Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 is sometimes called the “Pastoral Symphony.” WHAT name is generally given to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3? Adding one letter to the answer yields a type of literary or artistic work that Gloria Steinem argues ought to be considered distinct from pornography “as dignity is from humiliation, as partnership is from slavery, as pleasure is from pain.”
7) NAME the French aviator, one of the first fighter pilots in European history and of whom Rafael Nadal may or may not be a fan, who is generally credited as the first pilot to down an enemy airplane with a machine gun firing through his plane’s propeller.
8) Plants that produce seeds that are enclosed within a fruit, in contrast with plants that produce unenclosed seeds, are known by WHAT ten-letter term, representing approximately 80 percent of all known living green plants?
9) NAME the person who, in the summer of 2022, overtook Charli D'Amelio as the owner of the most-followed account on the social-media platform TikTok. He is most famous for videos in which he mutely lampoons “life hack” videos.
10) Ṛta Kapur Chishti is a textile scholar who co-wrote a book in 2010 enumerating 108 different ways to drape WHAT article of clothing, the name of which is derived from a Sanskrit word for a strip of cloth?
11) NAME the person, inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022, who is generally credited as a key figure behind the adoption and advancement of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP); now a Google employee, she holds over 200 patents, including the patent for donations to charity via text messages.
12) Likely invented in the Philadelphia area in the early 1950s and sharing its name with a volcanic island off the coast of Sicily, WHAT food item, similar to a calzone, is a type of turnover filled with Italian cheeses (typically mozzarella) and meats (typically salami and other cold cuts) or vegetables?
Trivia Factorial Field Trip
Last weekend, I was able to briefly visit the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the world’s oldest and largest art museums. I wrote up some thoughts about the field trip and its tie-ins to past questions we’ve done here at Trivia Factorial. We didn’t include that in this e-mail so that your inbox wouldn’t be bombarded by lots of images, but you can read about the trip by clicking the button below.
Recap of Trivia Newsletter LXXXIV
1) WHAT was the name of NASA’s second human spaceflight program, which began in 1961 and concluded in 1966? NASA clarified in 1965 that the official pronunciation of the program rhymes with “knee.”
The program is GEMINI. Quoting The New York Times:
On Tuesday, Bob Jacobs, a spokesman for NASA, said that the “knee” pronunciation is part of the agency’s culture, and serves almost as an insider’s shibboleth — a word whose proper delivery identifies you as someone in the know. “If you get it right,” he said, “you’re part of the space club.” He likened it to the Nashville street Demonbreun, which is pronounced Da-MUN-bree-un, and not like what some have characterized as “demon pickle juice.” Mr. Jacobs also suggested that the pronunciation could have to do with the early space program’s Southernness, in the way that “every pilot speaks like Chuck Yeager.”
And yet it wasn’t always so clear, said Bill Barry, the space agency’s chief historian. Back in the time of the Gemini program, “it kind of depended who you were talking to, and what day of the week it was,” and even varied from NASA locations, he said.
A trivia chestnut that comes up is that Gemini, the constellation, is associated with the twins Castor and Pollux from Greek mythology. Accounts of the circumstances of their birth vary wildly, but generally: Castor and Pollux were both sons of Leda, but Castor’s father was the mortal Tyndareus (a king of Sparta) and Pollux’s father was the god Zeus.
2) LINKS is a quarterly magazine published in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina that was launched in 1988 and centers its coverage around WHAT topic? Contributors to the magazine have included Tom Doak, Nick Faldo, Jim Nantz, John Updike, and Ernie Els.
The magazine covers GOLF. You had a few ways to get there. A “links course” is a type of golf course—perhaps you’ve seen a golf course with “links” in its name, or heard someone say they’re going to “hit the links.” The “links” apparently refers to a type of sandy terrain common on the edges of the coasts of the British Isles where the game of golf originated (since the land wasn’t useful for agriculture). Hilton Head Island is a resort town, also pointing towards the answer. Finally, the list of contributors included sports personalities, golf course architects, and Ernie Els, a notable professional golfer.
By the way, WHAT IS THE NAME of the biennial golf competition between teams from Europe and the United States? It was not founded by a certain transportation and logistics company with about 40,000 employees. The answer is at the end of this newsletter.1
3) “From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail” is the subtitle of WHAT memoir published in 2012 by Cheryl Strayed that was later adapted into a film starring Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern?
The memoir’s title is WILD, and so is the name of the 2014 film adaptation. I had wondered if it was coincidental that someone who had written a book about being lost and then finding herself after a long physical journey had been previously given the last name “Strayed”; alas, Strayed chose the surname for herself in the late 1990s.
In 2012, Oprah Winfrey launched “Oprah’s Book Club 2.0” with a focus on digital media, and Strayed’s memoir was the first selection for the club. What’s another connection between Winfrey and Strayed?
Gillie and Marc Schattner (who tend to go by “Gillie and Marc”) are a collaborative artist couple from Australia known for creating sculptures. Their website wants you to know that “[t]heir decisions and responsibilities are shared, and Marc would never assume that he is more capable than Gillie because he is a man. Nor would she let him!” In their line of work, they came to realize that the vast majority of the sculptures they were asked to create were statues of men, so they created an organization called Statues for Equality to bring awareness to, and change, that fact. In 2019, the first public exhibit of Statues of Equality opened in New York, depicting ten women. They’re listed here in no particular order:
Cheryl Strayed. You may remember her as, uh, the person we’re talking about, right now, in this recap.
Oprah Winfrey—their grouping on this list is our second Strayed-Oprah connection. Oprah narrated a lovely short video about Serena Williams that ESPN aired following Serena’s match at the US Open last Monday (and again yesterday) as Serena plays in possibly her final professional tournament.
Tererai Trent, an educator whose inspirational story of earning her doctorate despite not being allowed to attend school while in Zimbabwe was popularized in the 2009 book Half the Sky.
Pink, a singer/songwriter. We never found a way to make this a trivia question, but Pink (who stylizes her name P!nk) was part of the cover of the song “Lady Marmalade” for Moulin Rouge!, and we at Trivia Factorial love the exclamation mark crossover possibilities there.
Nicole Kidman, an actress; this very, very bad article was recently written about her.
Tracy Caldwell Dyson, an astronaut. Caldwell Dyson has been to space multiple times, including a 176-day stay on the International Space Station. For a brief time in 2010, four women were in orbit at the same time; that’s the first time that’s ever happened. Those four women were Caldwell Dyson, Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger (NASA), Stephanie Wilson (NASA—hey, remember her from our recap of Trivia Newsletter XXXIII back in February?), and Naoko Yamazaki (JAXA, Japan’s aerospace agency—she is the second Japanese woman to fly in space, after Chiaki Mukai).
Jane Goodall, a primatologist. Goodall is one of three women sometimes called the “Trimates” who were chosen by anthropologist Louis Leakey to study apes:
If someone’s asking you a Jane Goodall question, they’re probably going to mention CHIMPANZEES, perhaps in Tanzania. In fact, if someone’s asking you a primatology question at all, the answer’s probably Goodall.
If someone’s asking you a Dian Fossey question, they’re probably going to mention GORILLAS (perhaps in Rwanda or the Congo), her 1983 book Gorillas in the Mist, or the 1988 film of the same name starring Sigourney Weaver as Fossey. Fossey was tragically killed in Rwanda in 1985.
If someone’s asking you a Biruté Galdikas question, they’re probably going to mention ORANGUTANS, perhaps in Borneo. Galdikas has never been mentioned on Jeopardy! directly and is, by a large margin, the least likely Trimate you’re going to be asked about.
Gabby Douglas, a gymnast. She’s the first U.S. gymnast to win gold in both the individual all-around and team competitions at the same Olympics (2012).
Janet Mock, a writer, director, producer, and activist for transgender rights; according to Teen Vogue, Mock is the first transgender woman of color to direct any episode of television (Pose).
Cate Blanchett, an actress. Cate Blanchett has been nominated for more Oscars than any other Australian (seven), though art director and costume designer Catherine Martin has the most Oscar wins of Australians (four).
4) Travis Fimmel, Katheryn Winnick and Gustaf Skarsgård starred in WHAT television show that aired from 2013 to 2020? The show’s second episode shows a raid on a monastery on the island of Lindisfarne, which helps us estimate that the events in the episode took place in the year 793.
This show is VIKINGS.
The first season of Vikings: Valhalla, the sequel series to Vikings, began airing on Netflix earlier this year. The creator of that show is a screenwriter named Jeb Stuart; he’s also the guy who wrote the screenplays for Die Hard (1988) and The Fugitive (1993). The successes of those films led Stuart to direct Switchback (1997), starring Dennis Quaid, Danny Glover, and Jared Leto. What, you haven’t heard of Switchback? That’s okay, because neither did filmgoers; it was #8 in the box office in its first week of release, and eventually made $6.5 million (against its $38 million budget). “What we have here,” wrote Roger Ebert in his review of the film, “is a potentially good movie swamped by the weight of Hollywood formulas it is forced to carry.”
5) The following is a list of the most-recent sets of WHAT, specifically? Timberwolf/Scorecard, Eagle/Sundance, Trailblazer/Angler, Renegade/Celtic, Mogul/Hoosier, Celtic/Pioneer.
These are SECRET SERVICE CODE NAMES OF U.S. PRESIDENTS AND VICE-PRESIDENTS. “Celtic” is Joe Biden’s code name, for example, which is why he appears in the list twice.
In the Tom Clancy novel Executive Orders, the author establishes that President Jack Ryan’s Secret Service code name is “Swordsman” and that the First Lady’s code name is “Surgeon.” At first blush, this makes sense, because Dr. Cathy Ryan in the series is a doctor. Ever since I learned this information a few seconds ago, though, I’ve always struggled with this. Isn’t the whole point of a call sign so that you have a quick way to refer to a person that isn’t readily confused with other words? Aren’t “Swordsman” and “Surgeon” two words that might sound very similar to each other over a radio if a crisis were to occur? Well, hopefully there are no other plot issues in the thirty-five other “Jack Ryan universe” novels written by Tom Clancy and his successors.
6) WHAT specific distinction, also this newsletter’s theme, is shared by the following films? The Mighty Ducks (1992), Fargo (1996), Jingle All the Way (1996), A Prairie Home Companion (2006), Juno (2007), Leatherheads (2008), Jennifer’s Body (2009), Contagion (2011).
These are all films that TAKE PLACE, whether partially or entirely, IN THE STATE OF MINNESOTA. That may have been something you were able to piece together from the films themselves, which definitely lean towards wintry films to a degree, but the conceit of the newsletter is that each question pointed towards a professional Minnesota sports team:
Question #1: Gemini points towards Twins (MLB: Minnesota Twins)
Question #2: Links sounds like “lynx” (WNBA: Minnesota Lynx)
Question #3: Wild (NHL: Minnesota Wild)
Question #4: Vikings (NFL: Minnesota Vikings)
Question #5: Timberwolf spotted in the text of the question (NBA: Minnesota Timberwolves)
Newsletter Title: “Triple H” is a reference to Hubert H. Humphrey, a U.S. Senator from Minnesota for decades and also the Vice-President of the United States from 1965 to 1969. There’s a sports connection, too: The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome hosted the Minnesota Vikings and the Minnesota Twins for about thirty years, starting in 1982. The Metrodome is the only venue to have hosted an MLB All-Star Game (1985), a Super Bowl (1992), an NCAA Final Four (1992, 2001), and a World Series (1987, 1991).
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The RYDER CUP.