Hi all—we’re going to take a brief summer hiatus to tee up our next slate of newsletters. We’ll be back with Trivia Newsletter CLVII on Thursday, August 3rd, which will also include the recap of Trivia Newsletter CLVI. If you’d like to know the theme of our last newsletter, it’s in the footnote below (and will be discussed in more detail next week).1 We have quite the race to the finish line in our latest leaderboard! Check that out with the link at the end of this newsletter.
For you newcomers: We occasionally publish “Variety Packs” in lieu of our typical themed newsletters. As you can imagine, making our questions fit into themes can be a bit limiting in terms of the sorts of questions we can ask. This Variety Pack, like the others, has no theme, does not bear on our Question #6 leaderboard, and is an opportunity for us to ask some questions from our cutting-room floor that didn’t fit into a previous theme.
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. You can find our rules and guidelines by following this link.
1) Blake Fall-Conroy, an artist and mechanical engineer, created an art installation that lets users turn a crank to cause the installation to dispense pennies. The installation at one time dispensed a penny approximately every 4.97 seconds of cranking, as the installation is meant to be a commentary on WHAT, also part of the installation’s name?
2) Whether measured by domestic gross or worldwide gross, and as of July 24, 2023, WHAT is the highest-grossing film of 2023 that is not a sequel, not a prequel, and is not based upon existing intellectual property?
3) The “Crosstown Shootout” is an annual basketball game played between the teams of WHAT two universities? Their campuses are separated by under three miles, and they have not played a football game since 1973, as that was the last year that both schools had a football team.
4) According to Forbes, WHO is the only known transgender billionaire? A retired lieutenant colonel of the Illinois Army National Guard, she is the cousin of a current state governor and the cousin of a Cabinet member who served from 2013 to 2017.
5) Depending on how one measures a continent’s boundaries, there are a few potential versions of the “Seven Summits,” the highest mountains on the seven continents; for example, Europe’s highest peak could be considered either Mont Blanc or Mount Elbrus. Of the five mountains that are unquestionably part of the Seven Summits, WHICH comes last alphabetically?
6) Maulana Karenga, the co-founder of the group US Organization that was a rival group to the Black Panther Party, is likely most notable for creating WHAT in 1966? The Black Candle, a documentary film released in 2012, is about Karenga’s creation and is narrated by Maya Angelou.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
The theme of Trivia Newsletter CLVI was “presidents who had multiple vice-presidents.” The answers contained either multiple Vs or multiple Ps, in order, so that was a way to get you to think “multiple VPs.” I believe, but struggled to confirm, that “papovavirus” is, together with “papovaviruses,” the only Scrabble-eligible word with multiple Vs and multiple Vs. If I’m wrong, please let me know!