Below are six trivia questions I’ve written. 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. The SIXTH question of each set is designed to be a question that cannot be easily Googled, so correct answers to those will be tracked and recognized in the next newsletter. The answers, and the next set of questions, will be published every Monday and Thursday.
1) Give the four-letter name that describes these three things: (1) a book published in September 2020 by long-time investigative journalist Bob Woodward about the Donald Trump presidency; (2) an attack in the Generation I Pokemon games whereby the user cannot stop using the attack until the opponent or the user faints; and (3) the name of the virus in the 28 Days Later film franchise.
2) In 2006, Happy Feet won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and to help Disney get more competitive in the box office, Robert Iger, Disney’s CEO, oversaw the acquisition of Pixar. Since that acquisition, only two films that are not films made by Disney or Pixar have won Best Animated Feature. One is Rango; WHAT is the other film? Though the answer is not a Disney or Pixar film, its main character is also in several films produced by a Disney company; a sequel to this film is expected to release next year.
3) WHO was, according to People Magazine, the Sexiest Man Alive in 2016? He was also the subject of the 21st-most-read Wikipedia article of 2017; he couldn’t grab Bitcoin (#9) in those standings, but his fame continues to drag on, as his films have grossed over $10 billion worldwide and he is heavily involved in a sitcom currently airing on NBC. People who care about the Sexiest Man Alive award may care that he was naked on-screen in the HBO show Ballers. Give us his nickname, please.
4) Pull up anchor, seafarer: In what is probably the most memorable scene in Jaws (1975) not featuring a shark onscreen, the character Quint solemnly recalls his time surviving the sinking of WHAT World War II naval ship, which shares its name with a US state capital? In real life, she epitomized the Portland-class heavy cruisers of the US Navy, and her men of courage were famous for one uncommon key shipment: many of the parts of Little Boy, the first nuclear weapon used in combat. [Hint: Do not guess “Salem” or “Augusta”—the reference to “Portland-class” is not a clue.]
5) Webster’s English Dictionary defines a certain word as “impossible to understand.” WHAT is this thirteen-letter adjective, made famous in part by the film The Princess Bride? Like a kangaroo’s terse reaction to hearing Mr. Tribbiani’s name on Friends, or a dog’s mother hearing a certain five-letter curse word that starts with “b,” we might say “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
6) I know that past Questions #6 have been difficult, so let’s go full circle and make this as straightforward as possible (but don’t cheat!). There’s a guy named Alex Wolff; he’s 24 years old, is an up-and-coming actor, and got his first raw exposure to the world in The Naked Brothers Band, a TV show that aired on Nickelodeon from 2007 to 2009. Here’s a picture of him:
All you need to do is fill in the blank, which is a single English word, in this list of every film in which he’s acted since 2018, presented in order of release (hey, it’s no Kubrick, but there are some good films here).
Hereditary, Dude, Stella’s Last Weekend, The Cat and the Moon, Castle in the Ground, Bad Education, Human Capital, Jumanji: The Next Level, [BLANK], Old
If you don’t know the answer, don’t blow it off—I recommend trying to stick with the secret theme(s?) of this newsletter.
Here are the answers from last time:
1) In chemistry, a container with SLOPED sides is generally known as a flask. What is the name, shared with a character from The Muppet Show, generally given to a container with STRAIGHT sides and a spout? John Joseph Griffin, a 19th-century English chemist, famously invented a common style of this item.
Meep! We were looking for “beaker.” I, uh, don’t know what to say about beakers, so I will let a one-star Amazon review of a common beaker take it from here: “I put all the cups together without plastic around them and the two smaller beakers got stuck and couldn’t get unstuck.” As for Griffin, he was apparently a hyper-earnest lover of chemistry who wanted to make it commercially popular—he published Chemical Recreations: A Popular Manual of Experimental Chemistry, which can be mostly found on Google Books and is surprisingly enjoyable.
2) There are three actors who have won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series four or more times for playing the same TV character. Each of those three characters has a first name or a last name that ends in the letter “R”. Name TWO of the THREE characters, in THREE guesses—first and last name required. (Michael J. Fox won three times for playing Alex P. Keaton in Family Ties, and one time for playing Mike Flaherty in Spin City, and thus does not qualify.)
Those characters were Dr. Sheldon Cooper (The Big Bang Theory), Dr. Frasier Crane (Frasier), and dockworker/cab driver Archie Bunker (All in the Family). In 2012, a newly discovered species of bee in Brazil was given the name Euglossa bazinga, in honor of the catchphrase popularized by The Big Bang Theory.
3) In combat sports, WHAT is typically the weight class that is heavier than flyweight but lighter than lightweight? The weight class typically spans 125 to 132 pounds in boxing, and 136 to 145 pounds in UFC. On August 15, 2009, Gina Carano took on Cris Cyborg for the inaugural Strikeforce Women’s Championship at this weight class.
The answer here was “featherweight.” I’m writing this before I’ve seen anyone’s answers, but I suspect “welterweight” will be a common guess—that’s (typically) the next one above lightweight, although what I am learning is that weight classes are not uniformly used between sports at all. In researching this question, I also learned that “light heavyweight” is a weight class, which is crazy!
4) In 2003, the American Film Institute released a list of the top 50 film heroes of all time. Two women are in the top ten of this list of heroes. One is Ellen Ripley from the Alien franchise; WHO is the other film hero, who appears in a film based on a novel? Both the actress who portrayed this character and the author of the novel are living as of October 29, 2021.
This one is Clarice Starling, played by Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs. The novel clue was given in the hopes it’d get you away from characters from works like Gone with the Wind (whose author is not alive) or The Terminator (which was not based on a novel). Earlier this year, CBS aired the first (and perhaps only) season of Clarice, which centers on Starling and takes place after the events of Silence of the Lambs. Apparently, in the novel, Hannibal Lecter’s famous line (“I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti”) referred to Amarone rather than Chianti, but the filmmakers were concerned Americans wouldn’t know what Amarone (a rich dry red wine from Italy) is.
5) The below passage is taken from House Resolution 611 of the second session of the 105th U.S. Congress. WHOSE name fills in the blank?
[BLANK] willfully provided perjurious, false and misleading testimony to the grand jury concerning one or more of the following:
(1) the nature and details of his relationship with a subordinate Government employee;
(2) prior perjurious, false and misleading testimony he gave in a Federal civil rights action brought against him;
(3) prior false and misleading statements he allowed his attorney to make to a Federal judge in that civil rights action; and
(4) his corrupt efforts to influence the testimony of witnesses and to impede the discovery of evidence in that civil rights action.
Bill Clinton’s name fills in the blank here, as this is an excerpt from his impeachment proceedings. There have been four impeachments in US history of presidents, though none has led to a conviction—Clinton, Andrew Johnson, and Donald Trump (twice).
6) What is the US city that best completes this set? Glendale, AZ; St. Louis, MO; Atlanta, GA; Seattle, WA; Toronto, ON; Baltimore, MD; New Orleans, LA; Pittsburgh, PA.
Each of the answers in this quiz was meant to clue you into birds: BEAKer, Fraiser CRANE and Sheldon COOPer, FEATHERweight, Clarice STARLING, and BILL Clinton. The newsletter’s name was also a hint here, as “down” is the term for the layer of feathers around a bird under its exterior feathers (you know, like a “Phoenix Down” from the Final Fantasy video games). That was meant to get you to think about birds and help you realize that this is a near-complete list of all of the teams in the “Big Four” North American sports that have birds in their names (i.e., the Cardinals, Cardinals, Falcons, Seahawks, Blue Jays, Ravens/Orioles, Pelicans, and Penguins). The only one missing is the Anaheim Ducks, so Anaheim, California was our answer.
…and, that’s what I had originally written in the first draft of these questions. The list of cities changed around a few times, and somehow I had deleted Philadelphia (the Eagles) without correctly adding Anaheim. So, either Philadelphia or Anaheim was correct, and we regret any confusion caused by the omission. Due to the blind spot, I was more liberal with accepting answers here than I’d normally be—any recognition that we were dealing with sports/bird teams was sufficient.
SIXTH QUESTION LEADERBOARD
CK - 5
ZM - 4
SM - 3
RC, MS - 2
EM, JK, KM, MM, TS, WM, VB - 1