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) Name the woman who got her start on the television show Last Comic Standing in 2007 and who authored the 2016 memoir The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo. She has been nominated for a each of a Grammy, Emmy and Tony Award, and her father is the second cousin of the current Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate.
2) WHAT song was #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 from November 12 to December 10, 1983? The song’s name alludes to the wealthy Upper East Side in New York City, and the song’s singer has stated that the song itself was inspired by his relationships with Elle Macpherson and Christie Brinkley.
3) WHO is the only NBA player to, in addition to his many other career accomplishments, average 25+ points per game for 15+ consecutive seasons (without taking any seasons off)? He is also the only NBA player to be in the top ten players all-time in both points and assists.
4) According to a Sports Illustrated article, WHAT celebrity, born in 1977, has granted by far the most wishes to children via the Make-A-Wish Foundation, with over 650 and counting? In addition to being one of the all-time greatest performers in his field, this celebrity has starred in several big-name films and had his 2005 album certified platinum.
5) “We started a Web site, but NBC refused to let us put the address on any of our ads because they didn’t want people to know the Internet existed. They were worried about losing viewers to it.” This quote was given to Vanity Fair about WHAT television show, which was canceled in 2000 after airing twelve episodes? Today the show, which has a rhyming title, regularly appears in lists of the greatest television shows of all time.
6) What unusual distinction is shared by each of these films? The Invisible Man (1933), Back to the Future Part III (1990), The Fugitive (1993), Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995), Broken Arrow (1996), Anastasia (1997), Batman Begins (2005), Final Destination 3 (2006), Super 8 (2011), Skyfall (2012).
Here are the answers from last time. Note that I have capitalized and bolded portions of certain questions to assist with the theme; these portions were not capitalized/bolded in the original e-mail distribution.
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 move until it faints or the Pokemon dies; and (3) the name of the virus in the 28 Days Later film franchise.
This one was “Rage.” The goal was that, with multiple ways in, plus the constraint of four letters, you had enough to make a plausible guess. The name of Woodward’s book was based on a conversation in 2016 between Woodward and Trump: Woodward said to Trump that “a lot of angst and rage and distress” seemed present in the GOP, to which Trump said “I bring rage out. I do bring rage out. I always have... I don't know if that's an asset or a liability, but whatever it is, I do.”
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 for 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.
The answer here is the terrific Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Hopefully the fact that Spider-Man is a Sony property that also appears in Marvel films (owned by Disney) wasn’t too disorienting. Spider-Verse was, as the question notes, the first non-Disney/Pixar animated film to win Best Animated Feature since Rango (2011), but it was the first non-Disney/Pixar animated film to win Best Animated Feature when there was another Disney/Pixar film in the running since, well, Happy Feet (2006).
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.
The Rock (i.e., Dwayne Johnson) was the answer here. You might wonder what the most-read Wikipedia article in 2017 was—maybe it was Trump? Or Game of Thrones? No, it was the surprisingly morbid “Deaths of 2017”! Hooray, question mark?
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.]
This one was the USS Indianapolis. Approximately three seconds before finalizing these questions, I realized that people might see “US state capital” and “Portland” and be misled, so I threw in the clarifying note—apologies if that seemed a bit ham-handed. The sinking of the USS Indianapolis constituted the greatest single loss of life at sea from a single ship in the history of the United States Navy.
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.”
Inconceivable! Wallace Shawn, an actor in the film, says that for years people would yell “inconceivable!” at him when he dropped his keys or did anything else. I hope the hints here, which gently nudged you towards the process of conception as a way to key into “inconceivable,” weren’t too goofy, but hey, you try to find a way to fit “rooster” into a question (more on that below)…
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: [picture omitted from this recap e-mail]
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.
So the answer here is Pig, a lovely 2021 film starring Nicolas Cage that I highly recommend everyone see. There were, uh, four ways to get here:
1) Maybe you just knew who Alex Wolff is and knew a lot of facts about him! That would have definitely been the easiest way.
2) As you might have noticed skimming through the questions, the entire Chinese zodiac calendar is hidden in this quiz in order: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog. The only one missing was “pig.” This was definitely a very hard thing to notice, but slight clues included the reference to Beijing in the newsletter’s title, combined with the reference in Question #6 to going “full circle.”
3) Another theme of this newsletter is that each of the answers (Rage, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Rock, USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage, and Inconceivable) is a name of a Nicolas Cage film (though a few of them are truly forgettable). Pig is another film starring Nicolas Cage. (I slipped in “men of courage” into the USS Indianapolis question for this reason.) A hint here was that Cage was also in the (eminently terrible) Bangkok Dangerous, which the title of this newsletter alluded to.
4) All of that seemed really hard, so I threw in one last-ditch path—Question #6 (and only Question #6) has, hidden within it, several references to the story of the Three Little Pigs—”wolf”, “brick”, “straw”, “stick(s)”, and “blow.” If you happened to notice those, you might have put those together and seen the connection.
SIXTH QUESTION LEADERBOARD
CK - 5
ZM - 4
SM - 3
RC, MS, VB - 2
EM, JK, KM, MM, TS, WM - 1