Welcome to the tenth edition of this newsletter! Thank you for your support and participation. Anyone’s welcome to subscribe, so feel free to share this with someone you know who might enjoy trivia.
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) In January 2017, Serena Williams defeated her sister Venus in the final of the Australian Open (women’s singles) to win her 23rd major, one short of the all-time record for Grand Slam titles in singles—that record is held by WHOM, who arguably has an appropriate name for this accomplishment?
2) WHAT is the two-word phrase missing from the below passage, first published in the year 1776?
He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an [BLANK] to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.
3) “Hysterical realism” (sometimes also called recherché postmodernism) is a term that was first used in 2000 and was used to describe a novel released in the same year. The plot of the novel concerns the lives of two wartime friends, the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones, and their families in London. WHAT is the novel’s name, which is also the obscured answer in the excerpted crossword below? The novel won many awards and is sometimes included in lists of the best English-language novels of the past one hundred years.
4) George Rhymes was a fourth-round pick by the Minnesota Vikings in 1985. Known as “Buster” while in the league, he set the NFL single-season kick return yardage record that same year, but was out of professional football by 1990 after a stint with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Rhymes is likely most famous not for his football career, but for inspiring Chuck D of Public Enemy to bestow WHAT stage name to a now-famous American rapper?
5) WHAT historical fiction novel won the 1944 Newbury Medal and was adapted into a 1957 film by Walt Disney Pictures? The novel features fictional characters (such as master metalworker Ephraim Lapham and soldier Rab Silsbee) as well as not-so-fictional characters such as Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere.
6) What is the notable trait shared by each of these films and TV shows? The A-Team (1983-87), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990-96), Pocahontas (1995), L.A. Confidential (1997), Titanic (1997), The Matrix (1999), 8 Mile (2002), American Dad! (2005—), Rick and Morty (2013—)
Here are the answers from last time:
1) The Java Man, Piltdown Man, Taung Child, and “Lucy” are each examples of fossil finds purported to be the WHAT specific two-word phrase between anatomically modern humans and our anthropoid ancestors? The answer is also the name of a 2019 stop-motion animated film made by Laika (the studio behind films like Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings), which featured the voices of Hugh Jackman, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Fry, Timothy Olyphant, Emma Thompson, and Zach Galifianakis.
Anne Robinson voice: “This was the MISSING LINK—goodbye.” I should note that I carefully used the word “purported” specifically because the Piltdown Man was found to be a fake. Instead of being a half-million old ancestor, the “Piltdown Man” was actually a human skull of medieval age, the 500-year-old lower jaw of an orangutan, and chimpanzee fossil teeth, which had all been modified to fit the fraud. It took over forty years to fully expose the affair, which is a long time to you and me but not a long time in archaeology.
2) Mount Narodnaya and Mount Karpinsk are two prominent peaks in WHAT mountain range, also the name of a territory in most standard editions of the board game Risk?
The Ukraine is not weak, and neither are the Ural Mountains, our answer here. Part of the physical boundary between Europe and Asia, the Urals were home to the Kyshtym disaster in 1957, which still ranks as the world’s third-worst nuclear accident (according to the subjective International Nuclear Event Scale), behind Chernobyl and Fukushima.
3) On October 27, 1994, perhaps the world’s first internet “banner ad,” which was for AT&T, was shown on the website HotWired. It is said that that ad had a CTR of 44%. As internet advertising became more common, the rates of CTR heavily declined, and although CTR heavily depends on context, CTRs of 0.1% or less are not rare today. WHAT does CTR, commonly thought to be a key component of search engine optimization, stand for?
We wanted “click-through rate” here. As you can imagine, CTR is commonly used to measure the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns. HotWired was a component of the magazine company Wired; the former is generally recognized as the first commercial online magazine, and is believed to be the first company to attempt behavioral targeting online.
4) In the novel The Great Gatsby, the following passage appears: “They are not perfect ovals – like the [BLANK] in the [BLANK] story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end – but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the seagulls that fly overhead.” In the novel War and Peace, the following passage appears: “The spiritual guide was astonished at this solution, which had all the simplicity of [BLANK]’ [BLANK].” WHAT two words, which the Italians might have called uovo di Colombo, are missing from both phrases?
We were looking for “Columbus’ egg.” The references above refer to the following apocryphal story whereby Columbus, in between bouts of genocide, was defending himself against a claim that, even if he hadn’t “discovered” the Indies, someone else would have:
Columbus placed an egg on the table saying: "Gentlemen, I will lay a wager with any of you, that you will not make this egg stand up as I will, naked and without anything at all." They all tried, and no one succeeded in making it stand up. When the egg came round to the hands of Columbus, by beating it down on the table he fixed it, having thus crushed a little of one end; wherefore all remained confused, understanding what he would have said: that after the deed is done, everybody knows how to do it; that they ought first to have sought for the Indies, and not laugh at him who had sought for it first, while they for some time had been laughing, and wondered at it as an impossibility.
5) In one of the more infamous video game puzzles of all time, your advisor in Metal Gear Solid (1998) instructs you to check “the back of the CD case” to learn a certain numeric code. The trick is that the solution is not in the game at all, but requires you to check the physical box that contained the game. That code is needed because you must call WHAT character in the game, who shares her first name with the person who has been nominated for more Oscars than any other person in history? (First name sufficient.)
This question was a convoluted way for you to respond with “Meryl,” for Meryl Streep. I could probably do the next ten newsletters solely on Meryl Streep facts, but for now: In 1980, Streep won an Oscar for her role in Kramer vs. Kramer, and minutes later, she almost lost the award in the bathroom at the ceremony. As the story goes, someone saved the day by saying the following sentence, which I think is hilarious: “Hey, someone left an Oscar in here.”
6) Based upon the theme of this newsletter, what is the number missing from this group of numbers? 6, 5, 13, 8, 8, 9, 6, 8, 10, 17, 8, 18, 7, 9, 4, 6, 8, 18, [BLANK], 9, 4, 8
Several of the clues were tangential Russia (Laika, the Urals, War and Peace, and the plot of Metal Gear Solid), and so this was a list of the 22 republics of Russia today, sorted in alphabetical order and then listed by the number of letters in each one—we were missing Sakha, which is five letters.
If you don’t know all of the Russian republics by their spellings, because that’s ridiculous and virtually no one anywhere in the world has any chance of seeing that pattern, then another (more recommended) way you could have gotten to “5” was realizing that the clues above were all trying to get you to look at the actual URL of the newsletter (which is linked in the e-mail you receive). #1 spotted you “link,” #2 was trying to get you to think of “URL,” #3 was about clicking through, #4 was an explicit reference to problems that are easier than they appear, and #5 described in detail a meta-puzzle. Finally, the name of the quiz itself encouraged you to check the “box” in your browser. If you did so, you saw this:
“https://hammersmif.substack.com/p/theanswertothelastquestionis5”
SIXTH QUESTION LEADERBOARD
CK - 5
SM, ZM - 4
RC, VB - 3
KM, MM, MS - 2
EM, JK, TS, WM - 1
[As a programming note: It is fairly likely that I will soon offload the sixth-question leaderboard to a separate, regularly updated Google Charts link rather than needing to update every newsletter, in part to make the newsletter more friendly to folks who weren’t around since Day 1 and in part to allow for newsletters to be finalized well in advance. More on that soon.]