For the first time since March 14, 2022, we get to use a new Roman numeral, C, in the newsletter title! We won’t get our next new letter until late 2025 at the earliest, when we get to Trivia Newsletter CD.
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. Like most trivia, the answers can be readily found via Google, so you’re on the honor system (i.e., do not use external resources to help you answer any of the questions). The SIXTH question of each set is generally designed to be a question that cannot be easily Googled; correct answers to those will be tracked and recognized in the next newsletter. The answers, and the next set of questions, will be published on Mondays and Thursdays.
1) In January 2020, WHAT Syracuse University alumnus, despite never winning the Heisman Trophy, was named by ESPN as the greatest player in the history of college football? In his professional career, he had more regular-season rushing yards in the 1960s than anyone in the National Football League (or American Football League), despite retiring after the 1965 season.
2) The “Weird Al” Yankovic song “Why Does This Always Happen to Me?”, released in 2003, spoofs the style of the arguably self-absorbed songs of WHAT singer-songwriter, who also plays piano on the track? The answer is also a description of what Jennifer Lopez’s husband might do in a poker game if he didn’t catch a flush on the river.
3) Wisent, zubr, and B. b. bonasus are all ways of describing the European variant of WHAT animal? Like its American counterpart, humans previously drove this animal to near-extinction, but due to recent conservation efforts, the animal is no longer endangered as of today.
4) The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book was written by (surprise!) Alice B. Toklas, who was born in San Francisco in 1877 but spent much of her adult life in Paris. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, however, was not written by Toklas; instead, it was written by WHOM?
5) WHAT TWO COUNTRIES, respectively, contain the westernmost and easternmost geographical land-based points of the area between Mexico and Colombia generally known as Central America?
6) WHAT distinction, also related to this theme’s newsletter, is shared by each of the following U.S. cities (as well as other U.S. cities)? Los Angeles, CA; San Diego, CA; Riverside, CA; Philadelphia, PA; Honolulu, HI; Milwaukee, WI; El Paso, TX; New Haven, CT; San Francisco, CA; Denver, CO.
Trivia Newsletter LXXXIX Recap
1) Nella Last, a volunteer for the Women's Voluntary Service and the British Red Cross during the Second World War, authored one of the longest examples of WHAT in the English language? The television film Housewife, 49 is based upon her writings, in which she expressed that she was riddled with worry that members of her family would be killed in the war.
Nella Last is famous for her DIARY. In the late 1930s, a British organization called Mass Observation, with the goal of creating an “anthropology of ourselves,” encouraged members of the public to send over their diaries. Hundreds of people did so, but Last was an especially prolific writer—her diary totaled over twelve million words (that’s about fifteen times the length of the King James Bible).
The diaries are charmingly mundane at times but also appear to have been self-therapeutic for Last. There are descriptions of marital arguments:
I reflected tonight on the changes the war had brought. I always used to worry and flutter round when I saw my husband working up for a mood; but now I just say calmly, ‘Really dear, you should try and act as if you were a grown man and not a child of ten, and if you want to be awkward, I shall go out – ALONE!’
And, well, more marital arguments:
I suppose you would only think I was putting a brave face on if I told you I’d sooner die than step into the frame you make for me. Do you know, my dear, that I’ve never known the content – at times, real happiness – that I’ve known since the war started? Because you always thought like that and were so afraid of ‘doing things’, you have at times been very cruel. Now my restless spirit is free, and I feel strength and endurance comes stronger with every effort.
And, of course, her reactions to wartime events:
This morning I lingered over my breakfast, reading and re-reading the accounts of the Dunkirk evacuation. I felt as if deep inside me was a harp that vibrated and sang – like the feeling on a hillside of gorse in the hot bright sun, or seeing suddenly, as you walked through a park, a big bed of clear, thin red poppies in all their brave splendour. I forgot I was a middle-aged woman who often got up tired and who had backache. The story made me feel part of something that was undying and never old – like a flame to light or warm, but strong enough to burn and destroy trash and rubbish.
And lots of other things—hey, it was twelve million words.
2) A common but readily debunked explanation of WHAT nursery rhyme is that it was written during a bubonic-plague pandemic in the fourteenth century? According to this gaunt explanation, the first line of the rhyme describes a symptom of the plague, the second line describes a futile good-luck charm, the third line approximates the sneezing of an infected person, and the final line describes the people who have died from the plague.
This is “RING AROUND THE ROSIE” (sometimes called “Ring a Ring o' Roses” or other variants thereof).
The almost-certainly-untrue story that the nursery rhyme relates to the plague is a good, if minor, example of the crazily wrong things you hear sometimes once you start listening for them. Ask people whether the pyramids in Egypt were built by enslaved people, and you’ll get lots of wrong answers (they almost certainly weren’t). Next time someone tells you that motivational-speech thing about how the Chinese word for “crisis” is written with two Chinese characters meaning “danger” and “opportunity,” tell them that they’ve learned something that is incorrect. There are more important things to avoid being wrong about, of course, but….
3) In the last two seasons of the television show How I Met Your Mother, the character Robin Scherbatsky frets over WHAT family heirloom, passed down to her by her grandmother and which she intended to be her “something old” for her wedding? The object took a serpentine path throughout the show’s plot, as at varying times it was in Central Park, in a pencil box, in Germany, and in a river—finally it is given to Robin in the show’s penultimate episode.
This is a LOCKET.
Neil Patrick Harris was nominated four times for the Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for his work on How I Met Your Mother, losing all four times (three times to Jeremy Piven for Entourage, and once to Jon Cryer for Two and a Half Men). Harris did, however, win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for his appearance in a 2010 episode of WHAT television show?1 The answer is not Saturday Night Live, but it does appears at the end of this newsletter.
4) Chris Chelios and Brian Rafalski, besides both playing at one time for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have their names engraved three times each on WHAT trophy, the oldest existing trophy to be awarded to a professional sports franchise in North America?
This is the STANLEY CUP, as Chelios and Rafalski are both hockey players. Chelios, in particular, is a Hall of Famer known for his shocking longevity—in his final brief stint with the Atlanta Thrashers in 2010, he was 48 years old. Chelios played in 26 NHL seasons and holds the NHL record for most career playoff games played, with 266.
You probably know that the Stanley Cup has the distinction of having players’ names engraved into it. “So what stops the trophy from just getting bigger and bigger until it can’t fit through doorways?” What they do is, every 13 years, remove the top “band” of the trophy (shown below), as that’s the oldest one, and add a new band. That band is then sent over to the Hockey Hall of Fame (which by the way is in Toronto).
5) In the ancient Greek play Medea by Euripides, Medea takes out her revenge on Jason’s bride-to-be, Glauce, by poisoning a set of golden robes and WHAT other object, in the hopes that Glauce will not be able to resist wearing them? (If you wisely pick a certain name for this item, regularly used in translations of Medea, its first syllable will be a clue for what happened to Glauce.)
The word we’re looking for is DIADEM—some translations go with coronet, crown, or other related words. The first syllable of “diadem” is “die,” as things don’t go great for Glauce. The character Medea is the answer to “Portrayals of what character have won the most Tony Awards for the same female lead character?”, with Judith Anderson (1948), Zoe Caldwell (1982), and Diana Rigg (1994) all winning the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Play for playing Medea. The male equivalent to this bit of trivia is George, from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is probably Edward Albee’s most famous work, but my favorite work of his is the one-act play The Zoo Story. The full text of that is here. The Zoo Story, Albee’s first play, is about a chance meeting on a Central Park bench between a wealthy businessman and an isolated, less-well-off man. Albee was eventually unhappy with the story and added a “prequel” act of sorts, called Homelife—those two acts are sometimes performed together in a play sometimes called At Home in the Zoo and sometimes called Peter and Jerry.
The climax of The Zoo Story shows the two men fighting over position on the bench:
PETER: [his fury and self-consciousness have possessed him] It doesn't matter. [He is almost crying.] GET AWAY FROM MY BENCH!
JERRY: Why? You have everything in the world you want; you've told me about your home, and your family, and your own little zoo. You have everything, and now you want this bench. Are these the things men fight for? Tell me, Peter, is this bench, this iron and this wood, is this your honour? Is this the thing in the world you'd fight for? Can you think of anything more absurd?
6) This newsletter is missing TWO fictional characters needed to complete a full set. NAME either missing character.
This newsletter was trying to gear you towards the Harry Potter franchise—as a SPOILER ALERT, this is about to get pretty spoilerific:
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Right, so this newsletter was specifically the overarching plot in the books/movies where the protagonists seek out and destroy the bad guy’s physical anchors to immortal life, or as they’re called in the series, Horcruxes.
I’m a big Harry Potter fan—if it were up to me (well, I guess it is), the next ten newsletters would just be Harry Potter themes (“and we asked you about Bengals quarterback Joe BURROW for the obvious association with the Weasley abode, but also because one of the Chasers on the Ravenclaw Quidditch team in Prisoner of Azkaban is Randolph BURROW”). But no one wants to answer questions about the Ravenclaw Quidditch team as it was said to exist in 1993, and so we tried to keep this quiz restricted to the more generally accessible and famous components of the Harry Potter universe.
The first five questions tracked the first five Horcruxes that are destroyed in the series:
Question #1: In the second book, Harry destroys Tom Riddle’s DIARY (we included “riddled” in the question for this reason)
Question #2: We learn in the sixth book that, in between Harry’s fifth and sixth years at Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore found and destroyed Marvolo Gaunt’s RING, so “Ring Around the Rosie” was meant to get you there (and this is why “gaunt” is in the question)
Question #3: In the events of the seventh book, Ron Weasley destroys Salazar Slytherin’s LOCKET (Slytherin’s symbol is a snake, so we put “serpentine” in the question)
Question #4: Later in the seventh book, Hermione Granger destroys Helga Hufflepuff’s CUP (Hufflepuff’s symbol is the badger, and so too is the mascot of the University of Wisconsin, which is why it came up)
Question #5: A few pages later in the seventh book, Vincent Crabbe inadvertently destroys Rowena Ravenclaw’s DIADEM (Ravenclaws are generally associated with being wise, so we tossed “wisely” into the question)
Thus, a correct answer was either HARRY POTTER (Voldemort’s inadvertent Horcrux, which Voldemort himself destroys) or NAGINI (Voldemort’s snake and the final Horcrux, which is destroyed by Neville Longbottom). A choice in the story that I like a great deal is that each Horcrux is destroyed by a different person, and Harry technically doesn’t destroy any of them after Book 2.
The newsletter title (i.e., divided), besides generally referring to Horcruxes and the related division of the soul, refers to this portion of the fifth book, shortly after Harry experiences a vision from the point of view of Nagini, and Dumbledore is trying to figure out what’s going on:
Tiny puffs of pale green smoke issued from the minuscule silver tube at the top. Dumbledore watched the smoke closely, his brow furrowed, and after a few seconds, the tiny puffs became a steady stream of smoke that thickened and coiled in the air…. A serpent’s head grew out of the end of it, opening its mouth wide. Harry wondered whether the instrument was confirming his theory: He looked eagerly at Dumbledore for a sign that he was right, but Dumbledore did not look up. “Naturally, naturally,” murmured Dumbledore apparently to himself, still observing the stream of smoke without the slightest sign of surprise. “BUT IN ESSENCE DIVIDED?”
Harry could make neither head nor tail of this question. The smoke serpent, however, split itself instantly into two snakes, both coiling and undulating in the dark air. With a look of grim satisfaction Dumbledore gave the instrument another gentle tap with his wand: the clinking noise slowed and died, and the smoke serpents grew faint, became a formless haze, and vanished.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
GLEE (“Dream On”, Season 1, Episode 19)