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 2016, The Wall Street Journal published a story with the headline “Millennials Are Fine Without [BLANK]; P&G Looks to Fix That.” WHAT two-word product fills in the blank? Though the product in question is not a hair or skin product, the second word in the product’s name is now sometimes changed to “conditioner” in order to boost sales.
2) Body, hip, shoulder, poke, hook, sweep, and stick are some of the words that can be used to describe WHAT action in the sport of ice hockey, which is generally not against the sport’s rules unless done in a prohibited manner (for example, when done with the shaft of the hockey stick with both hands)?
3) WHAT toy, comprised of (among other things) polybutadiene, hydrated silica, zinc oxide, and stearic acid, inspired the name of the annual event that has generally been, for the past few decades, the most-watched television broadcast in the United States each year?
4) WHAT package-delivery startup company was founded in 2013 in order to solve the problem of consumers in large cities not receiving packages ordered online? Despite being featured on the television show Shark Tank, the company, which aptly shares its name with a certain profession, ceased operations in 2017.
5) The ratio of the final velocity to the initial velocity between two objects after their collision is sometimes called in physics the coefficient of WHAT property? A perfectly elastic collision has a coefficient of 1, while a perfectly inelastic collision has a coefficient of 0.
6) There are exactly two feature-length films that have a certain distinction not shared by any other feature-length film. One of the films is Shakespeare in Love (1998). WHAT other film, which was not among the top-50 films in the box office in the year it came out and which received middling reviews, shares this distinction? Perhaps more helpfully to you, the film’s title is also the theme of this newsletter.
A quick aside: You may recall that last June I wrote a guest post on Learned Lessons, a newsletter that former Jeopardy! champion Ben Raphel uses to recap his daily performance in LearnedLeague, an online trivia league that I (and many Trivia Factorial readers) participate in. Ben let me write another guest post about Friday’s Match Day. Check it out (and the rest of his newsletter) if you’d like by clicking the below button. Even if you aren’t a LLama, as folks on LearnedLeague call themselves, you might have fun reading the questions and seeing my thought process:
Trivia Newsletter XC Recap
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.
This is JIM BROWN.
The winner of the Heisman Trophy for the 1956 season was Paul Hornung, Notre Dame’s quarterback known as “the Golden Boy.” He deftly led his team to a 2-8 record while throwing three touchdowns and thirteen interceptions. In Hornung’s defense, not only was the game very different back then, and Hornung was a bit of an everyman—he led the team in passing, rushing, scoring, kickoff and punt returns, and punting, and he was second on the team in interceptions (caught) and tackles made. The point of this recap is not to attack Hornung, who was drafted first overall by the Green Bay Packers, who won an MVP Award in the NFL, and whom Vince Lombardi called “the greatest player I ever coached.” Today, college football players can receive the Paul Hornung Award, which is given to particularly versatile and high-performing players (such as Christian McCaffrey or Jabrill Peppers). Hornung is the only player to ever win the Heisman while playing for a losing team (gosh, of course it’s Notre Dame that has that distinction).
Jim Brown was fifth in Heisman voting that year. Brown led his team to a 7-1 record, rushing for 986 yards and 14 touchdowns. It’s pretty easy to make the case that Brown statistically had the best year in college football and should have won the Heisman. Why didn’t he? Perhaps it was because Syracuse didn’t get much attention those days, compared to teams like Notre Dame and Oklahoma (then the defending champion). But why don’t we listen to what Brown himself thought?
Interviewer: Now this is a period—[coughs], excuse me—a period—when you've, go to Syracuse, is a period in American history when college and professional athletics, moving toward the television era, and sports, in fact, is about to become a gigantic industry in this country. How did that affect you? What do you remember about that period of your own development, and playing the ball, at Syracuse—
Brown: Well, you're a little ahead of me there, because my feelings had nothing to do with sports becoming a TV entity. It really had to with the emerging of the black man into college ball, because at that time, black man couldn't get the Heisman Trophy. They didn't want too many guys on the team. In the southern part of the country, you had no black players on white teams, like Alabama and Mississippi. And when I went to Syracuse, that was my biggest problem. My biggest interest was the fact that they had a quarterback before me that was black, and he left and went to Canada, and they didn't receive me too well because of that. I was the only black guy on the team at the time. And so I went through four years there trying to bring about a change, first of all, to have them accept me, and then secondly, to have them recruit black players. So—and thirdly, of course, you know, a couple of years after I left, Ernie Davis—who went to Syracuse—won that, was the first black to win the Heisman Trophy. So TV really didn't play much of a part. I know in my senior year, we did play in the Cotton Bowl, in Texas, and I got TV exposure, and that, that made me become, probably, a high draft choice, because that game was televised all over the country. So that's the part that I remember about TV. I really remember more about trying to break down barriers and be accepted.
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.
This is BEN FOLDS; you’ll have to forgive my pun in the question.
To quote Folds himself, his music is “punk rock for sissies.” Some of the most notable songs that Folds is responsible for include “Brick,” “Rockin’ the Suburbs,” and “Landed,” though my favorite is “Best Imitation of Myself”:
I feel like a quote out-of-context, withholding the rest
So I can be for you what you want to see
I've got the gesture and sounds, got the timing down
It's uncanny, yeah, you'd think it was meDo you think I should take a class to lose my southern accent?
Did I make me up, or make the face 'til it stuck?
I do the best imitation of myself
(I find myself thinking more about this song after watching Nathan Fielder’s excellent new show, The Rehearsal.)
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.
This is the EUROPEAN BISON. One of the best-selling brands of vodka in the world is Żubrówka Bison Grass Vodka, which takes its name from the zubr:
Each bottle has a blade of bison grass inside of it, which means that it cannot be sold in the United States due to FDA regulations—however, there is apparently a US equivalent that omits it. Much of the 2014 Wes Anderson film The Grand Budapest Hotel occurs in the fictional country of Zubrowka.
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?
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written by GERTRUDE STEIN. Toklas is primarily known for trivia purposes for being Stein’s life partner. That’s why I slipped the fact in the question about Toklas being an American expatriate in Paris: Jeopardy! loves leading you to Stein that way. As a few of many examples:
Category: THINGS IN THE YALE LIBRARY
An empty envelope that once contained a rose belonged to this expatriate American woman who lived in Paris
Category: LET’S GET CREATIVE
Picasso's patrons included this expatriate American writer & her brother Leo
Category: THE CUBISTS
"Tender buttons", written by this American expatriate while she was living in Paris, is a book of Cubist still-life prose-poems
You get the idea. Here’s one more, except I removed someone’s name and replaced it with “[BLANK]”:
Category: WRITERS ON FILM
[BLANK] played this expat in "Midnight in Paris"
The prompted answer is, of course, Gertrude Stein—but WHOSE NAME did I omit? This actress has won one Academy Award for Best Actress, but not for Midnight in Paris--instead, it was for a film that came out twenty-one years before Midnight in Paris. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
No tricks here—these countries are GUATEMALA and PANAMA:
Guatemala is one of four UN member states that has a national flag featuring a firearm—the others are Mozambique, Haiti and Bolivia. Maybe I should’ve saved that for a newsletter theme.
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.
These are all CITIES THAT ARE IN COUNTIES OF THE SAME NAME—so, Los Angeles is in Los Angeles County, Philadelphia is in Philadelphia County, and so on.
The questions tried to point you towards groups where a part of the group’s subset shares its name with the group itself, whether by giving examples or pointing to same-name overlaps:
Question #1: Jim Brown is considered by most to be the greatest-ever Cleveland BROWNS player
Question #2: Ben Folds’s three-member band was called BEN FOLDS Five
Question #3: The American buffalo has the same name for its genus and species: bison bison (the hint in the question is that a type of European buffalo is Bison bonasus bonasus, which we put into the question in an abbreviated form).
Question #4: Toklas’s name is in the name of both books mentioned in the question.
Question #5: The capital of Guatemala is Guatemala City, and the capital of Panama is Panama City.
Newsletter Title: “As Above, So Below” was meant to clue you into the same-name overlap—here, “above” and “below” are meant in the administrative sense, not the physical one.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
KATHY BATES (the Oscar was for 1990’s Misery)