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) Form 706 (Estate), Form 944 (Employer), Form 1040 (Individual), and Form 1065 (Partnership) are all forms of WHAT, specifically?
2) Songs by the Beach Boys (1970), Mariah Carey (1995), Chris Brown (2008), Drake, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, and Eminem in a collaboration (2009), and Haim (2012) all have the same one-word title, which is WHAT?
3) NAME the television broadcaster who, earlier this year, celebrated her 20th anniversary with the television show Good Morning America. She, an ESPN veteran, also served as a guest host of the game show Jeopardy! for a week in 2021.
4) Chapter 64 of the Tao Te Ching, a Chinese classic text, is generally cited as the source of WHAT proverbial phrase? One fitness website estimates that a six-foot-tall person would need to take 2,094,999 more paces to complete the task described in the phrase.
5) In Reuben Fine’s influential book Chess the Easy Way, he assigns a numerical value to each chess piece (other than the king) so that players can assess whether an exchange of pieces is favorable or not. NAME the two distinct chess pieces that, in Fine’s valuation (and in most standard valuation systems), have the same value as one another.
6) To continue the theme of this newsletter, the answer to this question should have WHAT word in it?
Trivia Newsletter XCI Recap
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.
This is FABRIC SOFTENER.
Back when the sports blog Deadspin was good, Jolie Kerr (the author of My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag . . . and Other Things You Can't Ask Martha) wrote an article about fabric softener:
My thoughts are this: Fabric softener is terrible, and I want everyone to stop using it.
…
With that said, here’s the reason I’d prefer to get you all off the fabric softener: It leaves behind a coating that, over time, will render the fibers of your clothes more impenetrable to water and detergent. That coating will cause different things to happen to different types of fabrics; in the case of especially funky-smelling clothes, like gym gear, it will, over time, lock in that kind of crotch-y, sweaty smell. Towels are another category that don’t respond well to fabric softener; the coating I mentioned will make the towels less absorbent. Which is, you know, kind of contrary to the whole idea of towels.
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 action is generally not against the game’s rules unless done in a prohibited manner (for example, when done with the shaft of the hockey stick with both hands)?
The word here is CHECKING—checking is just the act of trying to disrupt an opponent who has the puck.
Sudden Death, the 1995 film, was directed by Peter Hyams and starred Jean-Claude Van Damme. Sudden Death, like many movies of the time, is a “Die Hard, but X instead of an office building” movie. Specifically, it is Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Chicago Blackhawks and the Pittsburgh Penguins, Van Damme and his family are in attendance, and then terrorists kidnap the Vice President of the United States (also in attendance) and rig the stadium with explosives, for reasons. There are at least two different scenes where one of the terrorists is disguised as a non-terrorist (classic Die Hard trope), including a scene where one of the terrorists is dressed as Iceburgh, the mascot of the Penguins, and fights Van Damme (warning: awesome 90s violence):
In another scene, due to shenanigans, Van Damme disguises himself as the goalie of the Penguins, is forced to take the ice, and actually plays in the game in order to maintain his cover (remember, this is Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals):
It’s terrible, and it’s great.
Sudden Death was the second collaboration between Van Damme and Hyams. WHAT FILM, which came out in 1994, was the first? The film in question is the highest-grossing film of Van Damme's, for films where he is the lead actor in the film. The answer is at the end of this newsletter.1
3) WHAT toy, comprised of (among other things) polybutadiene, hydrated silica, zinc oxide, and stearic acid, holds the distinction of inspiring 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?
This is a SUPER BALL. You know, the things that bounce really high and look like this:
I should note that there’s some dispute about whether the Super Ball actually inspired Lamar Hunt, the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, to call football’s championship game the Super Bowl. Certainly, this is the official story. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have reported that this is what happened, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame even has some Super Balls on display to honor the story. Others, though, noticed that some statements made by Hunt decades later do not add up chronologically, and that the term may have already been in regular usage before Hunt did anything.
4) WHAT package-delivery startup company was founded in 2013 and attempted to resolve the problem of consumers in cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City not being able to receive packages ordered online? Despite being featured on the television show Shark Tank, the company, which aptly shares its name with a profession, ceased operations in 2017.
This company was DOORMAN. Just as someone who lives in a high-rise building might have a doorman who can receive packages on that person’s behalf, the founders of Doorman wanted to make money by creating a service that could act as anyone’s doorman. The idea was this: Consumers sign up for Doorman, and then set their delivery address for packages they buy online to Doorman’s warehouse. Doorman receives the packages, then lets you pick a short delivery window to have them sent directly to you from the warehouse, thus avoiding the problem of packages being undelivered or potentially stolen by standard mail services.
Building a business only on delivery fees is challenging, and what Doorman did was make a bet on its ability to grow by offering an “unlimited delivery” subscription for $19 a month. While this was popular, Doorman never managed to recapture its costs; or, to quote their CEO in an e-mail to consumers explaining why its fees were increasing:
[U]nfortunately that means our original monthly plans have stopped making sense and we’re, like, losing money on a lot of you.
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.
This is called the coefficient of RESTITUTION. Though not as famous as his laws of motion, Isaac Newton’s law of restitution states that when two objects hit or collide, the speed at which they move after the collision is dependent on the material they are made from. Some materials are more elastic than others, and the coefficient of restitution is a unitless measure of just how elastic a material is.
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, both shares this distinction and is also the theme of this newsletter?
The distinction (which we offered no clues for) is “films that Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck are both in.” One film is Shakespeare in Love, and the other is the entirely forgettable 2000 film BOUNCE.
You were better served trying to figure out the theme of the newsletter, which was that each of the answers was related in some way to things that can bounce:
Question #1: Bounce is a type of fabric softener
Question #2: Checks, the financial instruments, can “bounce”
Question #3: A Super Ball is very bouncy
Question #4: “Doorman” is a synonym for “bouncer”
Question #5: The coefficient of restitution describes the bounciness of objects
Newsletter Title: “Your Message Is Too Large to Send” is an example of an e-mail bounceback message
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
TIMECOP