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) There ain’t no Mark Twain Prize for American Humor like the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor awarded to WHAT person in 2010 (because the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2010 is mandatory went to the youngest person to ever receive the award)?
2) “Let me be your ruler (ruler) / You can call me queen bee” is a line from the chorus of the debut single of WHAT artist with a phonetically appropriate name?
3) In late 2019, the New York Post queried “With Lori Loughlin disgraced, who’s the new queen of Hallmark Christmas movies?” The article in question suggested that the answer was either Candace Cameron Bure or WHAT actress, who was also the voice of Eliza Thornberry in the animated television show The Wild Thornberrys?
4) Drop a letter from a word that refers to the fin-shaped aerodynamic attachment one might find on a dart or arrow (whether or not made out of plastics), and now you’ve got WHAT word that means “attractive” and alternatively might describe what a dog wants to be doing?
5) One way to try to evaluate the limit of the mathematical expression shown in the image below is to use a rule devised by WHAT mathematician, who first published the rule in his 1696 treatise Analyse des Infiniment Petits pour l'Intelligence des Lignes Courbes?
6) WHAT musical, based upon and with the same name as the work that is the theme of this newsletter, completes the following set of works that share a particular distinction? The Scottsboro Boys (2011), Slave Play (2018).
Trivia Newsletter XCII Recap
1) Form 706 (Estate), Form 944 (Employer), Form 1040 (Individual), and Form 1065 (Partnership) are all forms of WHAT, specifically?
These are forms of TAX RETURNS. See, it’s right there on the page:
Near the top of the form, filers are asked the following: “Check here if you, or your spouse if filing jointly, want $3 to go to [the Presidential Election Campaign Fund]. Checking a box below will not change your tax or refund.” What’s up with that?
In 1966, in a noble attempt to accelerate the public financing of elections and begin limiting private donations in politics, an option to give one dollar to the fund was added to tax returns so that the proceeds could be split between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party (and any other party that received over 5% of the vote). These efforts in part led to the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971. That law and some amendments to it were gutted in the Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo, which stands for, among other propositions, the proposition that private political donations have First Amendment protections:
A restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached.
In 2010, that holding was expanded to donations by corporations, and not just individuals, in the case Citizens United v. FEC.
So what of the Presidential Election Campaign Fund? For decades, the funds were used primarily to pay for convention activities for each party—for example, in 2008, the Democrats and Republicans received $17 million each. In 2014, Congress voted to, on a temporary basis, redirect the funds to the National Institutes of Health to fight pediatric diseases. There was some debate at the time about whether the bill (which expires in 2023) was laudable, or was merely a stunt.
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?
The common title is “FOREVER.” Chris Brown, who has repeatedly pled guilty to domestic-violence and other assault charges, probably has the most famous version on the list—the song was played during that 2009 viral YouTube video of a wedding march where the participants unexpectedly begin dancing. That video was later parodied on The Office for Jim and Pam’s wedding. The folks whose wedding appears in the video have used the attention to raise tens of thousands of dollars for a domestic violence charity; apparently, they had no idea the dance would be parodied on The Office until they saw the episode airing on TV, which must have been pretty surprising.
Haim is a rock band; its members are Alana Haim, Danielle Haim, and Este Haim. That makes them a band where its name is exactly the same as the last name of all of the band’s members. What’s another band that shares that distinction? You guessed it, I had Hanson in mind. They’re behind the 1997 one-hit wonder “MMMBop”—you know, that catchy light-hearted song. Right?
Have you ever listened to the lyrics of “MMMBop”? I mean, really listened?
You have so many relationships in this life
Only one or two will last
You go through all the pain and strife
Then you turn your back and they're gone so fast
Oh yeah
And they're gone so fast, yeah
Oh, so hold on the ones who really care
In the end they'll be the only ones there
And when you get old and start losing your hair
Can you tell me who will still care?
Can you tell me who will still care?
It’s heavy stuff! The chorus of the song makes it clear that an “mmmbop” is a unit of time; we’re all just an mmmbop away from losing almost everything. Or, to quote Zac Hanson, the band’s drummer:
What that song talks about is, you've got to hold on to the things that really matter. MMMbop represents a frame of time or the futility of life. Things are going to be gone, whether it's your age and your youth, or maybe the money you have, or whatever it is, and all that's going to be left are the people you've nurtured and have really built to be your backbone and your support system.
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.
This is ROBIN ROBERTS. In March 2019, the members of the United States women's national soccer team each chose an influential woman and wore a jersey with that woman’s name on the back. Alyssa Naeher chose Robin Roberts:
I picked Robin because she spoke at a basketball camp I was at when I was probably 13 or 14, me and my sister were there – we were the only girls in camp – and she made an impact on me. We used to watch her on SportsCenter every morning with Stuart Scott, so we were excited to hear what she had to say. Since then, going through her whole story, she’s battled cancer and started the ‘make your mess’ message. I watch GMA every morning. It’s part of my routine.
Alex Morgan, at the time a co-captain of the team (with Carli Lloyd and Megan Rapinoe), picked WHAT former teammate of hers to honor with a jersey? This former teammate, who retired in 2015, was a six-time winner of the U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year Award, is the all-time leading scorer for the USWNT, and in 2012 became the first American woman since Mia Hamm (2002) to win the FIFA World Player of the Year Award. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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.
This phrase is “A JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES BEGINS WITH A SINGLE STEP,” or deviations thereof.
The reputed author of the Tao Te Ching is Laozi (Jeopardy! prefers to style it as Lao-Tzu), the perhaps legendary ancient Chinese philosopher. Jeopardy! will rarely (not never) prompt you for his name; instead, they’ll go for angles like this one:
Hey, Lao-Tzu, you're considered the founder of this Chinese religious philosophy & the author of its principal text (WHAT IS TAOISM?)
“Its principal text” refers to the Tao Te Ching, though I contend Jeopardy! is being a bit sloppy here—the Zhuangzi, a collection of stories and anecdotes, is also said to be foundational to Taoism.
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.
This is the KNIGHT and the BISHOP. You probably reasoned to the queen and pawn not making sense as answers, which led you to try to figure out which of the knight, bishop, and rook is more powerful, and it’s the rook. Of course, pieces gain and lose value in different stages of a match based upon context, but the valuation system is still generally used for quick reference. Let’s quote Fine:
Since there are six different kinds of pieces it is necessary to set up a table of equivalents in order to be able to know whether an exchange is favorable or not. Again such a table is based partly on the elementary mates (R can mate, B or Kt cannot) and partly on practise. If we take the pawn as 1 we may set up a table such as this:
pawn = 1
bishop (or knight) = 3
rook = 5
queen = 9
I thought this post by Edward Winter explored other valuations throughout history in an interesting way.
6) To continue the theme of this newsletter, the answer to this question should have WHAT word in it?
The missing word is RISES. The answers throughout this newsletter were all the last words of the titles of certain of the live-action Batman films in chronological order, omitting the word “Batman”:
Question #1: Tax RETURNS for Batman Returns (1992)
Question #2: FOREVER for Batman Forever (1995)
Question #3: ROBIN Roberts for Batman & Robin (1997)
Question #4: “A journey of a thousand miles BEGINS with a single step” for Batman Begins (2005)
Question #5: KNIGHT and bishop, for The Dark Knight (2008)
Thus, the next film in the sequence is The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Our newsletter title (“The Old Man and CB”) was a reference to the Nolan trilogy of films, since they feature Gary Oldman and Christian Bale as actors.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
ABBY WAMBACH.