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) It’s not a lie, but it’s not the truth: WHAT name, coined by Gregory K. Pincus, is given to poems such as the following? Part of the poem, also the answer to this question, has been replaced with a “[BLANK]” below.
One
Small,
Precise,
Poetic,
Spiraling mixture:Math plus poetry yields the [BLANK].
1) Please FILL IN THE BLANK in the following otherwise complete group: PE, NL, NB, NS, SK, MB, AB, BC, QC, [BLANK].
2) “Monsters need to become skilled at the profession of scaring humans because the existence of those monsters depends on scaring humans” describes the premise of the Pixar film Monsters, Inc. (2001); it also describes the premise of WHAT animated television show that aired from 1994 to 1997?
3) We Are Not Free, a 2020 novel set during World War II and named by TIME as one of the 100 best young-adult novels of all time, was written by WHAT author, who is also the author of the Sea of Ink and Gold trilogy?
5) Every president of the United States, except Donald Trump, was at least one of the following prior to becoming president: (a) the U.S. Vice President, (b) a member of Congress, (c) a state or territorial governor, (d) a U.S. Army general, or (e) a Cabinet secretary; for example, John F. Kennedy, the 35th president, satisfied (b) before becoming president. If we removed option (e) from the prior sentence, WHAT president would join Trump in the distinction of not having served as any of the roles described in (a) through (d)?
8) WHAT U.S. president generally fills in the blank in the following sequence? George Washington, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Chester A. Arthur, [BLANK].
Trivia Newsletter XCIII Recap
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)?
This is TINA FEY. The structure of the question intentionally parodied the 30 Rock quote “There ain't no party like a Liz Lemon party 'cause a Liz Lemon party is mandatory!”, as Fey created and starred in 30 Rock.
The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor is awarded by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and so it’s a political/corporate affair. Perhaps ironically, the marketing materials for the prize include some of the least funny sentences that a human can write, such as: “Capital One® is the Presenting Sponsor of this year’s Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor as part of the bank’s three-year, $3 million gift to fund Comedy at the Kennedy Center, a signature program at the Center focused on elevating comedy as an art form and uniting the community through laughter.”
The same website linked above would like you to know that previous recipients of the Mark Twain Prize, before Jon Stewart won the most recent iteration of the prize, “include” Richard Pryor (1998), Jonathan Winters (1999), Carl Reiner (2000), Whoopi Goldberg (2001), Bob Newhart (2002), Lily Tomlin (2003), Lorne Michaels (2004), Steve Martin (2005), Neil Simon (2006), Billy Crystal (2007), George Carlin (2008), Bill Cosby (2009, rescinded in 2018), Tina Fey (2010), Will Ferrell (2011), Ellen DeGeneres (2012), Carol Burnett (2013), Jay Leno (2014), Eddie Murphy (2015), Bill Murray (2016), David Letterman (2017), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (2018), and Dave Chappelle (2019). The website has a funny sense of what the word “include” typically denotes, as that’s actually just a complete list of all of the winners of the Mark Twain Prize, ever. The website would also like us all to call it a “Mark Twain” (like an Oscar or an Emmy), and I don’t think that’s going to happen (why not just a “Twain”?).
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?
This is LORDE, from the song “Royals” (“phonetically appropriate” was meant to point to “lord”). The annotation for this part of the song on the website Genius puts forth the following:
As Lorde suggested earlier when she fantasized about Cadillacs, she isn’t immune to temptation. She just understands that not all desires should be acted upon. If you can’t own a Caddy or be a ruler, there’s no need to cut someone’s throat – you can still drive one in your dreams or be a leader in your friend group.
Here’s a different question I wrote about Lorde in my pre-Trivia Factorial endeavors:
Name the 2017 breakup anthem by Lorde that was called the best song of the year by The Guardian and charted well in Australia and New Zealand, but that “only” reached #19 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States. Lorde insists that the song's name and chorus (“Oh, I wish I could get my things and just let go / I'm waiting for it, that [NAME OF SONG], I want it”) are not a reference to The Great Gatsby.
The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
This is LACEY CHABERT, who in addition to appearing in at least twenty-seven different Hallmark films also played Claudia Salinger, one of the main characters on the sitcom Party of Five. You might also know that Chabert voiced Meg Griffin in the first season of Family Guy before she left the role and Mila Kunis took over. If you know your video games, you may further know that she voiced the “Princess Elise” character in the doomed and heavily panned video game Sonic the Hedgehog that came out in 2006 (and that is usually called “Sonic ‘06”).
To catch you up on the latest Hallmark Channel drama: In early 2020, a guy named Bill Abbott stepped down as CEO of Crown Media (that’s the company that owns Hallmark) right around the time that the Hallmark Channel faced controversy in certain circles for airing an advertisement featuring a same-sex couple. After some further maneuvering, Abbott and some other investors acquired an existing country-music cable TV network and rebranded it as “GAC Family,” which would have programming similar to Hallmark’s. (“GAC” stands for Great American Channels.)
Hallmark staples such as Candace Cameron Bure (mentioned in the question), Lori Loughlin, Jen Lilley, and Danica McKellar (remember her from our recap of Trivia Newsletter XLI?) have already made the jump from Hallmark to GAC Family. GAC Family wants you to know that it “features family-friendly series” that “celebrate faith, family, and country,” though some outlets have expressed skepticism about the channel’s true motives. Chabert, for now, remains a Hallmark regular.
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?
The words here are “fletching” and “FETCHING.”
You’ve probably got the idea of these recaps by now. I take some concept from the question that I find interesting and dig into it a little more. For this one we started with “Okay, who are some people with the last name Fletcher? Hmm, here’s a British sculptor named Rosamund Fletcher who won an Olympic bronze medal for art—wait, an Olympic bronze medal for art?”
From 1912 to 1948, art competitions were held in the Olympic Games in the categories of architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. The International Olympic Committee today does not track or “count” these medals, and so they are of interest only to people who read trivia newsletters. Let’s talk about a few people who won some of these medals:
Alfréd Hajós won a silver medal at the 1924 Olympics for architecture. The judges didn’t award anyone a gold medal in that competition in 1924, which was a fairly common practice in the Olympic art competitions; for example, Igor Stravinsky (the Russian composer of The Rite of Spring fame), a judge in the 1924 music competition in Paris, awarded no medals to anyone. Hajós was also a fantastic swimmer; he won two gold medals in swimming at the 1896 Olympics, making him one of two people to win Olympic medals in both art and sport. Nicknamed the “Hungarian Dolphin,” Hajós also played for the Hungarian football team and was an accomplished discus player.
Walter W. Winans, an American, was another Renaissance man. He won medals in shooting events in the 1908 and 1912 Olympics, and also won a gold medal in 1912 for sculpture. Winans is also a member of the Harness Racing Hall of Fame. He actually passed away while riding a horse in a race; unbelievably to me, he won that race.
Jack Butler Yeats, the brother of the poet William Butler Yeats, is probably the most important Irish painter of the twentieth century. He also won a silver medal in painting in the 1924 Olympics, becoming (if you are willing to count these medals) the first Olympic medal winner of the Irish Free State.
Most amusingly to me, Jan Wils of the Netherlands won a gold medal in architecture in the 1928 Olympics for designing Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam, which is where the 1928 Olympics were held. One day, get a really hard trivia question right by remembering that De Stijl (Dutch for “the style” and sometimes called Neoplasticism) is the name of a minimalist Dutch art movement from the early twentieth century; Wils, Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg and Gerrit Rietveld were founders of the movement.
Mondrian is the name to know for trivia purposes—Jeopardy! wants you to remember that he painted Broadway Boogie Woogie and might give you clues about him such as “geometric” and “intersecting lines.”
Though the art competitions are no more, a “Cultural Olympiad” continues to be held in conjunction with each iteration of the Olympic Games.
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?
So put me on a highway,
Show me a sign,
Take it to the limit
One more time.
This is GUILLAUME DE L’HÔPITAL—it’s “L'Hôpital's rule” (or “L'Hospital's rule” as it is sometimes stylized) that calculus students learn. We didn’t tell you he was French, but you may have noticed that the name of the treatise we mentioned was French, which I included to try to eliminate a few possibilities. This website competently summarizes L'Hôpital's rule.
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).
The answer here is Mean Girls, as these are the three musicals/plays that have been nominated for the most Tony Awards (12) without winning any. The easier way into this answer was to realize that there were several references to the 2004 film Mean Girls in this newsletter:
Question #1: Tina Fey wrote and appeared in Mean Girls.
Question #2: The song lyric contains the words “queen bee,” and Mean Girls is based on the 2002 book Queen Bees and Wannabees by Rosalind Wiseman. (Indirectly: “Royals” itself, I contend, is a song about rejecting the kind of juvenile clout-chasing that animates the plot of Mean Girls.)
Question #3: Lacey Chabert is a primary cast member of Mean Girls. (Indirectly: “The Wild Thornberrys” is about a girl who travels around Africa with her family, and Lindsay Lohan’s character in Mean Girls is a fish-out-of-water character in an American high school because she lived in Africa in her younger years.)
Question #4: There are dozens of quotable lines from Mean Girls, and one revolves around Chabert’s character attempting to make the slang word “fetch” happen (“stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen!”). Also, the group of “mean girls” in the film is called “the Plastics,” so we slipped that word into the question.
Question #5: The math expression in the question is the same one that leads Lindsay Lohan’s character to victory in the math competition near the end of the film (shown in the image below) and that leads her to correctly answer “the limit does not exist.”
Newsletter Title: “Maligners” just means people who malign others, which is what “Mean Girls” are. Happily, the word is also a anagram of “Mean Girls.”
Bonus Clue: This newsletter came out on October 3rd, which happened to be a Monday this year and thus a day that Trivia Factorial circulates:
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
“GREEN LIGHT”