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) On January 3, 1993, for the first time in American history, a state was represented in the United States Senate by two women. One of those women continues to serve as a senator, and the other is now a private citizen. NAME the state.
2) The fictional bar Molly’s, based upon a real bar in the Bucktown neighborhood of a certain city, regularly appears in three different current primetime network television shows. WHAT word appears in the title of all three television shows?
3) Mia Farrow, Alan Arkin, Jeff Bridges and Christopher Lee are all part of the improbably star-studded voice cast of WHAT 1982 animated film, based upon a 1968 fantasy novel? The film grossed only a few million dollars at the time of its release but has since maintained a cult following.
4) NAME the Italian saint who was canonized in 1681 who is famous for founding a Swiss hospice and hostel equipped for mountain rescues. He is the patron saint of the Alps, skiing, snowboarding, hiking, backpacking, and mountaineering.
5) In a national television broadcast on February 6, 1971, the following was said:
Houston, while you're looking that up, you might recognize what I have in my hand as the handle for the contingency sample return. … In my left hand, I have a little white pellet that's familiar to millions of Americans. I'll drop it down.
WHAT was the “little white pellet” described in the broadcast?
6) What is the theme of this newsletter?
Trivia Newsletter XCVIII Recap
1) With one career win in 1979, two career wins in 2000, and many more wins in between, WHO is the only driver in NASCAR history to record at least one win in four different decades? He perhaps would have won more, but for his untimely death in February 2001.
This is DALE EARNHARDT, SR. Earnhardt was part of the NASCAR Hall of Fame inaugural class in 2010, together with Bill France Sr. (founded NASCAR), Bill France Jr. (chairman of NASCAR for 28 years), Junior Johnson (driver in the 1950s and 1960s, racing team owner thereafter—generally credited as the first to use the “drafting” technique in stock car racing), and Richard Petty, who was an answer to a LearnedLeague question I got wrong earlier this year:
Known affectionately as "The King", what driver, in his 1966 Plymouth Belvedere, won (among his 200 career wins) 27 of the 48 races on the NASCAR circuit in 1967, including 10 in a row?
By the way, WHERE is the NASCAR Hall of Fame? It’s in the only city that has an NFL team, an NBA team, and an MLS team, but no MLB or NHL team. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1 [Note: This question is considering metropolitan areas—so, for example, the New York Giants would count for New York City, despite playing their games in New Jersey.]
2) A Forbes article describes two television shows as follows:
Both stories are driven by mystery, slowly drip-fed to a ravenous audience, who are so fiendishly good at devouring clues, they spoil the show for themselves. Both stories take place inside a self-contained, warped reality, where the inhabitants are desperate to escape into the real world. Both utilize multiple timelines to mix up the narrative, provide bonus character development, and obscure incoming plot twists.
NAME both shows. One aired from 2004 to 2010, and the other began airing in 2016; its fourth season was released earlier this year.
These shows are LOST and WESTWORLD, respectively.
In a different life, I wrote this trivia question:
On December 28, 2007, the alternate-reality game Find 815 was launched online. As is typical of "ARGs," players were required to dig around web sites, send e-mails and voicemails, and conduct Google Maps searches to engage with the game and unlock new content. What television show was Find 815 associated with?
That’s Lost, of course (not because that’s an eminently gettable question, but because I just told you a few lines up that Lost was around in 2007 and you’re reading this in a recap about Lost). You can’t play Find 815 anymore, but someone’s Lost wiki does what seems to be a good job of recapping the game.
3) The musical Million Dollar Quartet dramatizes an impromptu jam session that occurred in Memphis on December 4, 1956. The four members of the quartet were Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and WHAT man, who has since been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Gospel Music Hall of Fame?
This is JOHNNY CASH.
In 1964, Cash released the album Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian, which focuses on the history of Native Americans in the United States. For example, the song “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow” from that album is about the loss of Seneca nation land in Pennsylvania and New York in the 1960s due to the construction of a dam. Another example: “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” is about, well, Ira Hayes, one of the six flag raisers in the iconic photograph of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima in February 1945. Hayes, an Akimel Oʼotham Native American, suffered from PTSD and alcoholism following his return from the war and passed away at the age of 32. To quote the song:
They let him raise the flag and lower it
Like you'd throw a dog a bone
He died drunk early one morning
Alone in the land he fought to save
Two inches of water and a lonely ditch
Was a grave for Ira Hayes
As you can imagine, messages like these were controversial in the 1960s country-music scene, and many radio stations and fans rejected the album. An editor of a country-music magazine reportedly told Cash that “[y]ou and your crowd are just too intelligent to associate with plain country folks, country artists, and country DJs.” Cash took out an advertisement in Billboard to respond to such claims (notice the swipe at “[t]eenage girls and Beatle record buyers”):
Sadly, Jerry Lee Lewis passed away on Friday, the day after this newsletter was published, at the age of 87.
4) WHAT ten-letter word, besides being a term applied to quarterbacks such as Brett Favre, is in the name of a 1982 dark-fantasy novel of which Roland Deschain is the titular character? Despite the word being closely associated with certain individuals of the nineteenth century, the word did not come into use until the early twentieth century.
This is a GUNSLINGER. The novel in question is Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, the first volume in The Dark Tower series.
King says that The Dark Tower was inspired by a poem called “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” which was written by Robert Browning in 1852. Browning married fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett, who wrote the greatest English epic poem of the nineteenth century (sorry, Lord Byron—this is a Trivial Factorial opinion and not necessarily a fact) and also that sonnet you hear at weddings, which was written to Robert (“how do I love thee? Let me count the ways”).
5) An “EGOT winner” is a person who has won each of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award. Had the musical Fela! won the Tony Award for which it was nominated, and had the television show Cobra Kai won the Primetime Emmy Award for which it was nominated, then a certain backer of Fela! and executive producer of Cobra Kai would be an EGOT winner. NAME this person, who won four Grammys in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, and who won his first Oscar for a 2021 film.
This is WILL SMITH. Will Smith is one of several dozen people who have been nominated for each leg of an EGOT, but who have not won all four. Some names on that list did not surprise me (Julie Andrews, Paul Newman, Lin Manuel-Miranda, Denzel Washington), and some names did (Trey Parker, Dolly Parton, Sting).
6) What is the theme shared by each of the answers to Questions #1 through #5 of this newsletter?
Each question had some connection to the phrase “MAN IN BLACK” or “MEN IN BLACK”:
Question #1: Earnhardt was called the “Man in Black” due to black Goodwrench livery of his No. 3 Chevrolet Monte Carlo (though his other nickname, “The Intimidator,” is much better).
Question #2: Lost and Westworld both featured mysterious characters known as the “man in black” (in fact, the next words of that Forbes article I quoted are “Both even have a character known as The Man in Black”).
Question #3: Johnny Cash’s all-black stage attire led him to be called the “Man in Black” (and he has a song and album with the same name).
Question #4: The novel centers around the gunslinger chasing a man in black—the famous first line is “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
Question #5: Will Smith starred in the film Men in Black.
Newsletter Title: “Cocktail Attire” was meant to point to the sartorial standard of wearing dark colors, most commonly black, for cocktail parties and the such.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA.