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) NAME the activist most famous for suing Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company in an employment-discrimination lawsuit that was decided by the Supreme Court in 2007. There’s something else: Two years later, Congress passed a “fair pay act” named after her that strengthened the remedies available to victims of pay discrimination.
2) NAME the actor who spoke as Sergeant First Class William James in a film that won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2010; he has also appeared in multiple films in the Avengers film franchise and the Mission: Impossible film franchise.
3) In the music video for WHAT song by John Mayer, Australian model Gemma Ward appears alone in an otherwise empty room, despite the song having a plural title?
4) Elmer Berger (who was the first to patent it in the United States), Ray Harroun (who used it as part of winning the first Indianapolis 500), and Dorothy Levitt (who recommended its use in her book The Woman and the Car) all saw things clearer thanks to their roles in inventing and popularizing WHAT early twentieth-century innovation?
5) Have I got a little story for you: Mel Gibson was the first person to win it, Paul Rudd is the most recent person to win it, and John F. Kennedy Jr. and David Beckham are the only non-entertainers to win it. WHAT is it?
6) NAME a band that could fill in the blank below in this list of artists, delineated with respect to a certain distinction; one potential answer is also this newsletter’s theme. Each subset of bands below is non-exhaustive, and the list could continue with more bullet points and other artists.
The Beatles; the Bee Gees
Joan Baez; Boyz II Men; The Calling; Danzig; Electric Light Orchestra; Led Zeppelin; Queen
Chicago; Judy Collins; Danzig; Falco; The Jackson 5; Led Zeppelin
Beyoncé; Black Sabbath; Danzig; Foreigner; Godsmack; Led Zeppelin
Joan Baez; Chicago; Judy Collins; Lenny Kravitz; Live; The Steve Miller Band
Chicago; Ice-T; We the Kings
Chicago; David Guetta; Bob Seger
Chicago; Incubus
Jason Aldean; Blink-182; Chicago
Chicago; Jason Moran; [BLANK]
Trivia Newsletter XCIV Recap
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].
This is called a “FIB” (that’s what the lie/truth clue was trying to point towards). The poem has a 1/1/2/3/5/8 syllable structure, but more on that later. Pincus maintains a blog about poetry, but is probably more famous for writing the screenplay to the 1994 film Little Big League; that’s the movie about a child who ends up owning and managing the Minnesota Twins.
This TIME post contends that Little Big League is the most underrated baseball movie of all time:
Little Big League is not your typical kids’ sports movie. The 11-year-old main character racks up major hotel charges for watching a porno, wonderfully titled Night Nurses From Jersey (Tagline: “They’re off the turnpike, and looking for love”), 11 times. There are only two scenes of kids actually playing sports in the entire movie, and the outcomes of both of those games are entirely irrelevant to the plot. And, most crucially (spoiler alert), the good guys lose the big game to the bad guys, who are led by Ken Griffey Jr. and Randy Johnson.
These departures from the tried-and-true story arc of its contemporaries also make it one of the best children’s sports movies of all time — and, with apologies to The Sandlot, The Natural and Major League — my favorite baseball movie ever. (I’m not alone in my fandom — thought it only made $12 million at the box office, it earned a slew of positive reviews, including a glowing one from Roger Ebert).
1) Please FILL IN THE BLANK in the following otherwise complete group: PE, NL, NB, NS, SK, MB, AB, BC, QC, [BLANK].
This is a list of provinces in Canada in reverse order of population, and so ON (Ontario) is our missing entrant.
50 Tracks was at one time a Canadian radio program. In 2005, it launched a weeks-long program to identify the fifty most essential Canadian songs of all time. The top three songs identified were “Four Strong Winds” (Ian and Sylvia), “If I Had $1000000” (Barenaked Ladies), and “Heart of Gold” (Neil Young). WHAT SONG, by Stan Rogers, was ranked fourth? The song’s lyrics suggest parallels between the singer’s journey through Canada and a historical search for a certain sea route. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
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?
This show is AAAHH!!! REAL MONSTERS.
A voice actress named Christine Cavanaugh was the voice of Oblina, one of the primary Aaahh!!! monsters. (Does that work? The “Aaahh!!!” thing, I mean. Do you think if you were talking to someone on the street, and you said that your favorite 90s cartoon was Aaahh!!!, they would know you were referring to this show? Or would that person think you just saw a ghost? Should it matter that “Aaahh!!!” works far better in text than it does verbally?)
Anyway, Cavanaugh’s voiced a few notable roles, including Chuckie in Rugrats and Jay Sherman’s son in The Critic. Her most famous role is almost certainly Babe from Babe (1995), though she didn’t come back for the sequel, Babe: Pig in the City (1998).
People who have put a lot more work than I have into this craft have written about what makes a good trivia question. A phrase I try to keep in mind is that “it's very easy to come up with a question that virtually no one can answer.” Consider the following trivia question I’ve just made up:
What is the name of the titular city in the film Babe: Pig in the City?
The question is, as far as I know, entirely valid—Babe is in a city in that film, the city is given a name, and the reader is tasked with guessing that name. But who cares? No one knows the name of the city, and it’s just not terribly interesting. I think any given reader would say “Okay, this probably wouldn’t be asked unless this were a major city that actually exists” and would guess New York City.
Consider this variation:
Sharing its name with a massive fictional city first identified by name in a 1939 work, what city is the titular city in the film Babe: Pig in the City?
I offer no thoughts on whether this is a “good” question, but now there’s at least something to chew on. Maybe you’ll even guess “Metropolis,” the correct answer, which is also the DC Comics city where Superman resides.
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?
This is a book, and a book is a world, and words are the seeds in which meanings are curled. Pages of oceans and margins of land are civilizations you hold in the palm of your hand. But look at your world and your life seems to shrink, to cities of paper and seas made of ink. Do you know who you are, or have you been misled? Are you the reader, or are you the read?
This is TRACI CHEE. The first book of the aforementioned trilogy is The Reader (2016), which we didn’t name in the question to avoid creating confusion with the 2008 film. I haven’t read The Reader, but it’s on my list—it is apparently filled with puzzles and Easter eggs. From Chee’s FAQ:
Q. I’ve heard there are Easter eggs and hidden messages in The Reader. How many are there?
A. There are over 10 different Easter eggs and hidden messages in each book of [the trilogy]. Some are easy to spot. Some are excruciatingly difficult. As far as I know, no one has found them all!
Q. Will you tell me where they are?
A. Nope.
Q. Will you give me a hint?
A. I’ve given out multiple hints on Twitter, but I recommend finding some like-minded, puzzle-loving readers and figuring it out together!
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)?
HERBERT HOOVER is the answer—he was Secretary of Commerce under Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. He was a very active Cabinet member; one joke at the time was that Hoover was “the secretary of Commerce and under-secretary of all other departments.” Hoover lived for over 31 years after his presidency, which was the record for the longest time alive post-presidency until about ten years ago, when Jimmy Carter broke the record (and continues to lap the field).
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].
The answer was DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER.
This newsletter was all about the Fibonacci sequence—that’s the sequence that goes 0,2 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, and so on, as each number is the sum of the two previous numbers. This is why the questions were numbered #1, #1, #2, #3, #5, and #8, instead of our normal 1-6 sequence. Here's how we tried to help you out:
Question #1: FIB was our most direct tie-in to the answer—the structure of the poem is based on the Fibonacci sequence.
Question #1: ON
Question #2: AHHH! Real Monsters
Question #3: Traci CHEE (notice that the answers to the first four questions, when taken in part, spell out FIBONACCI phonetically)
Let’s go out of order:
Question #8: This is a list of all of the presidents in order, based on the Fibonacci sequence; so, we gave you the first president, then the first president again, then the second president, then the third, then the fifth, and so on. Once you picked up on the theme, you had to come up with the 34th president. We tried to give you some clues:
Question #5 existed to make #8 easier once you figured out the theme—we explicitly spotted you the 35th president, to make it easier for you to pin who might be the 34th president.
The word “generally” in Question #8 is a bit of a non sequitur. We added it for the pun—Eisenhower was most famously a general during the Second World War (which we also referenced in an earlier question), and that’s what the word “generally” wanted to point you to. That’s also why Question #5 brought up the possibility of such a president.
Finally, our title (“Mic Check”) referred to one of Eisenhower’s most notable acts—in his farewell, he warned Americans of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex,” sometimes referred to as the MIC. In a sense, Eisenhower wanted us to make sure we’re always doing a MIC check.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
“NORTHWEST PASSAGE”
Yeah, yeah, I know that the examples throughout the newsletter did not use 0 as the first term of each sequence, even though 0 is the first term of the Fibonacci sequence. I decided that adding it would add more confusion than clarity. Just imagine a silent beat before each sequence, if you must.