A few announcements and notes—consider this our constitutionally required State of the Newsletter address. The following five topics are addressed below:
UPCOMING SCHEDULE
NEW LOGO
ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY/QUICK RETROSPECTIVE
TRIVIA FACTORIAL FUNDRAISER
THANK YOU!
We’re taking a few days off—Trivia Newsletter XCVIII will be released on Thursday, October 27. Updates to the Question #6 leaderboard may be similarly delayed.
You may have noticed we have a new logo:
This logo came to us thanks to CornDoggyLOL, who is most notable for creating very popular drawings of sports matchups all over Reddit—as one example, here’s the most recent Super Bowl outcome:
His Etsy shop is here.
What we’re doing here is not particularly serious; in fact, it is literally trivial. Life is silly and so is trivia, so why shouldn’t the logo be too?
Trivia Newsletter I came out on October 21, 2021, which means this week marks our one-year anniversary! Some quick thoughts on that:
If we had “perfect attendance” (no Mondays or Thursdays off), then today’s newsletter would be Trivia Newsletter CIV. We took off March 7 and 10 (and replaced them with our “Variety Packs” of general trivia), May 26 and 30, August 1, August 28, and September 1 (and replaced that one with another Variety Pack). Showing up 97 of 104 times, if you don’t count the Variety Packs, is pretty good, and I’m proud of that. (Well, 97 of 106 times, counting the upcoming days off, but still a 91%+ hit rate.)
Counting the 97 newsletters, the Variety Packs, and the additional questions we sprinkle in the recaps, we’ve published just about 700 questions. That’s a lot! My original goals were, in no particular order, (i) have fun, and (ii) get better at trivia. Both are going great, in my opinion.
Trivia Factorial is not a paid newsletter, and (sorry, Substack!) we have no intention of changing that in the foreseeable future. The reasons are twofold:
If the newsletter is free, then I don’t “have to” write it on any given day. If it’s not free, then I arguably do “have to” follow through, so it stops being a hobby and starts being an obligation.
Even beyond that point, with the current format (twice a week), I don’t think it’s a good value proposition for you. That’s not meant to be self-effacing—there is just a lot of very, very good trivia out there that you can pay money for instead (like BPTrivia, or The Inkling, or Apocalypse Sports Trivia (sports only), or School of Trivia, or the other Substack publications we’ve been recommending for months).
In celebration of our one-year anniversary, we’re doing a fundraiser! As I said above, you don’t pay for this, but if you’ve enjoyed these newsletters, it’d mean a lot to me if you considered making a donation with us. Below I describe two Chicago nonprofits that are near and dear to my heart and are doing good work—if you make a donation to either, and reply to this e-mail with a copy of that receipt, Trivia Factorial will match your donation (up to an aggregate of $500).
Nourishing Hope started as a food pantry in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. Today, in addition to providing the equivalent of four million meals a year to Chicagoans, Nourishing Hope offers mental wellness and social services to those in need. Over 90% of donations go directly to the services that Nourishing Hope provides.
CARPLS, which stands for “Coordinated Advice & Referral Program for Legal Services,” provides legal advice to low-income individuals in Cook County. CARPLS primarily operates via its legal-aid hotline, making it so that those in need of legal advice are (at most) a half hour away from help, rather than needing to wait days or weeks for an appointment. About 85% of donations go directly to the services that CARPLS provides.
Again—if you make a donation this week to either of these organizations, and reply to this e-mail with a copy of that receipt, Trivia Factorial will match your donation (up to an aggregate of $500)! And if you don’t, that’s cool too! It’s your life, do whatever you want. (Being asked to give money is annoying to some folks, so this is my promise that we’ll never do something like this more than 1-2 times a year, at most.)
(If you are not a subscriber, and therefore cannot reply to this via e-mail, but would still like to participate, you can send your receipt to triviafactorial@substack.com.)
One last note before we jump into today’s edition: It is outrageously humbling that a few hundred of you read this newsletter and that dozens of you submit answers and connect with me about the content of these newsletters. Thank you—and I really mean it—for being part of what we’ve done so far. I think the newsletters keep getting better on average, and I can’t wait to see where we are a year from now.
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) A 2010 article entitled in part “Mixed Messages to North: Anger, and a Christmas Tree” concerned a Christmas tree visible from the city of Kaesong and thus was an article discussing the relationship between WHAT two countries?
2) NAME the activist who founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth. In 1919, she was arrested as part of the Palmer Raids and was deported to the Soviet Union; she later wrote My Disillusionment in Russia describing her time there.
3) Beamer, Calligra Stage, MagicPoint, Persuasion, and Keynote are all examples of software that have competed with WHAT Microsoft program first released in 1987?
4) "I used to hate constant references to my mom because I wanted to be known for myself,” once said Mariska Hargitay of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit fame. NAME Hargitay’s mother, who together with Marilyn Monroe and Mamie Van Doren was known as one of “The Three M’s” by the press.
5) In civil litigation, having your case dismissed sometimes means you can swallow your pride and refile the case in the future; sometimes, though, dismissal means that you are barred from ever filing the same case. This distinction depends on whether the case was dismissed with, or without, WHAT?
6) Each of the above questions, or answers thereto, relates to a specific work. WHAT novel completes the set of works in this newsletter?
Trivia Newsletter XCVI Recap
We had a long introduction, and this is a recap of our Wordle quiz (and thus this set was more of a word puzzle than it was a set of trivia questions), so we’ll keep this brisk:
1) In 1906, an businessman influential in Chicago passed away due to pneumonia contracted while playing golf with Robert Todd Lincoln, the eldest son of Abraham Lincoln. 106 years later, entirely coincidentally, an acclaimed actress with the same last name as that businessman played Robert Todd Lincoln’s mother in the film Lincoln and was nominated for an Oscar. WHAT is the shared last name of the businessman and actress?
The answer here was FIELD (Marshall Field, of retail and The Field Museum fame, and Sally Field, of Norma Rae, ER, and Forrest Gump fame.
2) The Curse of Capistrano, a 1919 novel by Johnston McCulley set in the early 19th century in what is today California, is the first work to feature WHAT fictional character, who has since appeared in dozens of films?
This is ZORRO. I was surprised that “Zorro” is an acceptable guess in Wordle, but here we are!
Antonio Banderas played Zorro in The Mask of Zorro (1998). It will not surprise you, I think, that he was not nominated for an Oscar for that role. The years in the following question relate to the years that the awards show in question was held, not necessarily the year of the work: Banderas has been nominated for an Oscar (2020), for two Primetime Emmy Awards (2004 and 2018), and for a Tony (2003). He did not win any of those awards. Name ANY of the four works in question for which Banderas was nominated for one of those awards. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
3) WHAT infectious disease, which can be vaccinated against by a common vaccine that also protects against measles and rubella, is typically characterized by pain and swelling of the salivary glands?
This is MUMPS. The MMR vaccine is the vaccine in question.
4) The headline of a 2019 Vanity Fair retrospective on the television show The Sopranos referred to the offing of the character Adriana as the WHAT that changed everything? This answer, an informal word used to certain killings (whether or not the victims were moles), repeatedly appears in reviews and recaps of the show.
An apology here: I received a couple of notes that this is a major spoiler for The Sopranos that a couple of our readers would have preferred avoiding. In the past, I’ve tried to be mindful of providing spoiler warnings, and I could have easily worded this question to avoid the spoiler—my fault on that. We’ll do better down the line.
Anyway, this is a WHACK.
5) What is the SECOND WORD of the two-word term, stamped on likely thousands of American whiskeys, that has no precise legal meaning but practically refers to whiskey that is neither vatted or single-barrel? For example, the brands Four Roses, Elijah Craig, 1792, and Evan Williams all offer varieties of whiskey labeled with this term.
The term in question is “small BATCH.”
6) Oh no! I forgot to write Question #6 again! Can you just come up with a noun—maybe a big one?—that completes this weird chart below?
[Do not assume the chart necessarily represents optimal guesses, but do assume that all answers are valid Wordle submissions.]
The best way to get here was to reason out as many of the answers to Questions #1 through 5 as you could in order to eliminate possibilities. As best I can tell, the only 5-letter word accepted in Wordle that does not have any of the grey letters, has “A” as the second letter, and has C, H, and T somewhere in the word (but not in the respective yellow positions) is YACHT. Beyond that: We told you it was a noun, that it was big (yachts tend to be large), and then the title, “Wordle Beach,” was a small clue—not only might you see a yacht from a beach, but the Beach Boys are (arguably) the origins of the genre of music known as yacht rock.
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Oscar: Pain and Glory (Best Actor).
Emmy: And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie), and Genius (same).
Tony: Nine (Best Actor in a Musical). A last bit of trivia here: Nine, the musical, is based on Federico Fellini’s semi-autographical 1963 film 8½, which is generally regarded as one of the greatest and most influential films of all time. Yeston, who came up with Nine (and did the music and lyrics), said that if you add music to 8½, “it’s like half a number more”—thus, Nine.