Below are six trivia questions I’ve written. You can reply to this e-mail if you’d like to participate. Like most trivia, the answers can be readily found via Google, so you’re on the honor system. The SIXTH question of each set is designed to be a question that cannot be easily Googled, so correct answers to those will be tracked and recognized in the next newsletter. The answers, and the next set of questions, will be published every Monday and Thursday.
1) On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan and several of his cabinet members were attacked by a gunman while they were leaving the Washington Hilton Hotel. Reagan and three others were shot, including WHAT man, the White House Press Secretary at the time, who was permanently disabled as a result of his efforts to (among other things) protect the nuclear football and after whom the 1993 Handgun Violence Prevention Act was named?
2) Karim Kharbouch is a Moroccan-American rapper who has won BET Hip Hop Awards for “Pop That” (Best Club Banger in 2013) and as a featured singer on the follow-up “All the Way Up” (Best Collaboration, Duo or Group in 2016). WHAT stage name is Kharbouch better known as? He has appeared as himself on shows such as Keeping Up with the Kardashians and America’s Next Top Model.
3) “It was a pleasure to talk to this well educated little prince,” wrote Thomas Manning, regarding his experience in 1811 of becoming the first Englishman to visit WHAT city, the capital of Tibet, and speak to the Dalai Lama (then a seven-year-old child)? The answer is an anagram of, expressed as two words, the singular body part you might use L'Oréal’s Bambi product line for (it’s waterproof!).
4) Theodosia Salome Okoh wore many hats. She was the first female chairman of the Ghana Hockey Association and was called “the Joan of Arc of Ghana hockey” for her efforts. She also designed Ghana’s flag, which was adopted in 1957; in describing the process of designing the flag, she said:
"I decided on the three colors of red, gold and green because of the geography of Ghana. Ghana lies in the tropics and blessed with rich vegetation. The color Gold was influenced by the mineral rich nature of our lands and Red commemorates those who died or worked for the country’s independence. Then the [BLANK] which is the symbol of African emancipation and unity in the struggle against colonialism.”
WHAT symbol has been omitted from the above quote?
5) And just like that: WHAT fictional character, author of works such as Menhatten and A Single Life, has an address of 245 E. 73rd Street on the Upper East Side of New York City?
6) WHAT unusual distinction do each of these television shows share? 24: Legacy (2017), 60 Minutes (1968-), Airwolf (1984-87), All in the Family (1971-79), The Equalizer (2021-), Friends (1994-2004), The Good Life (1994), Lassie (1954-73), MacGruder and Loud (1985), NBC Nightly News (1970-), The Office (2005-13), Survivor (2000-), This Is Us (2016-), The X-Files (1993-2002; 2016-18), The World’s Best (2019).
Here are the answers from last time:
1) “If fate decrees / that I should live far from your space / - I shall return, Kinneret, / to lie in your resting place!” These lines are from a poem by WHOM, who shares her name with the ship that rescues Ishmael following the destruction of the Pequod in the novel Moby-Dick? She also occasionally wrote poems identifying with her namesake biblical matriarch. When she passed away in 1931, her wishes in the preceding poem were honored when she was buried in a grave overlooking the Sea of Galilee.
The answer here is Rachel Bluwstein, sometimes referred to as just Rachel or Rachel the Poetess. In 2011, she, together with Leah Goldberg, Shaul Tchernichovsky, and Nathan Alterman, was selected to appear on Israeli currency as examples of great poets, and in 2016, Google put up a doodle commemorating her birthday.
2) The SMPC is a nonprofit corporation that puts on events, such as the Twilight Concert Series, at WHAT location, which is located near the intersection of Colorado Avenue and Ocean Avenue in Los Angeles County and has been frequently shown on TV and film?
SMPC stands for the “Santa Monica Pier Corporation.” The hope here was that you’d wonder things like “What does SMPC stand for?” or “hey, what would be located NEAR something called Ocean Avenue?” or “Why mention LA County and not a specific city?” Whether the Santa Monica Pier is being blown up (2012, Pacific Rim Uprising) or terrorists are bleeding to death under it (24), the pier is constantly shown on TV and film.
3) The Scouts Association of Australia is that country’s equivalent to what we know as the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts of America. Before they are promoted to Cub Scouts, WHAT appropriate rank are children between the ages of 5 and 8 given in the Scouts Association of Australia?
The answer here is Joey Scout, as “joey” is the term for a baby kangaroo. One term for a group of kangaroos is a “mob,” and so a group of Joey Scouts is also called a Mob. Like its American equivalents, the Scouts Association of Australia has repeatedly faced legal and regulatory issues due to its failures in handling sexual misconduct complaints against its leaders.
4) “The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.” These words come from the essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” written after The Big Sleep but before The Long Goodbye, by WHAT crime author? The essay is a scathing critique of British authors such as A.A. Milne and Agatha Christie for what the author calls an inability to move beyond contrivances and formulas in mystery writing.
Phoebe: So, I decided I’m definitely going to go with either Joey or Chandler.
Joey: Oh! Oh-oh, you gotta pick Joey! I mean, name one famous person named Chandler.
Chandler: Raymond Chandler.
Joey: Someone you didn’t make up!
This Friends clip points us to our answer, Raymond Chandler. The essay itself is lovely and I highly recommend it. In writing about the ideal detective in a properly written detective story, Chandler writes:
He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks-that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.
5) NAME the businessman who, after serving for the U.S. Navy in 1957, became a salesman for IBM and thereafter founded Electronic Data Systems in 1962. He came into national prominence for other reasons in the year 1992, and a few years before his death in 2019, he was ranked as the 167th richest American by Forbes.
This was H. Ross Perot, the last third-party candidate in an American presidential election to collect at least 5% of the popular vote (he actually won almost 19% of the vote in 1992, and followed up with 8.4% of the vote in 1996). Since then, the best performance by a third party was Gary Johnson, who picked up about 1 out of every 30 votes in 2016. In 1992, Perot said the following about Washington, D.C., becoming the first person in recorded history to complain about how the government is run:
This city has become a town filled with sound bites, shell games, handlers, media stuntmen who posture, create images, talk, shoot off Roman candles, but don't ever accomplish anything. We need deeds, not words, in this city.
6) WHAT unusual distinction do each of these locations, presented as a bulletpoint list for clarity (and not as a clue in its own right), share?
Barbados
Las Vegas, Nevada
London, United Kingdom
Massapequa, New York
Poughkeepsie, New York
Tulsa, Oklahoma
This is, specifically, a list of all of the geographic locations that appear in the titles of episodes of the television show Friends. The list happens to closely track, for obvious reasons, locations that were visited by the characters in Friends throughout the show. There wasn’t much in the way of trickery here—the answers to the five above questions contained the names of five of the characters (Rachel, Monica, Joey, Chandler, and Ross). (Sorry, Phoebe.)
The title of the newsletter was a reference to the show’s theme song, “I’ll Be There for You” by the Rembrandts:
So no one told you life was gonna be this way
Your job's a joke, you're broke
Your love life's DOA
It's like you're always stuck in SECOND GEAR
When it hasn't been your day, your week, your month
Or even your year, butI'll be there for you
(When the rain starts to pour)
I'll be there for you
(Like I've been there before)
I'll be there for you
('Cause you're there for me too)…
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