I’ve written a welcome page and FAQ for the newsletter, which can be found here: https://hammersmif.substack.com/about. New subscribers are always welcome, so if you know someone who might enjoy what we do here, feel free to share that link as an introduction.
To emphasize one format change we’re testing out: You may either submit your guesses via e-mail or you may use the Google Forms link below. Based on feedback, we may retire e-mails and go with Google Forms permanently, so let me know what you think. The questions are reproduced on the submission form for convenience, although I am unable, to my knowledge, to import formatting (bold/italics).
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: https://forms.gle/npRomzWk8QKmucYD6. 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 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) “You know, the only thing that matters, is the ending,” Johnny Depp playing the character Mort Rainey says in WHAT 2004 film, based on a novella by Stephen King? The home media release of the film showed two different versions of the film’s ending.
2) You don’t need to know the Big-time actor who was nominated for an Oscar for Jagged Edge to know that covered exterior galleries or corridors (like the ones featured on the Stanford University quad or the one added to the Sydney Opera House in 2006) are known as WHAT architectural features?
3) Mastery of the board game Scrabble arguably relies upon knowing the list of two-letter words that are legal words to play. According to the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, 6th Edition, WHAT is alphabetically the FIRST or the LAST word acceptable for Scrabble play with two letters?
4) Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks shows four people in a downtown diner. Above the diner window in the painting is an advertisement showing an image of a cigar, the text “Only 5¢” below it, and to the right in large letters WHAT word for a product that can still be purchased today, sometimes in gas stations? Similarly to one of the logos of the Major League Baseball team that shares its name with the answer, the sign is red.
5) In 1962, Random House (under the trade name Beginner Books) published The Big Honey Hunt, which introduced WHAT family? Since then, the series has grown to over 300 titles, with subtitles such as Life with Papa, Don’t Pollute Anymore!, and No Girls Allowed.
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of the following works? The Breakfast Club (1985 film), The Bridges of Madison County (1995 film), 8mm (1999 film), Incendies (2010 film), Captain America: Civil War (2016 film), It Chapter Two (2019 film).
Here are the answers from last time (recall that our last newsletter was a grab-bag of general knowledge questions without a theme):
1) NAME the woman who was president of the National Council of Negro Women for forty years and was called by President Barack Obama in 2010 “the godmother of the civil rights movement and a hero to so many Americans.” She is credited as the driving force behind a campaign to place a statue of Mary McLeod Bethune in Washington, D.C.; the statue, unveiled in 1974, was the first statue of either a woman or an African-American person to be erected on federal land.
Dorothy Height. The New York Times, at the time of her death, called her a “largely unsung giant of the civil rights movement,” and she said in 2003: “I was there, and I felt at home in the group, but I didn’t feel I should elbow myself to the front when the press focused on the male leaders.”
2) In 2005, the American Film Institute published a list of the top 100 quotations from American cinema; for example, the top quote is “Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn” from Gone with the Wind. Two of the quotes on the list are each a single word. NAME either word.
“Rosebud.” (Citizen Kane) and “Plastics.” (The Graduate). There are plenty of two-word quotes (and I bet you can think of some), but a trivia question on that is going to turn on whether you think “La-dee-da, la-dee-da” (Annie Hall) counts as a two-word quote.
3) On March 2, 2022, 141 of the 193 members of the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution condemning, in its words, Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine. Four members (in addition to Russia itself) voted against the resolution, and of those four members, three of them are nations whose common English names end with the same letter, which letter is WHAT?
Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea, and Syria voted against the resolution, so our answer was “a.”
4) “Our whole universe was in a hot dense state” are the first words of the theme song for WHAT television show, which aired 279 episodes over twelve seasons?
The Big Bang Theory. The song is by the Canadian rock band Barenaked Ladies, most famous for pop hits like “One Week” and “It’s All Been Done.”
5) NAME the work of art by Judy Chicago that is permanently displayed in the Brooklyn Museum and that functions as a symbolic history of women in civilization; it shows thirty-nine different elaborate place settings at a table for (obviously enough) thirty-nine different mythical and historical women.
The Dinner Party. Here’s another question—keeping in mind that the work was created between 1974 and 1979, WHO is the only woman shown in The Dinner Party who was alive when the work was finished? The answer’s at the bottom of this recap.
6) Gian Carlo Menotti created twenty-five operas, including a one-act opera that was the first opera specifically composed for television in the United States and that was the debut production of the Hallmark Hall of Fame, the longest-running primetime series in television history. NAME the opera, which was apparently inspired by Menotti seeing the painting The Adoration of the Magi.
Amahl and the Night Visitors. Menotti was in a relationship for over forty years with (and remained close friends with) composer Samuel Barber, of Adagio for Strings fame.
7) A nearby southwest suburb of Chicago with a population of about 19,000 happens to have a five-letter name that is made up of the symbols of three elements that appear consecutively from “left to right,” so to speak, on the periodic table. NAME the suburb.
Alsip (Aluminum + Silicon + Phosphorous). Alsip is home to some historically important cemeteries and is the final resting place of many notable Black personalities, including Emmett Till, Muddy Waters, and Earl Dickerson (a prominent attorney and civil rights activist).
8) How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (or, in German, Beobachtungen zu einer neuen Sprache) is a documentary film by Werner Herzog primarily focused on WHAT profession, which typically entails the rhythmic repetition of numbers and filler words in order to facilitate one’s bidding? Herzog calls the profession “the last poetry possible, the poetry of capitalism.”
Auctioneering (hence, my “bidding” pun). Specifically, the 44-minute documentary is a bunch of footage of the 1976 World Championship of Livestock Auctioneering held just outside of Philadelphia. An IMDB user review says “A documentary about auctioneers is a hard sell, but the true meaning (at least what I got out of it) is pretty excellent, that being communication and art is everywhere.”
9) In WHAT year did “Black Monday,” the worst single-day percentage drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, occur? It is commonly speculated that the roots of the crash lay in a series of monetary and foreign trade agreements, such as the Plaza Accord and the Louvre Accord. [Note: The answer is not 1929 or 2020.]
1987. The date is called “Black Tuesday” in Australia and New Zealand for reasons that took me an embarrassingly long time to realize.
10) Jared Diamond posits in his 1997 transdiscplinary book Guns, Germs, and Steel that mankind has successfully domesticated few wild animals throughout history because many different factors are required to successfully domesticate an animal; the failure of any one of them, in its own way, will lead to failure. This is a specific application of WHAT principle, named for a novel published in the 1870s, that essentially states that a deficiency in any one of a number of factors dooms an endeavor to failure?
The Anna Karenina principle. This is a riff on Anna Karenina’s famous first line: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” which is why I tossed “in its own way” in the question.
11) Three years after writing A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen wrote WHAT play, which tells the story of a medical officer who tries to report to a community that its bathwater is tainted, causing the community to turn against him? While Donald Trump probably is unaware of the play, he tweeted the play's name (except changing “an” to “the”) from his official Twitter account dozens of times during his presidency.
An Enemy of the People. In Norwegian the play is called En folkefiende, which I find a lot more charming. Carl Gottlieb, the co-writer of the film Jaws, said that the plot of Jaws was inspired in part by An Enemy of the People.
12) WHAT is the cosine of pi radians? The answer is also the designation given to a “world” players can enter in the original Super Mario Brothers video game by triggering an infamous glitch while entering a warp pipe.
This is negative one. Happy Pi Day, for those who observe.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
(By the way, the answer to our extra question in the Question 5 recap above is Georgia O’Keeffe.)