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/PWnB54HkdBohV74E7. 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) WHAT clichéd pickup line is also the name of a 1998 single by Des’ree? In the opening words of the song, she states the song title and follows it with the words “Do you know? Let me guess, you’re Scorpio.”
2) Relative keys in music are the major and minor scales that have the same key signatures—or, they share the same notes but are arranged in a different order of whole steps and half steps. According to Spotify in 2015, G major is the most common key on the streaming service. WHAT is the relative minor of G major (as distinguished from its parallel minor, which is G minor)?
3) “Canine’s canine” would probably be a worse name for WHAT duotone textile pattern characterized by broken checks or abstract four-pointed shapes, often in black and white?
4) In Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey, Agamemnon tells Odysseus that, while he was doing WHAT, “the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades”? The specific phrase used by Homer became the title of a certain author’s fifth novel, which novel is widely regarded as one of the greatest works in twentieth-century literature.
5) If you’re at London’s Heathrow Airport, one option to quickly get to London is to take the Heathrow Express, which connects Heathrow directly with WHAT train station located on Praed Street and perhaps well known to author Michael Bond?
6) WHAT distinction is shared by each of the following works? The Winter’s Tale (c. 1623 play), Siegfried (c. 1876 opera), Prince Caspian (1951 novel), Back to the Future Part III (1990 film), Lake Placid (1999 film), A Storm of Swords (2000 novel), Semi-Pro (2008 film), Brave (2012 film).
Here are the answers from last time:
1) From 2002 to 2004, a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice probe of certain trades of shares of biopharmaceutical company ImClone Systems led to arrests and jail time for Samuel D. Waksal, Peter Bacanovic, and most notably for WHAT businessperson and personality?
This question describes the arrest and imprisonment of Martha Stewart. Imclone was acquired by Eli Lilly and Company, the massive pharmaceutical company, in 2008.
2) A recurring joke in the 2019 film Knives Out is that the characters reference a fictional Hallmark Channel film called Deadly by Surprise, starring a real-world actress. This Hallmark regular (who is not in Knives Out) played Winnie Cooper in the television show The Wonder Years and has published multiple bestselling mathematics books encouraging girls to succeed in math. NAME this actress, who is also a judge on Domino Masters, a Fox television show that debuted in early March 2022.
This is Danica McKellar. Due to her acting career and her work as a undergrad at UCLA earning a degree in math, she has a Erdős–Bacon number of six—she co-wrote a theorem proving a magnetic field property with Lincoln Chayes, who published with Jennifer Chayes, who published with Bela Bollobas, who published with Paul Erdős; in addition, she acted with Margaret Easley in Hip, Edgy, Sexy, Cool, and Easley was in We Married Margo with Kevin Bacon.
3) NAME the word that describes each of the following: (i) a stock speech given by a politician running for office, (ii) an object you might be looking at if you’re a dendrochronologist, and (iii) a verb for what this question might do to you if you can’t figure out the right answer.
In each case the answer is stump—a speech can be a stump speech, a stump can be what you study if you’re looking at the rings of a tree, and a question can stump a reader. The word “torso” apparently comes from the Italian for “trunk.”
4) C-SPAN, the cable TV network, regularly asks a group of presidential historians to rank all of the U.S. presidents in terms of effectiveness. NAME the president who has ranked last in every C-SPAN poll (the first taken in 2000 and the most recent in 2021); his own White House page states that “[p]residing over a rapidly dividing Nation, [he] grasped inadequately the political realities of the time.”
This is James Buchanan, who was president from 1857 to 1861. Trivia questions asking about James Buchanan like to mention that he was a lifelong bachelor, so you can remember that because “Buchanan” and “bachelor” both have eight letters and start with the same letter.
5) In 2021, exactly one Division I school made (at least) the so-called “Elite Eight” in both men’s basketball and women’s basketball. NAME this school, the oldest continuously operating university in its state and the largest Baptist university in the world; you might even say that nobody puts it in a corner.
This is Baylor University—the last line is going for the Dirty Dancing reference that “Nobody puts baby in a corner,” because Baylor sounds a little like “baby.” Baylor is located on the banks of the Brazos River in Waco, Texas.
6) WHAT distinction is shared by each of the following works? 10 Things I Hate About You (1999 film), The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999 novel), SpongeBob SquarePants (1999— TV show), American Psycho (2000 film), Dirty Sexy Money (2007-09 TV show), The Mentalist (2008-15 TV show).
Each of these works stars, or heavily features, a character named “Patrick.”
Each of the answers for Question #1 through #4 contained a name that is also shared by a notable person named Patrick—so, Martha Stewart has the same last name as actor Patrick Stewart, Danica McKellar shares a name with driver Danica Patrick, “stump” is a reference to Patrick Stump (lead vocalist for Fallout Boy), and James Buchanan shares a name with paleoconservative Pat Buchanan. Question #5 contained the Dirty Dancing clue to get you to think of the person who said it, Patrick Swayze. The title of the quiz, A Star Is Bourne, referred to both Patrick Star from SpongeBob SquarePants and also to singer/actor Pat Bourne, who according to Billboard was the second-biggest charting artist of the late 1950s, behind only Elvis Presley. Finally, the newsletter was purposefully released on St. Patrick’s Day.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released