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/94EgrdADT7wxVub26. 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) Jens Stoltenberg has been the secretary general of WHAT organization since 2014? The organization has thirty members today, two and a half times as many as it had at its founding in 1949. A Google Trends search of Stoltenberg’s name, intended to show how often people are searching for a specific term on Google, shows the below from the past 90 days (image below):
2) In November 2021, the city of Buffalo, New York held its mayoral election. NAME the woman, a community activist and self-described democratic socialist, who lost that election to the incumbent mayor following the incumbent’s write-in campaign, falling just about 14,000 votes of becoming the first socialist mayor of a large U.S. city in 62 years.
3) Freetown, Bo, and Kenema are the most populous cities of WHAT nation, located on the west coast of Africa and bordered by Guinea and Liberia?
4) NAME the singer/songwriter who was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2016, who passed away in July 2020, and who is best known for a hit song in which two characters participate in a musical competition using the same instrument mastered by real-life musicians such as Byron Berline, Paddy Canny, Joe Thompson, and Bob Wills.
5) WHAT electronic product, first released in late 2014, is Amazon’s equivalent of Google’s “Home” or “Nest” line of products or Apple’s “HomePod”?
6) WHAT distinction is shared by each of the following works? Romeo and Juliet (c. 1597 play), The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (1954 novel), Johnny Bravo (1997-2004 television show), Magic Mike (2012 film), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014 film), The November Man (2014 film), Whiskey Cavalier (2019 television show).
Here are the answers from last time:
1) This is Question #1 and not Question #6, but we’ll use the format anyway: “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins, “The End” by The Beatles, “Hot for Teacher” by Van Halen, “Tom Sawyer” by Rush, and “Moby Dick” by Led Zeppelin are all songs that feature some of the most famous and beloved examples of WHAT in pop music history?
Each of these songs has a notable drum solo—though I suppose “In the Air Tonight” has more of a drum break or drum kick than a drum solo depending on how these things are measured. Neil Peart, the drummer and primary lyricist for Rush, went on to write several books about his travels, including (oddly enough, and in collaboration with another author) three steampunk fantasy novels based on Rush’s final album.
2) Five individuals in history have been nominated for over thirty Academy Awards: costume designer Edith Head (35), production designer Cedric Gibbons (39), composer Alfred Newman (45), and WHAT two other people, each with over fifty? One was born in 1901; the other was born in 1932 and is alive today.
Walt Disney has been nominated for 59 Oscars and composer John Williams has been nominated for 52 Oscars. Another bit of Oscars trivia—a pretty common trivia fact is that there have been two characters who have had multiple actors win Oscars for portraying them—Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro in the first two Godfather films) and the Joker (Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight and Joaquin Phoenix in Joker). Well, as of a couple weeks ago, there’s a third: the character Anita from West Side Story (Rita Moreno for the 1961 film adaptation and Ariana DeBose for the 2021 film adaptation).
3) In the novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the planet Magrathea, called “the most improbable planet that ever existed,” is identified as a circumbinary planet, which means that the planet has WHAT characteristic? You might dismiss the odds, though—in real life, scientists have confirmed the existence of nearly two dozen circumbinary planets (and counting).
A circumbinary planet orbits two stars instead of one. A “circumtriple” planet is—well, you can guess. In the novel The Three-Body Problem, the planet Trisolaris orbits exactly the number of stars that you think it does, which leads to the aforementioned problem.
4) NAME the three-word idiom that is generally used to mean “feeling elated” and that is also (i) the title of a 2008 song by Estonian artist Kerli, and (ii) the title of a 2013 song by Katy Perry, which topped out at #44 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The idiom and songs are “Walking on Air.” Fans speculate that Perry’s “Walking on Air” is about her relationship at the time with John Mayer, while Kerli’s “Walking on Air” apparently set a record (at the time) for number of times the iTunes “Single of the Week” was downloaded, back when that was a thing.
5) There have been five presidential elections in U.S. history where the Electoral College winner (and therefore overall winner) lost the popular vote. Of those five winners, four ran again in the following election and one did not—WHO was that lone president? He apparently decided that the answer to “what comes next?” was to decline running again, content with his party’s nominee because both were from the same state.
This question describes Rutherford B. Hayes, president from 1877 to 1881. The “B” stands for Birchard, by the way. The other presidents who lost the popular vote were John Quincy Adams (1824), Benjamin Harrison (1888), George W. Bush (2000), and Donald Trump (2016). Sometimes the popular vote is merely very close—if you ever want to get annoyed at something, you should read about the presidential election results in Alabama in 1960, when Kennedy beat Nixon; as a preview, here is a map of the results (image below) that looks totally normal and not at all weird:
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of the following films? Heroes (1977), Corvette Summer (1978), The Blues Brothers (1980), Anywhere But Here (1999), Deep Blue Sea (1999), The Haunting (1999), Rogue Trader (1999), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), Shattered Glass (2003), Midnight Special (2016), X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), The Circle (2017), Murder on the Orient Express (2017).
Each of these is the next film that a lead actor or actress appeared in after appearing in his or her first film in the Star Wars franchise—for example, Harrison Ford was in Heroes, Mark Hamill was in Corvette Summer, and Carrie Fisher was in The Blues Brothers. Your first clue here was the unusual clumping of the list of films in the late 1970s, late 1990s/early 2000s, and 2016-17, which happens to be just about when each Star Wars trilogy started coming out.
Question #1 gave us a reference to “solo” for Han Solo, and had the stealth clue of “use the format,” which is just one syllable away from “use the force.” Question #2 asked for Walt Disney (since Disney now owns the Star Wars franchise) and John Williams (whose association with Star Wars needs little explanation). Question #3 alludes to circumbinary planets, and the most famous circumbinary planet in our culture is Tattooine, where Luke Skywalker grew up; similarly, Question #4 was a clue for “Skywalker.” Question #3 also had a little nod to Han Solo’s line from Episode IV, “Never tell me the odds.” Question #5 got away from Star Wars, but tried to orient you towards thinking about what people did next to help you with the theme. Finally, the newsletter title, “Postbellum,” means “after war,” trying to get you to think about things after Star Wars.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released