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/zxFXYQZw4TPbwvmA8. 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) The “Core Four” of the New York Yankees (Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada, and Mariano Rivera) each won not four but HOW many championship rings with the Yankees? Magic Johnson (with the Los Angeles Lakers) and Tim Duncan (with the San Antonio Spurs) each won the same number of rings in the NBA.
2) NAME the word that describes each of the following: (i) a roll of cloth manufactured by a loom or knitting machine; (ii) a dart-like projectile generally used in connection with a crossbow; and (iii) a verb meaning to move suddenly.
3) NAME the novel written by Catalan author Edgar Cantero and published in 2017; the novel follows a pet dog and the reunited members of the “Blyton Summer Detective Club” as they try to cope with childhood trauma and solve a Lovecraftian mystery, and the novel’s two-word name is borrowed from a recurring phrase from a television show that in part inspired the novel.
4) Smolikas (located in the Pindus Mountains), Kajmakčalan (located in the Voras Mountains), Giona, and Tymfi are among the highest mountain peaks in WHAT nation, a nation with a population greater than Bulgaria’s population but smaller than Romania’s population?
5) The following passage appears in the first chapter of Tommie Smith’s autobiography:
My head was bowed, and inside that bowed head, I prayed—prayed that the next sound I would hear, in the middle of the Star-Spangled Banner, would not be a gunshot, and prayed that the next thing I felt would not be the darkness of sudden death. I knew there were people, a lot of people, who wanted to kill me for what I was doing.
The autobiography’s title, Silent Gesture, refers to WHAT action, the immediate aftermath of which Smith describes above?
6) WHAT distinction is shared by each of the following cities, and no other cities?
London, United Kingdom
Los Angeles, California
Paris, France
Athens, Greece
Beijing, China
Innsbruck, Austria
Lake Placid, New York
St. Moritz, Switzerland
Tokyo, Japan
Here are the answers from last time:
1) It’s Monday morning, which means it’s the perfect time for math! Assume a regular pentagon has vertices A, B, C, D, and E. A line is drawn from A to B, from B to E, and from E to D, as shown in the image below (not necessarily to scale). WHAT is the interior angle between line segment BE and side ED, expressed in degrees?
A pentagon’s interior angles will always equal 540° when added together—that can be determined either from knowing the formula for the sum of a polygon’s interior angles where n is its number of sides, which is (n − 2) × 180°, or by knowing that a triangle’s angles equal 180° and a rectangle’s angles equal 360° and then using the tried-and-true method of “just guessing that you add 180° for each side and hoping that’s right.”
Because it’s a regular pentagon (all the sides are the same length), we know all the angles are the same, so 540° divided by 5 is 108, the length of each of a regular pentagon’s interior angles. That means angle A must be 108°. For the same reason, we know that the two other angles of the ABE triangle shown in the above image are the same, and because a triangle’s interior angles equal 180°, we know those two other angles must be 36° (because 36° + 36° + 108° equals 180°). Thus, because the interior angle between line segment BE and side ED must equal 108° when 36° is added to it, our answer is 72°.
2) In the Netflix animated dramedy BoJack Horseman, the character Diane Nguyen was born in Boston, Massachusetts in the early 1980s; appropriately enough, within the show’s plot, Diane was named after a character from WHAT television sitcom?
Diane is explicitly named after Diane Chambers from Cheers, who is portrayed by Shelley Long. Not much magic here—this is a “can you think of the 80s show set in Boston with a major character named Diane” question.
3) There are two U.S. state capitals that have flags featuring a depiction of a phoenix. NAME both cities.
One answer is Phoenix, Arizona. Its flag (image below) is cooler than it has any right to be; the design apparently ranked fourth best out of 150 United States city flags in a 2004 survey of the North American Vexillological Association, behind only the flags of Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Denver.
The other answer is Atlanta, Georgia—its flag (image below) depicts the city seal, which prominently displays a phoenix. Atlanta was extensively burnt by General Sherman and his forces in the closing chapters of the American Civil War, and so the city adopted the phoenix as a symbol of its rebirth in the ensuing years.
4) WHO is, probably, the only person to publish exactly three novels, each of which have titles with exactly two words, and have each of those three novels adapted for the screen? In chronological order of the adaptational releases, the adaptations were were (1) a critical and box-office success, (2) a critical and box-office failure, and (3) an acclaimed miniseries.
This is Gillian Flynn, author of (in the order presented in the question) Gone Girl, Dark Places, and Sharp Objects. Flynn also wrote in 2016 a lovely piece in The New Yorker recommending that one “be kind to people dressed as food.”
5) He graduated Duke University with a bachelor’s degree in 1990 and obtained his M.D. at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in 1995. NAME this personality, far more famous for his acting career—he won the MTV Movie Award for “Best WTF Moment” for a 2009 film and later starred as the titular character in a widely panned ABC sitcom. Despite his career change, he still maintains his medical license and presumably did not get into any wacky misadventures with the deans of Duke or UNC.
The answer here is Ken Jeong. When I wrote this question, I hoped that long-time rivals Duke and UNC would meet in the men’s basketball Final Four to make this question topical, and they were nice enough to oblige. The 2009 MTV Movie Award was for The Hangover, and the widely panned sitcom was Dr. Ken. In the series finale of Dr. Ken, Jeong’s character auditions for a role in a sitcom created by Dan Harmon, but has an awkward run-in with Alison Brie (both playing themselves), which brings us to…
6) The following list of television shows is almost a complete set of shows that share a specific distinction, but it is missing two television shows; NAME either missing show. Saturday Night Live (1975—), Law & Order (1990-2010; 2022—), The Larry Sanders Show (1992-98), The Nanny (1993-99), Family Guy (1999—), Freedom: A History of US (2003), Brothers & Sisters (2006-11), Hjälp! (2007-09), Chuck (2007-12), Hot in Cleveland (2010-15).
This is an almost-complete list of television shows for which actor Chevy Chase has made an appearance—the missing shows are The Chevy Chase Show (1993) and Community (2009-15). (I don’t have much to say about The Chevy Chase Show, except I’m hopeful that you understand why I chose to also omit it from the list.)
This newsletter was a bit of an homage to the fan-favorite and oft-canceled sitcom Community, on which Chevy Chase played a major character. The newsletter’s title (“And a Movie”) was meant to point to what became Community’s de facto tagline: #sixseasonsandamovie, and the newsletter was six questions “and a movie.” Question #1 walked you through a series of line segments labeled “ABED,” also the name of Danny Pudi’s character on the show. Diane Nguyen in BoJack (the topic of Question #2) is voiced by Alison Brie, also a major actress on Community. Atlanta is, besides being a correct answer for Question #3, the name of Donald Glover’s show, and he was also a major actor on Community. Question #4 is an oblique reference to Gillian Jacobs, who plays Britta in Community. Finally, Question #5’s answer was Ken Jeong, who plays Señor Ben Chang on the show. Episodes of Community regularly featured hijinks involving the dean of the titular community college and puns involving Jeong’s character, and the final sentence of Question #5 alluded to those.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released