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/cLmjq2pfdfFb6CRv6. 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) SMS, the ubiquitous text messaging service, was developed throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the first SMS message was sent in 1992 (it said “Merry Christmas”). WHAT does “SMS” stand for?
2) William Daniels (perhaps most famous for his roles as Mark Craig in St. Elsewhere and Mr. Feeny in Boy Meets World) and Ken Howard (who won a Tony Award for Child’s Play and a Primetime Emmy Award for Grey Gardens) both played future presidents in WHAT 1972 musical film before each went on to serve as president of the Screen Actors Guild?
3) In 1994, the American clothing and skateboarding lifestyle brand Supreme debuted its logo (still in use today), a red box with the word “Supreme” in white Futura font. The founder of Supreme concedes that this style was borrowed, so to speak, from WHAT conceptual artist’s signature style? The artist was included in Time's 2021 “100 Most Influential People” and is today an Emerita Distinguished Professor of New Genres at UCLA’s art school.
4) NAME the woman who wrote the following tweet on September 15, 2017 [emojis have been removed]:
honored to be 1st disinvited trans woman visiting @harvard fellow. they chill marginalized voices under @cia pressure #WeGotThis
5) Mogura Taiji is the original Japanese name for WHAT kinetic arcade game first released in 1975? The game’s name has taken on a colloquial meaning for a situation characterized by a series of repetitious and futile tasks, where the successful completion of one yields another popping up elsewhere.
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of these TV shows and films? Hollyoaks (1995—), Sex Drive (2008), Sherlock (2010-17), House of Cards (2013-18), The Fault in Our Stars (2014), Non-Stop (2014), Jane the Virgin (2014-19), The Shallows (2016), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017).
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Here are the answers from last time:
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.
Those Yankees won the World Series in 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2009, so the answer is five. Here’s a bonus trivia question for you: There’s a statistic known as “championship win probability added” (cWPA) that sets out to measure a player’s impact on his team’s chances to win the World Series—so, a game-tying home run in Game 7 of the World Series is worth significantly more cWPA than a home run while the batting team is up 10-1 in the first round of the playoffs. cWPA is a counting stat (like RBI) and not a rate stat (like batting average). It may go without saying that cWPA is highly context-dependent; that is, it’s more of a “story stat” than a stat that tells us which players will succeed in the future.
Mickey Mantle is #2 in the cWPA leaderboard, but WHAT player, who is living but no longer playing professional baseball, is #1? The answer is at the bottom of this recap.
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.
Each of these is a “bolt.” My exposure to “bolts of cloth” comes not from tailoring but from video games like RuneScape and World of Warcraft.
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.
On October 3, 1970, the fourth episode of the second season of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! aired on CBS. In that episode, the nefarious Professor Wayne concocted a scheme to pretend to be a frozen prehistoric caveman brought back to life in order to scare off his rival and steal that rival’s revolutionary new marine life communicator. Professor Wayne, disgraced at the episode’s end, said: “And it would have been mine if it hadn't been for those meddling kids!” That was the first use of the “meddling kids” phrase that appeared regularly in the show and is regularly riffed upon in pop culture, and so our answer is Meddling Kids—the references to a detective club with a dog were to try to get you to think of Scooby-Doo.
Much more recently, the series Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? did a Jeopardy! episode with the voice-actor talents of Alex Trebek (may he rest in peace). Most of the episode can be easily found online, including, at this link, the episode’s climax and the quote “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids and famous TV personality and game show host, Alex Trebek”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6so9CC_86RE
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?
These are mountains in Greece. You probably could have guessed that Athens is Greece’s largest city by population, but its second-largest city is Thessaloniki (also known as Thessalonica), which has around 300,000 people.
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?
The “silent gesture” is the Black Power salute by Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City during the medal ceremony for the men’s 200-meter race. (Peter Norman, who won a silver medal for Australia and was therefore also on the podium, wore a badge for Olympic Project for Human Rights in support.) “We were not Antichrists,” Smith later said. “We were just human beings who saw a need to bring attention to the inequality in our country. I don't like the idea of people looking at it as negative. There was nothing but a raised fist in the air and a bowed head, acknowledging the American flag – not symbolizing a hatred for it.”
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
Each of these cities has hosted the Olympic Games more than once. In 2026, Cortina d'Ampezzo in Italy should host the Winter Olympics and join this list.
Question #1 referred to “five rings” and was meant to evoke the Olympic logo. Question #2 was an oblique reference to Usain Bolt, the legendary sprinter. Meddling Kids in Question #3 was a reference to “medaling.” Question #4 contained a list of Greece’s tallest mountains, but it was missing Mount Olympus, another Olympics reference. Finally, Question #5 overtly referred to an event that took place during the Olympics, and the newsletter’s name (“Let’s Run It Back”) went for the colloquial phrase of repeating an event, combined with the reference to running (a thing that happens at the Olympics).
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released
The answer to the baseball question in our recap above is David Freese, largely for his heroics in Game 6 of the 2011 World Series with the St. Louis Cardinals. Thanks to Baseball-Reference and their wonderful leaderboards for assistance with that question.