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/4yXHTpZxqA3pU8Tp9. 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) In 1989, in the landmark Supreme Court case Texas v. Johnson, the Court in a 5-4 holding ruled that WHAT action was protected speech under the First Amendment? Between 1995 and 2006, Congress repeatedly has attempted to amend the U.S. Constitution to empower itself to bar this activity (perhaps as mere election-year grandstanding), and on each occasion, the needed supermajorities were dodged by only a few votes.
2) It would never say where it came from (but it’s Knoxville, Tennessee). Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone (but it’s not—it has about 200 locations today). Who could hang a name on it? Well, you can: NAME the casual restaurant chain that emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2021 and continues to offer “TueGo” curbside service at many of its locations.
3) WHAT fictional family originated in a series of single-panel cartoons in The New Yorker in 1938? The family, featured in multiple television series since the 1960s and in multiple films, is sometimes considered a satirical inversion of the idealized twentieth-century American family.
4) Nice Kicks, a blog dedicated to basketball sneakers, often had weekly posts dedicated to reviewing and celebrating vintage sneakers; accordingly, the blog is sometimes credited as an early adopter of WHAT regularly occurring social media trend, particularly popular on Instagram for the past decade and regularly shortened to a three-letter hashtag?
5) RuPaul’s Drag Race is generally credited with further popularizing WHAT dismissive phrase in 2009, which phrase rapper and actor Ice Cube calls a phrase “to get anyone out of your face”? A 2008 Urban Dictionary entry says, regarding the object of the phrase, “[t]hey're [sic] real name becomes irrelevant because nobody cares what it really is.”
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of the following songs? “24/7” (Meek Mill feat. Ella Mai); “Everyday Thugs” (Bone Thugs-N-Harmony); “How Can I Not Know What I Need Right Now” (Charli XCX); “I Gotta Feeling” (Black Eyed Peas); “Police on My Back” (The Clash); “Superman” (Eminem); “Waiting for Love” (Avicii); “Writing to Reach You” (Travis).
Here are the answers from last time:
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?
“SMS” stands for “Short Message Service.” SMS messages are limited to 160 characters, which is part of where Twitter’s original 140-character limit came from (the remaining twenty characters were reserved for usernames). Or, to quote @jonbois, “there’s a lot more than 140 characters on twitter if you ask me.”
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?
This is the musical 1776—Daniels played John Adams and Howard played Thomas Jefferson in the film version (the original debuted on Broadway in 1969). I don’t dare try to verify this, but Wikipedia says that 1776 has the record among musicals for the longest time without a single note of music played or sung, at over thirty minutes.
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.
This is Barbara Kruger. Below is a representative example of her art (image below):
And then here’s Supreme’s logo, created later (image below):
Kruger herself never weighed in on the potential controversy until, years later, Supreme sued a different clothing brand for allegedly stealing the style. Kruger at that time said the following phrase, which at the time of this writing is my new favorite thing that a person has ever said: “What a ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers. I make my work about this kind of sadly foolish farce. I'm waiting for all of them to sue me for copyright infringement.”
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
This was Chelsea Manning, weighing in on Harvard University naming her a visiting fellow and then, days later, in the face of multiple CIA-affiliated speakers withdrawing from appearances and resigning from school-adjacent positions, withdrawing its invitation to Manning.
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.
This is Whack-A-Mole (sometimes stylized as Whac-A-Mole). Today, Mattel has the trademark for the game. I thought I could find an example somewhere of PETA opposing Whack-A-Mole, but they apparently haven’t come out against it—though, they do recommend saying “feed a fed horse” instead of the perhaps cruelty-normalizing “beat a dead horse” idiom.
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).
8398464 74696 66 727336
Each of these works does that thing where characters’ text messages are shown on the screen, like this (image below):
Arguably, this is old hat and not much of a distinction these works share, but I promise this was at one time seen as a pretty innovative and interesting thing that these works did. And if not? Well, that’s why we have the newsletter clues.
Question #1 was my attempt to orient us in the world of texting with a straightforward SMS question. Question #2 was a fact I liked, but also got us to “screen.” Question #3 is explicitly about an artist who regularly uses text in her works. Question #4, besides literally putting a tweet on your screen, is about a person most famous for leaking classified information to the world, like a text being shared with the viewer. Question #5 was used for the “popping up” reference. The newsletter’s name, “Air Drop,” was going for the reference to Apple’s “AirDrop” functionality whereby users can make files pop up on other phones and for the pun for text dropping out of the air on TV.
Finally, I threw in this string of numbers at the end of the newsletter: “8398464 74696 66 727336.” On a phone’s keypad, 2 is “ABC”, 3 is “DEF,” etc. This was meant to be a way for you to verify your suspicions, since the phrase “texting shown on screen” matches up with that number sequence if you type it out on a keypad.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released