Note: Some subscribers received multiple e-mails with the prior newsletter. This was not my intention and was due to a issue with Substack, our newsletter platform. Substack shared the following message with authors: “We have found and fixed two separate technical issues, one on April 8 and another on April 9, that resulted in some posts being sent twice to subscribers. We truly apologize for any frustration this situation has caused. We will be conducting an extensive investigation over the coming week to make sure that this does not happen again. Thanks for understanding and again, we are sorry.” If this becomes a recurring issue, this newsletter will migrate to some other platform; for now, I apologize for any annoyance/inconvenience caused by the unexpected spam.
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/5trkgGbKz2k1QtRS9. 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) 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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
Here are the answers from last time:
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.
The answer here was “desecrating the American flag,” or more specifically flag burning. Johnson had allegedly burned an American flag as part of an anti-Reagan protest in 1984 in Dallas; he was sentenced to one year in prison and a $2,000 fine under a Texas law prohibiting the action before the Supreme Court threw out the law. There’s a lot you can take away from the saga—mine is “man, cases take a long time to get to the Supreme Court.”
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.
We were looking for Ruby Tuesday—the question here liberally quotes the Rolling Stones song “Ruby Tuesday,” which was released in 1967 and which was the inspiration for the restaurant’s name when it opened in 1972. According to a PDF of the Ruby Tuesday menu available on Google, one should not forget its famous pumpernickel croutons available at its “Endless Garden Bar.”
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.
This is the Addams Family. Allan Burns, who created and wrote for the sitcoms The Munsters and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, said of the former that “We sort of stole the idea from Charles Addams and his New Yorker cartoon.”
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?
This was #ThrowbackThursday (sometimes stylized as #TBT). During the NFL season, a football game is regularly played on Thursday. Sometimes when there’s a lateral pass (i.e., a pass that is not thrown forward) during a game, I refer to it as an homage to Throwback Thursday. Zero people have laughed at this, a trend I expect to continue for the foreseeable future.
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.”
This was “Bye, Felicia,” which originated in the 1995 comedy film Friday (though the name was spelled “Felisha” in the original script). Ice Cube starred in that film and co-wrote the script, so that was meant to clue you in.
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).
Each of these songs does that thing where multiple days of the week are listed in order—like, in “I Gotta Feeling,” they sing “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (do it) / Friday, Saturday, Saturday to Sunday (do it),” and in “Waiting for Love,” the lyrics include:
Monday left me broken
Tuesday, I was through with hoping
Wednesday, my empty arms were open
Thursday, waiting for love, waiting for loveThank the stars it's Friday
I'm burning like a fire gone wild on Saturday
Guess I won't be coming to church on Sunday
I'll be waiting for love, waiting for love to come around
The answers to Questions #2 and #4 explicitly referred to “Tuesday” and “Thursday,” since I figured if the songs have multiple days of the week, the newsletter should refer to the same. Question #1 referred to flag burning, and one of the most famous instances in American sports history of flag burning was in 1976, when Cubs outfielder (and later Dodgers player and broadcaster) Rick Monday prevented protesters from burning a flag at Dodger Stadium. (The question tried to slyly allude to this by including the word “dodged.”) Question #3 referred to the Addams Family, and the family’s only daughter is Wednesday Addams. As stated above, Question #5 involved a quote that was created and made most famous by the film Friday. Finally, the newsletter’s title, “The Weakest Link,” was intended to imply that “week” was the link between the questions.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released