Below are six trivia questions I’ve written. You can reply to this e-mail if you’d like to participate. Like most trivia, the answers can be readily found via Google, so you’re on the honor system. The SIXTH question of each set is designed to be a question that cannot be easily Googled, so correct answers to those will be tracked and recognized in the next newsletter. The answers, and the next set of questions, will be published every Monday and Thursday.
1) Topping a steak (or veal, or another protein) with crab meat, asparagus, and (typically) béarnaise sauce—this is a preparation typically given WHAT male name, purportedly in honor of Sweden’s king between 1872 and 1907?
2) The Rolling Stones used this word to describe horses in 1971. A year later, Lou Reed described a “side” with the same word. Almost forty years later, Sia and Flo Rida sang about people sharing the same quality. Whether you’re born to be it, or you’re young, it and free—WHAT is the shared word?
3) Earlier this week, HBO tapped Nick Offerman (of Parks & Rec fame) to play Bill, a survivor of a zombie apocalypse who maintains an uneasy alliance with main characters Joel and Ellie, in WHAT adaptation of a video game series that the network is currently working on?
4) A novel is quoted in part below:
"I'm like you," he said. "I remember everything."
I stopped for a second. If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you're just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there's not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and…
WHAT five-word instruction ends the novel quoted above? Notably, the last paragraph does not appear in the novel’s film adaptation.
5) WHAT Italian phrase (literally “from the head”) does “D.C.” stand for in musical notation? Below is an example of the notation in use.
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of these films? The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Chinatown (1974), The Breakfast Club (1985), The Great Mouse Detective (1986), While You Were Sleeping (1995), Spider-Man (2002), Iron Man (2008), I, Frankenstein (2014)
Here are the answers from last time:
1) Some old trivia chestnuts include the fact that “Panama hats” are actually from Ecuador and not Panama, and the fact that the Hundred Years War was actually 116 years long. Another one of these: The Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago off the coast of northwestern Africa, are not actually named after the bird we know as the canary; in fact, the bird is named after the islands. Instead, the Canary Islands are named after WHAT animal? Pliny the Elder wrote that the island Canaria in particular contained vast multitudes of large varieties of the animal.
The answer here is dogs—that is, the name Islas Canarias is likely derived from the Latin name Canariae Insulae, meaning “Islands of the Dogs.” I note “likely” here because, like many trivia chestnuts, you can find people who bicker about whether there were truly dogs on the islands (other theories for the namesake include lizards and the Nukkari Berber tribe living in the area).
2) A malapropism is the use of an incorrect word in place of a word with a similar sound, resulting in a nonsensical and sometimes humorous utterance. For example, Yogi Berra (perhaps intentionally) once said that the State of Texas has a lot of “electrical votes” instead of electoral votes. WHAT three-word malapropism, comprised of common food-adjacent English words, did the person in the below image come up with when trying to write a common French phrase?
The answer here is “bone apple tea,” as some poor person’s attempt to get to “bon appétit.” I get that this is barely a trivia question and is more of “hey, I’ve opaquely described something for you to guess,” but this was all an excuse to share with you the lovely Bone Apple Tea subreddit.
3) Lepidocybium flavobrunneum, a species of fish in the family Gempylidae, is also known as snake mackerel, walu walu, or, most commonly, WHAT seven-letter term? The fish is likely most notable for (whether through ignorance or deceit) being mislabeled and sold as tuna at sushi restaurants and fish markets—in fact, the nations of Italy and Japan have banned sales of it due to its toxicity, whereas the Food and Drug Administration recommends that it “should not be marketed in interstate commerce.”
The answer here is escolar, sometimes also known as “butterfish” or “white tuna.” As noted above, potential health problems can be posed by consuming escolar—we don’t need to go too deeply into that, but some people mockingly call the fish “ex-lax fish.”
4) In 1773, the philosopher Voltaire sardonically quipped the following:
This body which was called and which still calls itself the [BLANK] was in no way [BLANK], nor [BLANK], nor an [BLANK].
WHAT is the multi-ethnic complex of territories, dissolved in 1806, described by Voltaire?
Voltaire said that, despite its name, the Holy Roman Empire was in no way Roman, nor holy, or an empire. The Hapsburgs, with very few interruptions, ruled the Holy Roman Empire from 1438 to 1806. Did you know that the Hapsburgs still exist today? Some 60-year-old man named Karl is just living in Austria today and is actually, arguably, the legitimate heir to the Austrian-Hungarian throne, except for the minor technicality that Austria-Hungary does not exist.
When you’re the heir to a throne that does not exist, you get totally normal sentences on your Wikipedia page like this one: “The marriage received the dynastic authorization of Karl's father, as head of the House of Habsburg, despite objections from some members of the family inasmuch as the bride, although a baroness in the nobility of pre-republican Hungary and Transylvania, did not descend in the canonically legitimate male line from a family of dynastic (ruling or formerly ruling or mediatised) status.”
5) There are, by my count, ten NFL teams that do not actually play their games in the city or state indicated by their team name—for example, the Dallas Cowboys actually play their home games in Arlington, Texas. Ignoring teams whose name does not clearly map to a specific state or city, of the ten teams with a mismatched city/state name, name EITHER of the two who have never won a Super Bowl.
The answer here was—well, let’s just go through the list:
Dallas Cowboys (actually play in Arlington): Won Super Bowl VI, XII, XXVII, XXVIII, XXX
Las Vegas Raiders (actually play in Paradise): Won Super Bowl XI, XV, XVIII
Los Angeles Rams (actually play in Inglewood): Won Super Bowl XXXIV
Miami Dolphins (actually play in Miami Gardens): Won Super Bowl VII, VIII
New York Giants (actually play in East Rutherford): Won Super Bowl XXI, XXV, XLII, XLVI
New York Jets (actually play in East Rutherford): Won Super Bowl III
San Francisco 49ers (actually play in Santa Clara): Won Super Bowl XVI, XIX, XXIII, XXIV, XXIX
Washington Football Team (actually play in Landover): Won Super Bowl XVII, XXII, XXVI
That leaves the Los Angeles Chargers (who actually play in Inglewood) and the Buffalo Bills (who actually play in Orchard Park) as the two teams of this subset to never win a Super Bowl.
6) What unusual distinction is shared by each of these songs? “Bodak Yellow” by Cardi B, “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen, “Dirt Road Anthem” by Jason Aldean, “How Soon Is Now?” by The Smiths, “Iris” by Goo Goo Dolls, “Jumper” by Third Eye Blind, “Lovesong” by The Cure, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana, “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba, and “Viva La Vida” by Coldplay.
Each of these is a song that has a title that does not actually appear in the lyrics of the song. The questions above each, to some extent, tried to get you to think about things that might be mislabeled or that don’t share characteristics with their titles. If I were a late-night TV host, I would now say the following: “…although, who knows what Kurt Cobain is saying in ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’! Maybe he’s saying the title over and over!”
The current Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.