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) The ALS Association, in describing the history of a certain months-long event that occurred in 2014, wrote the following:
“It all started in Florida with a golfer named Chris Kennedy. When Kennedy took the challenge in mid-July last year, the then little-known stunt was not tied to a specific charity. Kennedy thought taking the challenge might bring some cheer to a family member with ALS, Anthony Senerchia. Next, Kennedy nominated Senerchia's wife.”
WHAT three-word event, which eventually caused over $220 million dollars to be raised and became a social-media sensation that included many celebrities and politicians, is being described by the above quote?
2) The Jordan River (not that one!), Bear River, and Weber River are the major tributaries of WHAT lake? The three rivers deposit roughly 1.1 million tons of minerals into the lake each year, much of which is chloride and sodium. The lake itself is a remnant of an ancient lake known as Lake Bonneville.
3) A common poetic construction likely traces its origins to Edmund Spenser’s 1590 epic The Faerie Queene, which contains these lines: “She bath'd with [BLANK] [BLANK] and [BLANK] [BLANK], / And all the sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew.” Later, a 1784 English collection of nursery rhymes known as Gammer Gurton's Garland included these two lines: “The [BLANK] is [BLANK], the [BLANK]'s [BLANK], / The honey’s sweet, and so are you.” WHAT are the missing words shared by the quoted passages?
4) The Gospel of Luke describes the birth of Jesus as having occurred in Bethlehem explicitly because a certain Roman emperor decreed that all individuals return to their ancestral town so that a census could properly be undertaken. Since these events occurred around 6 to 4 BC, WHAT emperor, also notable for warring against Cleopatra and for banishing his daughter Julia, is named in the Gospel of Luke as having ordered the census?
5) Vladimir Kosmich Zworykin, a Russian-American inventor born in 1888, is most famous as the father of WHAT technology, due in large part to his breakthroughs with cathode ray tubes and the image iconoscope?
6) WHAT specific film is missing from the following otherwise complete list? A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, The French Connection, Harold and Maude, The Hospital, The Last Picture Show, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, A New Leaf, Shaft, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Two-Lane Blacktop.
Here are the answers from last time:
1) NAME the English actress who plays the character Villanelle in the British drama spy thriller Killing Eve; she also played major roles in the 2021 films Free Guy and The Last Duel. Entirely coincidentally, her last name is the same as a common Spanish verb, in its infinitive form.
The answer here is Jodie Comer (with “comer” being Spanish for “to eat”). Comer won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2019 and was, briefly, the youngest woman to ever win the award (at age 26)—then, in 2020, Zendaya (age 24) won the award for Euphoria.
2) 4′33″ is a three-movement composition by American experimental composer John Cage; Cage calls the song, which was influenced by the tenets of Zen Buddhism, the most important work of his career. Like Alphonse Allais's 1897 Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man or Yves Klein’s 1949 work informally known as The Monotone Symphony, WHAT is the most notable quality of 4′33″?
The score of 4’33” instructs the musical performers to not play their instruments during the entire four minutes and thirty-three seconds of the song—the only noise is the environmental sounds that listeners hear during a performance of the song, and so the song is commonly called silent. In 2015, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert showed a video of a cat competently performing the song.
3) It’s the name of both (a) the emperor who, in the year 330 A.D., dedicated the city of New Rome as his capital on the Bosporus Strait (soon thereafter the city was renamed in his honor), and (b) a 2005 superhero horror film based upon a DC Comics property with a cast including Rachel Weisz, Shia LaBeouf, and Tilda Swinton. WHAT is the shared name?
This is Constantine, the namesake of the city of Constantinople. The film’s ethos can be pretty adequately explained with one line by its title character, who has the hilarious name “John Constantine” and who is played by Keanu Reeves: “God's a kid with an ant farm, lady. He's not planning anything.”
4) On December 20, 1989, the United States invaded WHAT nation? In an effort to promote the perceived legitimacy of the invasion, the Pentagon named the invasion “Operation Just Cause”—General Colin Powell said that “even our severest critics would have to utter 'Just Cause' while denouncing us,” while those same critics branded the invasion “Just ‘Cuz,” making the point that the invasion only occurred because President George H.W. Bush felt like doing so.
“Operation Just Cause” was the name of the American invasion of Panama in order to depose Manuel Noriega, the de facto Panamanian leader, general and dictator. The United Nations, with all the force of a laundry tag on a T-shirt telling you to use cold water, condemned the invasion as a violation of international law.
5) “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King,” the song from The Lion King, is stylized as an argument between young-lion protagonist Simba and Mufasa’s majordomo-slash-bird Zazu. At one point in the song, Zazu says “If this is where the monarchy is headed, count me out!” In Zazu’s very next line, he name-drops a 1985 film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture. WHAT’s that film?
All together now:
“If this is where the monarchy is headed, count me out!
Out of service, OUT OF AFRICA,
I wouldn't hang about!
This child is getting wildly out of wing…”
”Oh, I just can't wait to be king!”
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of these works? 12 Monkeys (1995 film), End of Days (1999 film), Firefly (2002 TV series), Forrest Gump (1994 film), The Grapes of Wrath (1939 novel), The Green Mile (1999 film), A History of Violence (2005 film), John Carter (2012 film), Pinocchio (1940 film), The Terminator (1984 film).
Each of these films has a protagonist, or other major character, who has the initials “JC,” often as a pretty straightforward Christ allusion. For example, John Connor in the Terminator films is mankind’s explicit savior in the future war/armageddon to occur. Another: In his book On Writing, Stephen King wrote, with respect to the character John Coffey from The Green Mile, “[N]ot long after I began The Green Mile and realized my main character was an innocent man likely to be executed for the crime of another, I decided to give him the initials J.C., after the most famous innocent man of all time.”
Several of this quiz’s questions and answers were “J.C.” references (Comer, Cage, John Constantine, Just Cause, “Just Can’t.”) The title of the newsletter (“And the flames get higher”) was an allusion to “Ring of Fire,” the Johnny Cash song (another J.C.), but the hope was that the religious imagery suggested by that clue, by “Killing Eve,” and by the Constantine clue would be another hint.
The current Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.