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) “If fate decrees / that I should live far from your space / - I shall return, Kinneret, / to lie in your resting place!” These lines are from a poem by WHOM, who shares her name with the ship that rescues Ishmael following the destruction of the Pequod in the novel Moby-Dick? She also occasionally wrote poems identifying with her namesake biblical matriarch. When she passed away in 1931, her wishes in the preceding poem were honored when she was buried in a grave overlooking the Sea of Galilee.
2) The SMPC is a nonprofit corporation that puts on events, such as the Twilight Concert Series, at WHAT location, which is located near the intersection of Colorado Avenue and Ocean Avenue in Los Angeles County and has been frequently shown on TV and film?
3) The Scouts Association of Australia is that country’s equivalent to what we know as the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts of America. Before they are promoted to Cub Scouts, WHAT appropriate rank are children between the ages of 5 and 8 given in the Scouts Association of Australia?
4) “The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.” These words come from the essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” written after The Big Sleep but before The Long Goodbye, by WHAT crime author? The essay is a scathing critique of British authors such as A.A. Milne and Agatha Christie for what the author calls an inability to move beyond contrivances and formulas in mystery writing.
5) NAME the businessman who, after serving for the U.S. Navy in 1957, became a salesman for IBM and thereafter founded Electronic Data Systems in 1962. He came into national prominence for other reasons in the year 1992, and a few years before his death in 2019, he was ranked as the 167th richest American by Forbes.
6) WHAT unusual distinction do each of these locations, presented as a bulletpoint list for clarity (and not as a clue in its own right), share?
Barbados
Las Vegas, Nevada
London, United Kingdom
Massapequa, New York
Poughkeepsie, New York
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Here are the answers from last time:
1) “Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land;”—these are the first two lines of a sonnet written by Emma Lazarus in 1883, which sonnet is most prominently located on a bronze tablet affixed to WHAT?
The answer here is the Statue of Liberty—or, more technically, the pedestal upon which the Statue of Liberty sits. A fun Statue of Liberty story: In 2010, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp with an image of the Statue of Liberty. However, they inadvertently used an image not of the real Statue of Liberty, but of a replica of the statue at the Las Vegas casino/resort New York-New York. Due to the mix-up, the Postal Service was ordered to pay the replica’s sculptor $3.5 million for the copyright violation—the sculptor argued, successfully, that there were minor differences between the real Statue of Liberty and his facsimile.
2) On August 22, 2016, content creator Jon Bois and SB Nation released a YouTube video ranking each NCAA FBS football team by its mascot’s weight—for example, the Ohio State Buckeye (a dark brown nut) came in as the lightest, at 0.02 pounds, Minnesota’s Golden Gopher clocked in at fifteen pounds (the estimated weight of a life-size gopher statue made of gold), and the Michigan Wolverine was said to weigh 38 pounds. WHAT is the name of Tulsa’s mascot, which easily won this competition?
Tulsa plays as the Golden Hurricanes. From Tulsa’s FAQ on their website:
The origination of The University of Tulsa nickname –– Golden Hurricane –– came In 1922. The football team began working out in the fall with a new nickname "Yellow Jackets." In the past, Tulsa had been named "Kendallites," "Presbyterians," Tigers," "Orange and Black," "Tulsans," and, of course, "Yellow Jackets.” Head Coach Howard Acher made a remark in practice about "roaring through opponents,” and at that point it was seriously considered to name the team "Golden Tornadoes". However, it was learned that Georgia Tech already had chosen that tag in 1917. From the tornado, Acher evolved meteorologically to the hurricane. A few days before the team left for a game against Texas A&M, Acher asked the squad to vote on the name "Golden Hurricane," the gold being added because of the color of their new jerseys.
3) Smilodon, one of the most well-known prehistoric mammals, is a genus of the extinct machairodont subfamily of the felids—WHAT is the generic two-word name by which we commonly know Smilodon? This generic name was first given to Smilodon in 1842 by combining a term for “scalpel” or “two-edged knife” together with the tool that Smilodon used to kill its prey (most commonly large herbivores such as bison or camels).
We were looking for “saber-toothed tiger” or slight variations thereon. Smilodon has been extinct for about 10,000 years, and the largest collection of Smilodon fossils we have are from the La Brea tar pits—this is in part why the Smilodon fossil is California’s official state fossil.
4) In the mid-1940s, a reporter asked Antoinette Perry, the wartime leader of the American Theatre Wing, “Why do you devote so much of your money and time to such thankless activities?” Perry replied, “Thankless? They’re anything but that. I’m just a fool for the theatre.” Perry, a devout Christian Scientist and an inductee into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame, is almost certainly most prized for being the namesake of WHAT, specifically?
Antoinette Perry is the namesake of the Tony Award, the annual awards recognizing excellence in theatre. A previously scrapped version of this question asked you to come up with the fact that the equivalents of the Tony Award in the United Kingdom and France are, respectively, the Laurence Olivier Awards (named after the legendary British actor of the same name) and the Molière Awards (named after the 17th-century French dramatist considered to be one of the greatest French writers in history).
5) The French poet and novelist Victor Hugo was born on February 26, 1802—however, he believed incorrectly that he was born on a specific date several months prior. On WHAT date did Hugo believe he was born? Hugo gave the protagonist of Les Misérables a numeric “prison code” based on this date—the code appears twice in the novel and is frequently stated in the musical.
Who am I?
Who am I?
Jean Valjean
Monsieur le MaireAnd so your Honor, you see it's true,
This man bears no more guilt than you!
Who am I?
24601!
I should note a correction here: Some people say that the idea that Hugo chose the number due to his believed birthday is a “popular myth” unsupported by fact. Other sources suggest that June 24, 1801 is the date that Hugo believed he was conceived, and at that point I decided I did not want to learn more about this.
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of these films? Swordfish (2001), The Fountain (2006), Happy Feet (2006), Prisoners (2013), Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014), Chappie (2015), Deadpool 2 (2018), Free Guy (2021).
Each of these films features (whether credited or not, and whether on-screen or as a voice actor) the talents of actor Hugh Jackman.
Question #2 contains an explicit reference to Jackman’s most notable film role, as Wolverine of the X-Men. Question #3 looks for an answer that includes Sabretooth, Wolverine’s nemesis in the comics and films. Question #1 is an X-Men two-fer: The climax of the first X-Men film occurs at the Statue of Liberty, and the name of the sonnet is “The New Colossus,” with Colossus being another member of the X-Men. Jackman has also hosted the Tonys four times and is a celebrated stage actor who has performed as Jean Valjean in Les Mis. Finally, in the comics, Wolverine commonly refers to others as “bub” in conversation; hence, the newsletter’s title.
The current Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.