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) Episodes of television shows such as Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine often begin by jumping directly into the story before the title sequence or opening credits are shown. WHAT two-word name is generally given to these beginning scenes?
2) Hey now, you're not an all-star of the NBA, but you did get your game on when you won the NBA's Sixth Man of the Year award in 2011. WHO are you?
3) Since 1990, WHAT actress is the only person to win back-to-back Golden Globe Awards for Best Actress - Motion Picture Comedy or Musical? She won for playing the film roles of con artist Sydney Prosser and not-con artist Margaret Keane in the two films.
4) On June 15, 2012, high-wire artist Nik Wallenda completed what he claims to be the longest unsupported tightrope walk in history (1,800 feet or 550 meters), and then was required to present his passport at the end of the walk. WHAT geographical feature did Wallenda cross during this trek?
5) NAME the woman, born in 1979 as Vera Chokalingam and with a middle name inspired by a spinoff of the television show Happy Days, who has published the following works: Unbelievable Holiday Tales: Scripting a Fantasy of a Family, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), Questions I Ask When I Want to Talk About Myself: 50 Topics to Share With Friends, Nothing Like I Imagined (Except for Sometimes), and Why Not Me?.
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of these songs? “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel, “Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit of...)” by Lou Bega, “O.P.P.” by Naughty By Nature, “You Sexy Thing” by Hot Chocolate, “Tiny Dancer” by Elton John, “Leaving on a Jet Plane” by John Denver, “Runaway Train” by Soul Asylum, “Girlfriend” by Avril Lavigne, “American Pie” by Don McClean, “Who Let the Dogs Out?” by Baha Men, “Goodbye Stranger” by Supertramp, “Party in the USA” by Miley Cyrus, “Seasons of Love” by the cast of Rent.
Here are the answers from last time:
1) Put aside Puerto Rico and any islands that make up the states of Alaska or Hawaii—other than those, WHAT island is the largest island by area in the United States?
The answer here is Long Island, home to (among other things) Brooklyn and Queens. This is a bit of a tangent, but a couple weeks ago, we talked about Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus,” associated with the Statue of Liberty. That poem has the line:
From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
A good question is “Why in the world is a poem about New York talking about twin cities?” The answer is that, until 1898, Brooklyn was its own city and not part of New York City. If you looked at, say, the US Census in 1890, there were four US cities with over 750,000 people: New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn. This is also why historically Brooklyn had its own baseball team.
2) An animated sitcom that aired from 1962 to 1963 (and again from 1985 to 1987) and a live-action sitcom that aired from 1989 to 1998 both feature major characters that share an unusual first name; the former character has a very well defined career, while the latter character has nearly no visible means of financial support. WHAT’s the shared first name?
Cosmo Spacely is George Jetson’s boss on The Jetsons, and Cosmo Kramer is a major character from Seinfeld. In the pilot episode of Seinfeld, Kramer’s name was “Kessler” in order to avoid legal issues, since Kramer’s character was based heavily upon Larry David’s real-life neighbor Kenny Kramer. This was changed in the next episode when Kenny Kramer let David use the name.
3) The heavy-metal band Bad Wolves first found success in 2018 when their cover of a certain 1994 hit song went platinum. As part of the cover, Bad Wolves went ahead and added 102 to a line in the original song to make the new line: “It's the same old theme / In two thousand eighteen…” WHAT is the name of the original 1994 song?
The original song is “Zombie” by The Cranberries. The song was originally written as a protest to the Warrington bombings carried out by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in England in 1993. A three-year-old and twelve-year-old child were killed; the murders remain unsolved today.
4) NAME the English queen from 1553 to 1558 whose name has been omitted in the below family tree. She was most notable, perhaps, for her sanguine efforts to reverse the English Reformation.
The answer here is Mary I, sometimes called “Bloody Mary” by her opponents. My use of the word “sanguine” was meant to be a helpful pun for you. At her funeral service, the bishop of Winchester praised her, saying “"She was a king's daughter; she was a king's sister; she was a king's wife. She was a queen, and by the same title a king also.”
5) In 2021, Markus Schlosser and Marcel Fries were, respectively, the winning rider and passenger in the world championship of WHAT specific seven-letter subset of motorcycle racing? In this type of racing, trikes and cyclecars are banned, and the passenger’s primary role (in addition to monitoring the engine for problems) is to transfer his or her weight around during the race.
The correct answer here was “sidecar.” Isn’t it wild that motorcycle sidecar racing is a real thing? Somehow, before humanity got around to inventing diet soft drinks, the microchip, or Mr. Potato Head, the Sidecar World Championships had already been held for the first time.
6) Exactly one film is missing from this set of seven films, each of which shares an unusual distinction. Based upon this newsletter’s theme, name the missing film. Bolero (1984), Cats (2019), Gigli (2003), Inchon (1982), Showgirls (1995), Striptease (1996).
This is a list of each movie with a one-word title that has won the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture (commonly called a “Razzie”). I didn’t give you much to go on, but the fact that these movies (particularly Cats and Gigli) are generally recognized as awful movies was, hopefully, a start. The other answers in the quiz were all meant to point you towards cocktails (Long Island Iced Tea, Cosmopolitan, Zombie, Bloody Mary, Sidecar), and a Roffignac (the newsletter’s title), named after a former mayor of New Orleans, is a raspberry-heavy cocktail that was meant to be another clue for raspberry. All of that is why the missing film is Cocktail (1988), the romantic comedy-drama starring Tom Cruise and Elizabeth Shue.
The current Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.