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) 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.
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″?
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?
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 it “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.
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?
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).
Here are the answers from last time:
1) Brett Sperry, in addition to being a central figure in developing the Las Vegas arts community, is an American video game designer most notable for co-founding Westwood Studios in 1985. Sperry is credited with coining WHAT term, usually reduced to a three-letter initialism, in order to describe and advertise the game Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty in 1992? The term is broadly used to describe, for example, games in the Command and Conquer and StarCraft franchises.
Dune II and the other cited games are all examples of “real-time strategy” games, sometimes shortened as “RTS”—the term, broadly speaking, means nothing more than that the game is not a turn-based game. The Warcraft games and the Age of Empires games are other prominent examples of RTSes.
2) “Like I’m on the cover of Lethal Weapon” and “like I’m Jordan ‘96, ‘97” are two of the prepositional phrases that rapper Drake used to describe WHAT somewhat repetitive three-word phrase, also the title of the 2015 song in which the lyrics appear?
The cover of Lethal Weapon (or at least some of the covers) show Mel Gibson and Danny Glover back to back, and Jordan’s championships were a back-to-back affair (well, two threepeats, but whatever), so the answer is “Back to Back,” a diss track aimed at rapper Meek Mill.
3) Emerson Fittipaldi, a Brazilian automobile racing driver, was booed heavily by fans because he chugged orange juice and not WHAT beverage immediately after winning the Indianapolis 500 in 1993? Fittipaldi forfeited $5,000 from the winner’s purse and publicly apologized, but boos continued to follow him in the United States for over fifteen years.
Fittipaldi, an owner of orange groves in his native Brazil, was attempting to promote that industry and therefore didn’t properly kowtow to the American Dairy Association when he failed to drink milk, the answer to this question. Apparently, in advance of the Indy 500, drivers select whether they would like to drink whole, skim, or 2% milk in the event they win the race.
4) Exactly three pairs of countries have all three of the following qualities: (a) both countries border each other; (b) the Equator crosses through both countries, and (c) both countries’ English names end with the same vowel. NAME any of the pairs.
Any one of the following three pairs is a correct answer: “Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo,” “Uganda and Kenya,” and “Kenya and Somalia.” The fact about the Equator that always messes me up is that, despite its name, no part of Equatorial Guinea passes through the Equator.
5) The most recent consecutive vice-presidents who had last names ending with the same letter were Dan Quayle (1989-93) and Al Gore (1993-2001). NAME the vice-presidential pair who most recently, before Quayle and Gore, served adjacent terms with last names ending in the same letter.
Richard Nixon (1953-61) and Lyndon B. Johnson (1961-63) are the winning pair here. By the time Nixon passed away in 1994, his crimes had been largely forgotten by the American people and he was largely viewed as an elder statesman, with few exceptions—one of those is Hunter S. Thompson’s scathing obituary of Nixon.
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of these films? El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019), Final Destination (2000), Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008), Incredibles 2 (2018), John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019), Quantum of Solace (2008), Rocky V (1990), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977), The Thing (1982).
Each of these films begins immediately, or almost immediately, after another film or work in its franchise. For example, the events of Quantum of Solace pick up immediately after Casino Royale, and the story in the third iteration of the John Wick franchise starts essentially at the same time that John Wick: Chapter Two ends.
The name of the newsletter (“24”), in addition to dryly reflecting that it was the 24th newsletter in the series, was meant to allude to the television show 24, where “events occur in real time.” The first question directly references “real-time” strategy. The second question’s answer is “back to back,” which was trying to get you to think of how these films might relate to their preceding (or successive) films. Question #3 includes the phrase “immediately after.” Questions #4 and #5 both include references to groups of things immediately bordering or succeeding one another.
The current Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.