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) In 2014, the video game company Ubisoft released the game Assassin’s Creed Unity, another iteration of its long-running series which retells historical events within a fictional framework. Ubisoft temporarily made the game free to play on April 17, 2019 in response to then-current events; subsequently, the company offered government officials assistance in rebuilding WHAT, due to the extensive work the company had put into researching and modeling the same?
2) Ken Griffin, well fortified as the richest man in the State of Illinois, is the founder and CEO (“castle lord”?) of WHAT multinational hedge fund, which got into the news in January 2021 for the towering position it played in the GameStop short-squeeze fiasco?
3) NAME the actor/comedian from Staten Island who, in the past four years, has dated Ariana Grande, Kate Beckinsale, Margaret Qualley, Kaia Gerber, Phoebe Dynevor, and most recently Kim Kardashian.
4) In the musical Hamilton, the character Hercules Mulligan, during his triumphant return in the song “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down),” raps:
A tailor spyin’ on the British government!
I take their measurements, information and then I smuggle it [up!]
To my brother's revolutionary covenant
I’m runnin’ with the [BLANK] and I am lovin’ it!
WHAT three-word loosely organized political organization, likely most notable for effecting the events of the Boston Tea Party, does Mulligan explicitly cite in the lyrics?
5) As the story goes, a certain jazz bandleader was scribbling down directions for his to-be collaborator Billy Strayhorn, which directions began “Take the ‘A’ train”—thus, the legendary jazz standard was born. NAME this legendary bandleader, who passed away in 1974 and who appeared on the reverse of the District of Columbia quarter-dollar coin released in 2009.
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of these films? A Beautiful Mind (2001), The Bye Bye Man (2017), Dear White People (2014), The Incredible Hulk (2008), Pitch Perfect (2012), Prozac Nation (2001), Scream 2 (1997), The Social Network (2010), Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009).
Here are the answers from last time:
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?
This is the Ice Bucket Challenge. Some ALS organizations recommend instead that, to avoid using water, the bucket should be filled with socks instead—but then, if it had been the Sock Bucket Challenge, would it have ever taken off?
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.
The Great Salt Lake is the lake in question—the hope was that spotting you chloride and sodium would make you think of salty lakes. Due to the lake’s very low average depth (about 16 feet), the lake regularly fluctuates in size due to drought conditions and water diversion—for example, at certain times last year, the lake covered one-fourth of the surface area that it did throughout parts of the 1960s.
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?
Roses are red, violets are blue; TLDR: They differ in hue.
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?
This one’s Augustus, though you might call him Caesar Augustus, or Octavian, or Gaius Octavius. Broadly considered one of the most effective leaders in the course of human history, he’s notable for, among many other things, restoring the Roman Republic (nominally, at least) and ushering in what was known as Pax Romana to the Greco-Roman world.
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?
Zworykin was the father of the television. There’s a great Wikipedia list showing people who are considered the father or mother of a field (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_considered_father_or_mother_of_a_field)—I admit, when I clicked it, I did not expect the first item to be the father of cowboy sculptures.
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.
This is an almost-complete list of “narrative feature” films (i.e., not documentaries) released in 1971 that were selected for preservation by the United States National Film Preservation Board. The Board adds up to 25 films per year, and generally the list tracks the most culturally important films in American history (plus many others). You might have noticed that I typically include the release date of films but excluded it in this list.
Each of the answers in the quiz was meant to get you to think of the five children who receive Golden Tickets and go on the tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory in the book Charlie and the Charlie Factory—Charlie Bucket, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde, Augustus Gloop, and Mike Teavee. The newsletter title (Everlasting) was similarly an oblique reference to the candy Everlasting Gobstoppers, which appear in the book (and, now, real life). Thus, the only missing film is the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
The current Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.