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) Imagine all the U.S. interstate highways for which their numerical designations don’t end in a “5” or “0.” The longest such highway is I-94, which connects cities such as Chicago, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis. WHAT is the second-longest such highway, connecting metropolitan areas such as Richmond (VA), Louisville (KY), and St. Louis (MO)?
2) NAME the R&B soul singer and actress who, together with her backup band The Pips, was the first act to appear on the television show Soul Train when it debuted in 1971—though, she might be more notable for a different train.
3) NAME the actress born in 1996 in Miami whose parents are psychologist Jennifer Marina Joy and former banker Dennis Alan Taylor. For a 2020 role, she won a Golden Globe for Best Actress – Miniseries or Television Film and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Actress in a Miniseries or Television Movie.
4) Near the end of The Godfather: Part II, Kay Adams-Corleone, explaining to her husband her motivations for leaving him, says:
There would be no way, Michael, no way you could ever forgive me. Not with this [BLANK] thing that’s been going on for two thousand years.
WHAT single-word adjective fills in the blank? Let’s just say: Never go in against them when death is on the line.
5) In many variations of poker, WHAT action, shorthand for passing the action to the next player without wagering additional funds or folding one’s cards, is often signaled by tapping the poker table?
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by the following films? The Great Escape (1963), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Blade Runner (1982), Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Independence Day (1996), Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), X-Men (2000), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011).
An editorial aside:
[Warning: The below contains spoiler alerts for one of last week’s Jeopardy! airings. I recommend ignoring this section and either closing this newsletter or skipping right ahead to the recap of the prior newsletter if you are a Jeopardy! watcher trying not to be spoiled. There’s also a second spoiler at the very end of the newsletter, after the Question #6 recap.]
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Last Tuesday, this was the Final Jeopardy answer on Jeopardy!:
CATEGORY: AWARDS AROUND THE WORLD
France's national theater award, it's named for a man who died in Paris in 1673
Two of the three contestants answered (questioned?) incorrectly, and I’d say this is a pretty hard trivia question. Unless, of course, you remember our Tony Award question from Trivia Newsletter XVII and its subsequent recap, published here on December 20, 2021:
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 [______]1 Awards (named after the 17th-century French dramatist considered to be one of the greatest French writers in history).
The blank is in the footnote at the the end of this newsletter.
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[End of spoilers (until the bottom of this newsletter).]
Here are the answers from last time:
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?
The structure in question is Notre-Dame de Paris. From Wikipedia: “Notre Dame also stands out for its musical components, notably its three pipe organs (one of which is historic).” Man, imagine being one of those other two pipe organs just enjoying reading about your abode and seeing that.
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?
The answer to this was Citadel LLC (or, more formally, Citadel Investment Group, LLC). In addition to the hedge-fund side of things, Citadel also handles some 40% of the stock trades in the United States. The italics and such were me having a little fun with the question, because, y’know, hedge funds.
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.
This is Pete Davidson. For reasons I can’t fully fathom, in December 2017 Davidson claimed to get a tattoo of former senator Hillary Clinton on his leg; Clinton responded by saying that “this makes it significantly less awkward that I've had a Pete Davidson tattoo for years.”
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?
These are the Sons of Liberty, which included Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and many other cranky New Englanders from the time. A formal group known as the Daughters of Liberty was also formed contemporaneously; Samuel Adams is reported as saying that “With ladies on our side, we can make every Tory tremble.”
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.
The bandleader is Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington. Among his many accolades and awards, Ellington was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1965, but then the award instead went to no one, which I find bizarre. Ellington, then 66 years old, joked that “Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn't want me to be famous too young.” Well after his death, he was awarded a posthumous special Pulitzer Prize.
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).
Each of these films has all, or a significant portion, of its events occur on a college campus. This quiz was about as low-frills as it gets—each of the answers (Notre Dame, Citadel, Davidson, Liberty, and Duke) contained the name of a university, and the newsletter title (Later, Mama) was an anagram of alma mater (and, I suppose, is what a new college student might say to a parent before starting school).
The current Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
[Warning: Jeopardy! spoiler below.]
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Molière