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) Oh no! I forgot to write a newsletter and the deadline is very soon. Yikes, I’d better throw something together quickly. Uh…okay, look, just give me the ordinal number that appears in that painting of a wave by Ivan Aivazovsky, the Russian master of marine art; it also is associated with Beethoven’s final symphony that he completed.
2) Still so many questions to write…hey, you know haggis, the Scottish pudding thing? It’s made in part by mincing the heart, lung and liver of WHAT animal?
3) Isn’t there usually a pop-culture question by now? Um, fine, just go ahead and take a wildly successful 2017 song for which the opening lyric is “The club isn't the best place to find a lover,” add the word “The” in front of that song, and change the last word of the song’s title to a different word—now you’ve got the title of a film that came out the same year and won a bunch of Oscars. WHAT’S that movie? Just the last word of the movie’s title, please.
4) Think of a question, think of a question…hey, isn’t the Super Bowl coming up? Okay, it’s a name that appears in the subtitle of the film City Slickers II, and it’s also the nickname of that guy who founded (and played for, and coached) the Green Bay Packers (apparently he got the name because of his hair)—WHAT’S that shared name?
5) Almost done—let’s add a hard one. I’m looking for an Anglo-Irish playwright born in 1728 most famous for The Vicar of Wakefield and The Deserted Village, and not, presumably, for his great skill in working with element #79 on the periodic table. Derived from that guy’s last name, WHAT’s the nickname that his friends gave him that he hated? Like a bagel, maybe it goes with lox?
6) Oh man, I was supposed to do a whole thing where I come up with a theme and ask you to name a specific movie, and there’s just no time for that. I think it’s a movie that came out the same year the Exxon Valdez spill happened? I don’t know, just take your best guess—maybe this weird chart [image below] can help you?* (footnote below)
Here are the answers from last time:
1) James Patrick Sullivan is the name of the protagonist of WHAT 2001 film, the third-highest grossing film that year (both domestically and internationally), as well as the deuteragonist of its 2013 prequel?
My first draft of this question didn’t include the “third-highest grossing” part, so I threw that in to try to narrow it down for you. This is “Sulley,” the Monsters, Inc. (and Monsters University) character.
2) The following is from the opening of a 1986 novel by Winston Groom, except that the first line has been omitted. NAME the novel.
People laugh, lose patience, treat you shabby. Now they says folks ‘sposed to be kind to the afflicted, but let me tell you — it ain’t always that way. Even so, I got no complaints, cause I reckon I done live a pretty interestin’ life, so to speak.
The omitted first line is “Let me say this: Being an idiot is no box of chocolates,” and that means it’s Forrest Gump. The movie decided to take the line and make it a little less negative.
3) In the plot of the 2003 mystery thriller The Da Vinci Code, the main characters spend a frustratingly long time trying to come up with the five-letter answer to the below puzzle, which answer is WHAT?
In London lies a knight a Pope interred.
His labor's fruit a Holy wrath incurred.
You seek the orb that ought to be on his tomb.
It speaks of Rosy flesh and seeded womb.
Apple! It’s apple! Come on, Robert Langdon! I’ll let John Oliver take it from here, in case you want to watch that for nine minutes.
4) NAME the captain of innovation born in 1889 who, in 1932, filed a patent containing the following description: “Specially shaped nuts or heads of bolts or screws for rotations by a tool characterised by the shape of the recess or the protrusion engaging the tool substantially cross-shaped.”
He’s not a captain, per se, but it’s Henry Frank Phillips, after whom we get the “Phillips screwdriver”—that patent description is just, basically, what a Phillips screwdriver is.
5) Kicking & Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock & Roll is a memoir by sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson, which means that it’s a memoir about WHAT band formed in 1967 and inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013?
I got cute on this one—it’s just Heart, because the name of the book is a pun. My close friends can tell you that I am constantly getting Heart questions wrong in Jeopardy! and such, so hopefully now I will remember.
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of the following works? The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946 film), The Towering Inferno (1974 film), The Big Lebowski (1998 film), Riding in Cars with Boys (2001 film), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005— TV show), The Goldfinch (2013 novel), Toy Story 4 (2019).
Each of these titles—literally—contains a work that Tom Hanks was in (The Post, Inferno, Big, Cars, Philadelphia, Finch, and Toy Story). There were Tom Hanks tie-ins abound in this quiz: Hanks plays Sully in, well, Sully; Hanks was in Forrest Gump and The Da Vinci Code; Hanks played Captain Phillips in Captain Phillips (gosh, the man likes his eponymous films), and Question #5 was a little reference to Wilson, his volleyball buddy in Cast Away. Finally, That Thing You Do!, our newsletter’s title, was a 1996 film directed by Tom Hanks and the answers were, specifically, those things Tom does.
The current Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*If you don’t know what that chart is for Question #6 above, this link may help you: https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/
Do not assume the chart represents optimal guesses, but do assume that all answers are valid Wordle submissions.