A few administrative updates:
Our regular programming will be paused until Monday, March 14. On that date, Trivia Newsletter XL will be sent to everyone on the e-mail distribution list. This pause is for a few reasons—primarily quality control and real-life obligations.
On Monday, March 7 and Thursday, March 10, in lieu of our regular programming, subscribers will receive a variety pack of trivia questions I’ve written in the past. These questions will be unthemed and will have no connection to the Question #6 leaderboard.
Trivia Newsletter XL will represent the final newsletter of “Series 2” for purposes of Question #6 grading. Trivia Newsletter XLI, which will be released on Thursday, March 17, will mark the beginning of “Series 3” for the purpose of the Question #6 leaderboard.
Trivia Newsletter XL will contain some updates in terms of how submissions and grading will occur. These changes will be largely cosmetic (perhaps a Google Forms submission instead of e-mailing me directly). The “team” is still working these changes out, but to be clear, the fundamental newsletter format (two free sets of themed questions per week) will remain unchanged.
For Question #6 leaderboard purposes, the “due date” for Trivia Newsletter XXXIX (this newsletter) is 6:00 AM Central Time on Monday, March 7.
Below are six trivia questions. 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 (i.e., do not use external resources to help you answer any of the questions). The SIXTH question of each set is designed to be a question that cannot be easily Googled; correct answers to those will be tracked and recognized in the next newsletter. The answers, and the next set of questions, will be published on Mondays and Thursdays.
1) “Calling birds” appear in modern versions of a certain popular song. Some groups that appear in nineteenth-century variations of the song that do not appear in our modern version, however, include “hares a-running,” “ships a-sailing,” and “bears a-baiting.” WHAT is the song in question?
2) Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, named by Time as one of the 100 most important thinkers of the 20th century, authored the book On Death and Dying as the result of her studies and research with terminally ill patients at the University of Chicago’s medical school. Now commonly critiqued but still highly influential in culture, WHAT model (sometimes known by the initialism DABDA) was first set out by Kübler-Ross in On Death and Dying?
3) In the first, and again in the 26th, chapter of a certain book of the Bible, Moses is ordered to take a census of all of the adult Israelite males. These censuses give the Bible book its most common name in the King James Version, which is WHAT?
4) In 2015, the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement was renamed the Grammy Award for Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella. NAME the first group to win this renamed award, doing so in both 2015 and 2016; they also won the third season of NBC’s show The Sing-Off and their YouTube videos have amassed billions of views.
5) Acheron, Cocytus, Phlegethon, and Lethe are all examples of WHAT? Another member of this group shares its name with a long-running rock band formed in 1972 that has amassed sixteen top-40 singles.
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of the following films as of today’s date (but not at all times since each movie’s release)? Sudden Impact (1983), Shaft (2000), The Sum of All Fears (2002), Live Free or Die Hard (2007), Rambo (2008), Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011), The Bourne Legacy (2012), Jurassic World (2015).
Here are the answers from last time:
1) NAME the author of the below passage from the poem “Buttons”; he is more notable for his collections of verse such as Chicago Poems, Cornhuskers, and Smoke and Steel.
(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in
a red soak along a river edge,
Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling
death in their throats.)
Who would guess what it cost to move two buttons one
inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper
office where the freckle-faced young man is laughing
to us?
This perhaps-timely poem is by Carl Sandburg. I couldn’t find a way to shoehorn it into the theme, but my favorite poem with a similar sentiment (though more light-hearted) is Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Map” (1946), where she muses “Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?”
2) Stand-up comedian and actress Margaret Cho appeared on three episodes of the sitcom 30 Rock and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for portraying WHAT real-life figure, who unofficially is one of the greatest golfers in history?
Cho portrayed Kim Jong-Il on 30 Rock. When ESPN was a bit more edgy, they had an article about Kim Jong-Il’s death (late 2011) that stated “North Korean dictator/superstar golfer Kim Jong-Il has died at 69 -- a fitting age, because 69 is under par on every regulation golf course.”
3) The songs “Stay With Me,” “A Change Is Gonna Come,” “Why Can’t This Be Love” and “Body Like a Back Road” all share a characteristic—in fact, if we take some grammatical liberties, the thing they have in common is also the name of WHAT massive multinational conglomerate, the name of which could plausibly be on the device you are using to read this question?
Those songs are sung by Sam Smith, Sam Cooke, Van Halen (when Sammy Hagar was their lead singer), and Sam Hunt—therefore, they were Sam-sung songs, pointing us to Samsung.
4) Alexis de Tocqueville gets all the love for Democracy in America, but a half-century earlier, another French-born author wrote extensively about the American experience in a heralded collection of letters. The letters are purportedly by a fictional narrator named James, who claims to be a simple “cultivator of the earth.” NAME either the five-word title usually given to this series of letters OR NAME its author.
The work is Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1782, and their author is J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur. The town of St. Johnsbury, Vermont (population 7,364), known locally as “St. J,” is named after him—he suggested the odd “Johnsbury” rather than just “John” in order to distinguish the town from St. John, New Brunswick, which is the oldest incorporated city in Canada.
5) According to the newspaper The Chosun Ilbo, in 2008 scientists spent a great deal of effort attempting to adapt WHAT regional side dish for space travel? The dish requires fermented cabbage, which was problematic because food in space must be sterile; the scientists resolved this by, as NPR put it, “zapping it with radiation.”
The answer is “kimchi.” Quoting The New York Times:
If a Korean goes to space, kimchi must go there, too," said Kim Sung Soo, a Korea Food Research Institute scientist. "Without kimchi, Koreans feel flabby. Kimchi first came to our mind when we began discussing what Korean food should go into space."
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of the following films and television shows? Columbo (1968-78; 1989-2003); One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975); Apocalypse Now (1979); The A-Team (1983-87); Frasier (1993-2004); The Big Lebowski (1998); Mad Men (2007-15); Gran Torino (2008).
Each of these works has a key character who is specifically a veteran of the Korean War.
Q1, in addition to generally being at war, contained the line “inch on” in the verse, which was a hint for the Battle of Inchon that occurred early in the war. Q2 was a hint for the part of the world we were focusing on. Q3 was another such clue, as Samsung is a Korean corporation. “Creve coeur” is French for “broken heart,” an oblique reference to the Battle of Heartbreak Ridge during the war. Q5, in addition to being another regional clue, was meant to obliquely reference the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, another key battle in the campaign. Finally, the newsletter title (“I’ve Got Soul”), besides being a pun for “Seoul,” was a reference to the chorus of the song “All These Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers; in addition, the fact that this was the 38th newsletter was a reference to the key 38th parallel that demarcates North and South Korea (but you remember that from the recap of Trivia Newsletter XIII)
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released