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) Somebody once told me that the music video for “Somebody Told Me,” the song by the band The Killers, lifts several elements directly from the music video for the 2001 song “Crystal” by WHAT English rock band, which band was formed in 1980? In fact, The Killers took their name directly from the fictional band showed in the “Crystal” music video.
2) In American Sign Language, you can sign WHAT letter in the English language by holding up your dominant hand, palm facing out, with your thumb and index finger sticking out at a right angle to each other, while curling in your last three fingers?
3) The Canterbury Tales, the 14th-century collection of stories by Geoffrey Chaucer, has the conceit that a group of traveling pilgrims are engaged in a storytelling contest, sharing tales such as “The Knight’s Tale” or “The Merchant’s Tale.” One story begins with a womanizing and gambling man getting fired from his job and then engaging in daily revelry; however, Chaucer never finished that story, instead stopping after fifty-eight lines of writing. WHAT is that tale generally known as?
4) A mycologist might be unhappy to hear about it, but if you’re setting out to do completely different things from what has been done before, you’re engaging in WHAT three-word idiom?
5) The 2022 NBA Celebrity All-Star Game (presented by Ruffles!) is tomorrow. NAME any of the twenty celebrities participating in the game. You’ve got your pick—you can guess (i) the country singer/songwriter with hit singles “Best Shot” and “Make Me Want To,” (ii) an NFL player who recently became the first player in his team’s history to receive a 99 rating in the Madden video games, (iii) the artist who sings “forget me too (feat. Halsey),” or (iv) the comedian who authored the memoir The Last Black Unicorn; or, I suppose, you can just arbitrarily guess some other celebrity.
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of the following films? Inspector Gadget (1999), Mystery Men (1999), Digimon: The Movie (2000), Rat Race (2001), Shrek (2001).
Here are the answers from last time:
1) John Oates and Darryl Hall met while students at WHAT university, which led to the formation of the legendary pop rock duo Hall & Oates? Bob Saget (may he rest in peace), Adam McKay, and Diplo are some other alumni of the D-I school, the basketball team of which has not been to March Madness since a “First Four” loss in 2019 and the football team of which went 3-9 last year, with their biggest loss coming against Cincinnati.
This is Temple University, which is in Philadelphia. Some names I didn’t include in that alumni list: Kunal Nayyar (who, due to his work on The Big Bang Theory, has been at varying times in the past decade one of the highest-paid TV actors in the world), Patricia Wettig (best known for the TV show Thirtysomething from the late 80s), Norman Fell (Mr. Roper from Three’s Company), and Tim Heidecker (of Tim & Eric fame).
2) Yeehaw! In a 1962 interview with Time, folksinger and political activist Joan Baez made the analogy that a [BLANK] is to folk singing as a jam session is to jazz. NAME the Appalachian colloquialism that fills in the blank.
This was a “hootenanny.” This will never help you in any of your life’s trivia pursuits, but my first encounter with the word “hootenanny” was the video game Mario Party 2 for the Nintendo 64, wherein in one of the game modes, you can spend your hard-earned coins to disrupt everyone’s board position by making them come to you for, well, a hootenanny:
3) The below excerpt appears in Plato’s dialogue Cratylus:
Perhaps, however, the name Theonoe may mean "she who knows divine things" better than others. Nor shall we be far wrong in supposing that the author of it wished to identify this Goddess with moral intelligence, and therefore gave her the name ethonoe; which, however, either he or his successors have altered into what they thought a nicer form, and called her [BLANK].
Here, Socrates is guessing at the etymology of the name of WHICH Greek goddess?
This is Athena, who is generally identified as the Greek goddess of wisdom. Cratylus, the dialogue, kicks off by two folks bringing Socrates into their argument, which is about whether the names we call things have an intrinsic relationship to that which they signify (a debate that everyone today totally agrees upon and that never comes up again in the history of philosophy).
The dialogue has one of my favorite Socrates quotes:
[T]here is an ancient saying, that “hard is the knowledge of the good.” And the knowledge of names is a great part of knowledge. If I had not been poor, I might have heard the fifty-drachma course of the great Prodicus, which is a complete education in grammar and language—these are his own words—and then I should have been at once able to answer your question about the correctness of names. But, indeed, I have only heard the single-drachma course, and therefore, I do not know the truth about such matters.
4) Spoiler alert! In the Season 1 episode of Scrubs entitled “My Occurrence,” protagonist J.D. spends much of the episode trying to get a bad diagnosis fixed, believing it to be a clerical error; he instead realizes he was living a daydream, the unhappy diagnosis was true, and no time had passed. This episode (together with many other works, such as the Black Mirror episode “Playtest” and the 2005 film Stay) is an homage to WHAT 1890 American short story?
This is “An Occurrence on Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce—the Scrubs episode name is a nod to the short-story title. The lead singer of the band Owl City (most famous for that song “Fireflies” that always played on the radio in 2009-10) sometimes attributes the band’s name to the Bierce short story; other times, he attributes it to his sister’s pet owl.
5) NAME the actress known for her roles on Heroes, The Blacklist, The Good Wife, and recently as the adult version of Taissa on the hit TV show Yellowjackets. What, you aren’t watching Yellowjackets? Okay, don’t go insane in the membrane: just combine a colorful name for a style of port wine with part of the name of Louisiana’s state tree, and you’ll get her first and last name.
This is Tawny Cypress—we were going for the Cypress Hill song “Insane in the Membrane,” the tawny style of port wine, and the fact that Louisiana’s tree is the bald cypress as the extra hints here. The below image was tweeted by Cypress herself about five years ago, with the caption “No one puts tawny cypress on a shelf! #finewine”:
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of the following films? Bambi (1942), The Sword in the Stone (1963), Clash of the Titans (1981), The Fox and the Hound (1981), Blade Runner (1982), The Last Unicorn (1982), Labyrinth (1986), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), Sonic the Hedgehog (2020).
Each of these films has an owl on-screen at some point, and in most cases, the owl talks or is otherwise plot-important. I thought the film lineup might suggest a lot of animals and be a hint in that way (with Blade Runner being, perhaps, the outlier worthy of examination).
The newsletter’s title (“The Big Game”) was a reference to the Super Bowl—or, as the Internet often likes to gently lampoon the event, the “Superb Owl.” Question #1 refers to Temple University, whose athletic teams are the Temple Owls. Question #2 referred to hootenannies (that’s an odd word to pluralize), and “hoot” is in that answer. Question #3 references Athena, who is regularly accompanied in depictions by an owl. Question #4 gets us to Owl Creek Bridge from the story. Question #5 mentions “tawny,” also a word describing a type of owl.
The current-ish Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.