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) NAME the comic-book character who, in-universe, is a Pakistani-American teenager from New Jersey with shapeshifting abilities; Iman Vellani is set to portray her in a Disney+ series later this year, and she was one of the primary characters in the Marvel’s Avengers video game released across multiple platforms in 2020.
2) In Mere Christianity, a classic of Christian apologists, C.S. Lewis offers the below anecdote as a parable for why a person cannot, in essence, “give anything to God”:
It is like a small child going to its father and saying, ‘Daddy, give me a [BLANK] to buy you a birthday present.’ Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child’s present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is [BLANK] to the good on the transaction.
WHAT single word fills in both blanks? The quoted passage was the inspiration for the name of a band formed in 1992 that is most famous for a 1998 song that commands certain action “down by the broken treehouse,” among other places.
3) Hey, remember The Oregon Trail, the primarily text-based video game? WHAT is the word I’ve replaced in the image of the game below with a red box?
4) There are six North American types (California, mountain, Gambel’s, Montezuma, scaled, and Northern bobwhite) of WHAT small, plump game bird, perhaps idolized by Doug Funnie?
5) There are two individuals living as of today who have served for thirty-six or more years in the United States Senate who are not currently active senators. NAME both former senators; their last names have the same number of letters.
6) WHAT distinction is shared by each of the following states and by no states that are not on this list? [Note: States here are divided into tiers; so, for example, whatever this distinction is, New York has it to a higher degree than Indiana, and Kentucky and Texas have it to an equal degree.]
New York
Indiana
Massachusetts
Kentucky, Texas
California, Illinois, Minnesota, Tennessee, Virginia
Alabama, Delaware, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Wyoming
Here are the answers from last time:
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.
The band in question is New Order. If someone’s asking a New Order question, there’s a non-zero chance that they want you to identify that New Order was formed after the demise of the band Joy Division, following the tragic suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis. New Order is likely most famous for their song “Blue Monday” and for their vastly superior song “Bizarre Love Triangle.”
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?
When you do that, you get an “L,” so the answer is “L.” Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet is the educator who co-founded the American School for the Deaf in 1817 in West Hartford, Connecticut, which is the oldest permanent school for the deaf in the United States, and the first school for children with disabilities anywhere in the hemisphere; Gallaudet also helped develop American Sign Language, and a university in D.C. is named in his honor.
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?
This is the Cook’s Tale. Here’s a few lines from it:
For thefte and riot, they been convertible,
Al konne he pleye on gyterne or ribible.
Revel and trouthe, as in a lowe degree,
They been ful wrothe al day, as men may see.
I do not moonlight as a Chaucer scholar or translator in any fashion, but the idea here, I think, is that you can’t be a party animal and also be an honest man.
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?
The answer here was “breaking the mold.” “Mold,” of course, refers not to fungi but instead to an impression of something that you use to make a cast (so that you can reproduce it). Breaking the mold, in a literal sense, not only means doing new things—it means destroying your only means of doing what you’ve done before.
Because my brain is broken, I can’t think of breaking the mold without thinking of the hilarious Tim Tebow song that was popular ten years ago and its reference to “he shattered the mold!”
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.
The folks referenced above are, in order, Jimmie Allen, Myles Garrett, Machine Gun Kelly, and Tiffany Haddish. Other possible answers included Matt James (who was the bachelor on The Bachelor last year), Justin Bibb (the mayor of Cleveland), and lots of other folks. Because the voting for the NBA All-Star Celebrity Game MVP Award is done via fan vote, it is not rare for a player from the losing team to win the award—Nelly, Justin Bieber, and Kevin Hart have accomplished this. Kevin Hart has actually won MVP four (!) times, but he passed one of the awards off to former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in 2014.
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).
Each of these films features the Smashmouth song “All Star.” You’ve got to see the Digimon one for yourself: this isn’t a fan dub, this is actually the English version of the movie.
It is hard to overstate the pervasiveness of “All Star.” The song did very well when it came out, but its status as a meme has persevered—in 2019, for example, twenty years after the song’s release, it was sixth on Billboard’s annual list of streamed rock songs. This question may have been gettable for you solely by figuring out the connection between the films and the songs (for example, the ending of Rat Race has the cast meet up at a Smashmouth concert and participate in the concert as the credits play), but we had a few hints anyway:
The first question opens with the phrase “Somebody once told me,” which is also how the song begins. The second song tells you how to sign an “L,” which also happens in the first verse of the song:
Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me
I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed
She was looking kind of dumb with her finger and her thumb
In the shape of an "L" on her forehead
The third question is a bit oblique—comedian Dane Cook appears in the music video for the song. “Breaking the mold,” the answer to Question #4, is also in the lyrics:
Hey now, you're an all-star, get your game on, go play
Hey now, you're a rock star, get the show on, get paid
And all that glitters is gold
Only shooting stars break the mold
Question #5 explicitly refers to “All-Star,” and finally, the name of the newsletter (“Go for the Moon”) is the lyric of the public-domain sample used late in the song from NASA’s Apollo missions.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*Note: The leaderboard is typically updated 4-6 hours after the release of each newsletter.