Below are six seven 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) If you’ve read the 1917 poem that begins with the below passage, you’ve read thirteen ways of looking at a WHAT? (The answer also fills in the blank below.)
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the [BLANK].
2) Philip James de Loutherbourg, a French-born British painter famous for his large naval works and elaborate theater set designs, helped create the no-longer-extant Eidophusikon in 1781. Eidophusikon was essentially a small, mechanical theatre that was a precursor of modern cinema—it also greatly impressed WHAT English landscape painter, who was probably not a blue boy after seeing it?
3) The sometimes cloud-obscured Mount Huascarán (or Mataraju, its name from Ancash Quechua) is the fourth-tallest mountain in the Western Hemisphere; its summit is purportedly the place on Earth with the weakest gravitational force. Located in the province of Yungay and situated in the Cordillera Blanca range, IN WHAT COUNTRY can the mountain be found?
4) NAME the solitary word that each of the following have in common: (i) the documentary that details Alex Honnold’s climb towards his ultimate ambition; (ii) the tenth-highest grossing film (domestic) of 2018, but arguably the first in its meteoric franchise to be considered a box office bomb; and (iii) a song released in 2011 that rhymes “decomposable” with “foreclosable” and describes a certain substance running down “the front of” the singer’s back.
5) In the 1995-96 NHL season, a newly relocated team, in its rebirth and new life, went on to win its first Stanley Cup in franchise history. Five years later, the same team resurfaced and, after a sudden-death Game 7, won its second Stanley Cup over the New Jersey Devils. NAME this team, the only active franchise in NHL history to win every Stanley Cup Finals in which it has appeared; their home court is a synthesis of this NHL team and an NBA team that has never won the NBA Finals.
6) WHAT unusual distinction is shared by each of the following films? The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), Idiocracy (2006), Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009), Inception (2010), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014), Murder on the Orient Express (2017), Black Widow (2021).
7) For no extra credit, this newsletter contains several oblique references to WHAT, in addition to the Question #6 theme?
Here are the answers from last time:
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.
This is Ms. Marvel, or Kamala Khan. The first volume of Ms. Marvel, the comic book, won the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story in 2015. Among the many things the character is notable for is the further popularization of the Simpsons-created word “embiggen,” which now regularly appears in dictionaries thanks in part to the perfectly cromulent efforts of the Ms. Marvel writers:
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.
The missing word is “sixpence,” the band is Sixpence None the Richer, and the song I referenced is “Kiss Me.” Besides that song, Sixpence None the Richer is probably most notable for “Breathe Your Name” and their cover of “There She Goes”; the original of that song was by the British rock band The La’s. (I don’t much agree with Lewis, but this is a trivia newsletter and not a theology newsletter.)
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?
The missing word is “ford.” Fording a river is dangerous; the safest (and therefore most expensive) option is to ferry. The Internet tells me that fording would be disastrous here (in-game) and that you should only ford if the river is no more than 2.5’ deep or so.
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?
These are quail, and the Doug reference (the 90s Nickelodeon cartoon) is to the in-universe superhero “Quailman.” Jane Seymour, while pregnant with her son Edward (who would become Edward VI), apparently developed an insatiable appetite for quail.
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.
These senators are Orrin Hatch and Joe Biden. The three other senators who have served for 36+ years who are still serving in the Senate are Patrick Leahy (though you’ll recall from our recap of Trivia Newsletter XII that he’s retiring), Chuck Grassley, and Mitch McConnell.
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
This is a list of states ranked by how many vice-presidents were primarily affiliated with those states—for example, Aaron Burr was associated with New York (as he lived there, was the state attorney general and was a senator from that state before becoming VP) despite the fact that he was born in New Jersey before the U.S. existed. For grading purposes, I was not a stickler on the point of the VPs being affiliated from the states rather than born in the states.
This question is a derivation of one of the “final questions” we wrote for the team-trivia competition at our wedding:
The two states that have produced the most U.S. Presidents are Virginia, with eight, and Ohio, with seven. Which two states, which have respectively produced eleven and six vice-presidents, have produced the most vice-presidents? Both Virginia and Ohio are incorrect answers.
I always found it surprising that VA and OH do not top this list, despite the reasonably heavy overlap between presidents and vice-presidents. I mean, think about that. There are seven U.S. presidents who were affiliated with the State of Ohio, and despite the fact that exactly one-third of presidents were also vice-presidents, there are zero vice-presidents affiliated with the State of Ohio. Arguably, this makes sense—presidents rarely select running mates from the same state—I’m just still surprised the answer is zero and not, say, two.
Each of the questions in this newsletter was meant to clue you into a vice-president (in order of questions: Kamala Harris, Mike Pence, Gerald Ford, Dan Quayle, and Joe Biden). Finally, the newsletter’s name was “Scripted Envies,” which is (i) an anagram for “Vice Presidents,” and (ii) my attempt to poke fun at the common trope in fiction where the vice-president is evil, or potentially evil, and attempting to humiliate or otherwise defeat the president for his or her own ends—it’s an easy way to manufacture jealousy, or script envy.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released