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 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?
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?
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?
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.
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.”
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).
Here are the answers from last time:
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].
This is the first verse of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” by Wallace Stevens. It’s really great (link below). Stevens won a Pulitzer Prize, but more importantly, he also broke his hand by punching Ernest Hemingway in the face.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45236/thirteen-ways-of-looking-at-a-blackbird
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?
This was a pretty convoluted way to ask you about Thomas Gainsborough, whom I admit is probably more notable for his prolific portraits than for his landscapes (though Gainsborough is credited as an originator of the British landscape school of the 1700s). Once every couple years, Jeopardy! likes to ask you about The Blue Boy, one of Gainsborough’s most famous paintings, and prompts you for his name.
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?
The country is Peru. The tallest mountain in the Western Hemisphere (and the Southern, and in every continent except Asia) is Aconcagua, which is in Argentina.
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.
The clues here were to lead you to Free Solo (the documentary), Solo: A Star Wars Story (the film), and “Red Solo Cup” (the Toby Keith song). I want to go to that song’s lyrics for a moment:
Hey, red solo cup is cheap and disposable
And in fourteen years, they are decomposable
And unlike my home, they are not foreclosable
Freddie Mac can kiss my a**
I promise, it is not exaggeration to say that learning that “Red Solo Cup” contains a strongly worded rebuke of the subprime mortgage crisis is why I do this newsletter.
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.
This incredibly awkwardly written question (more on that below) was trying to get you to think of the Colorado Avalanche. They share their court with the Denver Nuggets, though hopefully not at the same time.
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).
Each of these movies has an avalanche (though not always of snow) appear on-screen. Q1 references snowy mountains. Q2 references De Loutherbourg, who also painted An Avalanche in the Alps, a good exemplar of romantic sublimity in art. Huascarán in Q3 is a bit self-evident, but also was the site of a horrific avalanche in 1970. Q4 had a loose association by referencing a rock-climbing documentary and a reference to a substance “running down.” Q5 gave up the farm with “Avalanche,” but I figured a hockey question would be sufficiently challenging to reward people who figured it out. Finally, “Bring It Down” was the newsletter’s title, and besides being literally what an avalanche does, are the next words in the Fleetwood Mac song “Landslide” after the word “landslide.”
7) For no extra credit, this newsletter contains several oblique references to WHAT, in addition to the Question #6 theme?
This newsletter was secretly an homage to the PlayStation game Final Fantasy VII, which was released in 1997 and has a non-trivial argument as one of the most influential video games of all time.
The main characters in the game include Barret Wallace (“Wallace” is the author of the poem in Q1), Aerith Gainsborough (“Gainsborough” is part of the answer in Q2), Cloud Strife (“cloud” is mentioned a bit needlessly in Q3), and Red XIII (Q1 uses the phrase “read thirteen”). Q4 uses the phrase “ultimate ambition,” which is a near-synonym of “final fantasy,” and uses the word “meteoric” (a major plot point in the game is an impending meteor that will destroy the world). Throughout the game, you fight the primary antagonist Jenova, an extraterrestrial life form (yeah, don’t ask) in four different forms—Birth, Life, Death, and Synthesis—and those words all appear in Q5. In addition, in the game’s plot, secondary antagonist Sephiroth himself resurfaces after a five-year absence, alluded to in Q5. The newsletter itself was Trivia Newsletter XXXVII, so “VII” was spotted there (and this was Question “Seven”). Finally, the ragtag group of protagonists in the game are trying to “bring down” the evil Shinra Corporation, and that group’s name is AVALANCHE.
The current-ish* Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
*typically updated 4-6 hours after each newsletter is released