Below are six trivia questions I’ve written. 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. The SIXTH question of each set is designed to be a question that cannot be easily Googled, so correct answers to those will be tracked and recognized in the next newsletter. The answers, and the next set of questions, will be published every Monday and Thursday.
1) Mia Love is today a political commentator for CNN; she has also made several appearances on the daytime talk show The View, replacing Meghan McCain. Before taking on these roles, she served in Congress from 2015 to 2019 as the first Black woman elected as a Republican and the first Black person elected to Congress from WHAT state?
2) WHAT is the U.S. city that completes the quote below from former NFL quarterback Peyton Manning?
“[BLANK] was just a indicator word. It was a trigger word that meant we had changed the play, there was low time on the clock and the ball needed to be snapped right now to kind of let my offensive lineman know that ‘Hey, we'd gone to Plan B, there's low time on the clock.’ It's a rhythmic three-syllable word, ‘[BLANK], set hut.’”
3) In addition to its more common usages in our language, it’s the last name of the character Jeremy Piven played on the TV show Entourage, it’s the name of a Ryan Adams album released on September 25, 2001 that was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Rock Album, and it’s what the below Egyptian hieroglyphic means. What is it?
4) Wonderland, a British bi-monthly lifestyle magazine, published the following in June 2013:
Being named after a goddess is a good start to life. And the Roman goddess of vitality, fertility and femininity at that. But there’s more. [BLANK] was still in her mother’s womb when her parents discovered on a trip to the Grand Canyon that they were standing on a rocky outcrop called... [BLANK].
NAME the actress the article is referring to. According to IMDB, she was passed over for the role of Luna Lovegood in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2007) and she turned down the role of Anastasia Steele in Fifty Shades of Grey (2015); today, she is likely most notable in the U.S. for playing Keeley Jones on the hit show Ted Lasso.
5) Blackfyre, Ringil, Falchion, Rhindon, Verminfate, Frostmourne, Durendal—these are each, specifically, examples of WHAT?
6) What specifically do each of these persons/characters have in common? Yogi Berra, Edward Boyce, Medgar Evers, Henry Fonda, Alec Guinness, Thomas Meehan, John Miller, J.D. Salinger, Benjamin Vandervoort.
Here are the answers from last time:
1) In January 2017, Serena Williams defeated her sister Venus in the final of the Australian Open (women’s singles) to win her 23rd major, one short of the all-time record for Grand Slam titles in singles—that record is held by WHOM, who arguably has an appropriate name for this accomplishment?
Margaret Court (née Smith), the legendary Australian tennis player, is the answer here. Among her many other career accomplishments, she holds the women’s record for most titles won in a single Grand Slam event, with eleven wins at the Australian Open—on the men’s side, this record is held by Rafael Nadal, who won his 12th French Open in 2019 and 13th in 2020.
2) WHAT is the two-word phrase missing from the below passage, first published in the year 1776?
He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an [BLANK] to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.
We were looking for “invisible hand” here—this is a direct quote from Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, and refers to the economic concept that argues that unintended greater social benefits and public good are brought about by individuals acting in their own self-interests. Arguments in favor of and opposing this line of thinking are easy to find; for example, Emma Rothschild argues that Smith’s use of the term is “an ironic joke, and it is also a joke on himself”:
Smith’s concern, at the point where he introduces the invisible hand in the Wealth of Nations, is to persuade legislators that they should desist from imposing restrictions on imports. It is not particularly easy, as Condorcet observed, to convince officials of the attractions of doing nothing. It is easier, perhaps, to convince them that to do nothing is to cooperate in a great system of public order. The invisible hand is thereby a contrivance, and also a sort of obviating device; it crowds out weightier, mightier hands.
3) “Hysterical realism” (sometimes also called recherché postmodernism) is a term that was first used in 2000 and was used to describe a novel released in the same year. The plot of the novel concerns the lives of two wartime friends, the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones, and their families in London. WHAT is the novel’s name, which is also the obscured answer in the excerpted crossword below? The novel won many awards and is sometimes included in lists of the best English-language novels of the past one hundred years.
The answer here is White Teeth by Zadie Smith. I hope the crossword wasn’t, to quote Rothschild above, too much of a contrivance; I expect in advance that some people will be stymied by thinking that 47-down must be “arrest” and not its actual answer, “at rest.” As for Smith, she is today a tenured professor in NYU’s Creative Writing program; back in 2004, she was named one of the twenty most influential British people, and she has been publishing since.
4) George Rhymes was a fourth-round pick by the Minnesota Vikings in 1985. Known as “Buster” while in the league, he set the NFL single-season kick return yardage record that same year, but was out of professional football by 1990 after a stint with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Rhymes is likely most famous not for his football career, but for inspiring Chuck D of Public Enemy to bestow WHAT stage name to a now-famous American rapper?
Busta Rhymes, the name by which we today know Trevor George Smith Jr., was the answer here. The goal wasn’t for this to be a particularly hard one (which is why I spotted you Buster and Rhymes), it was for you to say “Wait, Busta Rhymes is named after a minor NFL player from the 1980s?”, because the goal of trivia (at least to me) is to produce the “hey, that’s weird” reaction every once in a while.
Busta Rhymes has been nominated for twelve Grammys and has never won. The leader in this distinction is Indian conductor Zubin Mehta, with eighteen nominations; one behind him is Snoop Dogg, with seventeen. Wow your families and friends today by asking them “Hey, what do the conductor emeritus of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the guy in this Corona beer commercial right now have in common?”
5) WHAT historical fiction novel won the 1944 Newbury Medal and was adapted into a 1957 film by Walt Disney Pictures? The novel features fictional characters )such as master metalworker Ephraim Lapham and soldier Rab Silsbee) as well as not-so-fictional characters such as Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere.
This one is Johnny Tremain, by Esther Forbes, the story of apprentice silversmith Johnny Tremain and how he gets caught up in the events of the American Revolution. As of the year 2000, Johnny Tremain was apparently the sixteenth-bestselling children’s book in the United States.
In a manner reminiscent of how some people bicker about the historical accuracy of works like the musical Hamilton, Johnny Tremain has animated plenty of argument about how it portrays historical events. Some folks view Johnny Tremain as a work that correctly and honorably glorifies the struggle of America’s fight for independence, while others, like Christopher Collier, write that the book "teach[es] nothing worth learning” and “falsif[ies] the past in a way that provides worse than no help in understanding the present or in meeting the future.” Some things never change.
6) What is the notable trait shared by each of these films and TV shows? The A-Team (1983-87), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990-96), Pocahontas (1995), L.A. Confidential (1997), Titanic (1997), The Matrix (1999), 8 Mile (2002), American Dad! (2005—), Rick and Morty (2013—)
Each of these works stars or prominently features at least one character with the last name “Smith.” The clues were abound above—Margaret Court’s maiden name was Smith (and she sometimes went by Margaret Court Smith after marriage), the “invisible hand” was proposed by Adam Smith, White Teeth was written by Zadie Smith, Busta Rhymes has the last name of Smith, and Johnny Tremain was famously a silversmith. Finally, the newsletter had the name “byline,” encouraging you to think of the quiz’s byline, as it was written by me.
SIXTH QUESTION LEADERBOARD
CK - 5
SM, ZM - 4
RC, VB - 3
KM, MM, MS - 2
EM, JK, TS, WM - 1