I apologize for the second e-mail this morning. In the original distribution of this e-mail, Question #6 contained a critical typo, which has been corrected below. I regret the error, and the “team” is working through proposals to reduce such errors in the future.
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) On May 17, 2019, the website Vice ran an article by a former editor of the satirical newspaper The Onion. Below is an excerpt from the article. WHOSE name fills in the blank? The quote below refers to articles The Onion had previously run about this person doing things like shirtlessly washing his Trans Am in the White House driveway and getting banned from Dave & Buster’s.
If you’ve ever thought of [BLANK] as a clueless but lovable clod, a well-meaning klutz who is predictable, friendly, and ultimately electable, I am in small part responsible for that image. And I’m sorry.
2) In mathematics, a “Leyland number” is a number of the form x^y + y^x where x and y are integers greater than 1. For example, the first Leyland number is 8 (2 squared plus 2 squared). WHAT is the smallest three-digit Leyland number? [Note: For those submitting answers, using pen and paper is OK, but using a calculator or Google is not.]
3) WHAT is the shared name of the following items? (1) the American name of a ubiquitous board game derived from alquerque, a Middle Eastern strategy game; (2) a chain of drive-thru restaurants that started in 1986 in Alabama and has a few hundred locations, primarily in the southeastern United States; and (3) a black-and-white cocker spaniel that became nationally important due to a speech given on national television on September 23, 1952?
4) The Germans might call it Sturm im Wasserglas. The Estonians might say torm veeklaasis. The French might go with une tempête dans un verre d'eau. I might say it’s “my second-favorite Shakespeare play (Prospero notwithstanding) if you put that inside the namesake of a famous bribery scandal from 1921 to 1923 that embroiled the Harding administration.” WHAT is the four-word idiom (or five words, if you start it with the article “a”) to which we’re all referring?
5) Name the American elected official, first elected in 1974, who was born in Montpelier, Vermont and who earlier this month announced his impending retirement. Due to his comic book fandom and connections, he has appeared in small roles in several films, including Batman Forever, Batman & Robin, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
6) What combination of letters finishes this set? ROH, DMO, DMA, DTX, RCA, [BLANK], DDE
[Note: The original e-mail distribution of this question contained a typo. “DTX” above was incorrectly noted as “RTX.” The above version is the true, accurate version of the question.]
Here are the answers from last time:
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?
The state in question here is Utah. In recent years, the district in question (Utah’s 4th Congressional District) has been hotly contested—Love lost her 2018 election by merely 714 votes, and in 2020, Democrats took back the district by just 3,765 votes (out of 376,730 cast).
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.’”
Omaha! A couple of years after Manning said the above, he said, on the topic of Omaha, “I’m gonna be upfront. Omaha was the name of my stuffed giraffe when I was a kid. And yes, I still have him.” I suspect Manning was having some fun with us, but I want to believe that he owned a stuffed giraffe and that it was named Omaha.
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?
Each of these is “Gold”—the above references are to Ari Gold (the Entourage character) and to Adams’s album Gold, which remains his bestselling album. The first song on Gold is “New York, New York,” the music video for which was filmed in Manhattan on September 7, 2001 and thus prominently features the World Trade Center.
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.
Juno Temple is the answer here. Temple will be playing Bettye McCartt in The Offer, which is an upcoming Paramount+ miniseries about the development and production of the film The Godfather—McCartt was the assistant of Al Ruddy, the producer of The Godfather. Later, McCartt would become notable for being the agent-manager for Tom Selleck, among others.
5) Blackfyre, Ringil, Falchion, Rhindon, Verminfate, Frostmourne, Durendal—these are each, specifically, examples of WHAT?
These are all famous swords from fiction. Blackfyre was Aegon the Conqueror’s sword (Game of Thrones), Ringil was Fingolfin’s sword from The Silmarillion, Falchion was Marth’s weapon in the Fire Emblem series, Rhindon is Peter’s sword in The Chronicles of Narnia, Verminfate is Rawnblade Widestripe’s sword from the Redwall universe, Frostmourne is Arthas’s sword from the Warcraft universe, and Durendal is Roland’s sword in The Song of Roland.
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.
Each of these persons took part, in some fashion, in the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, which is better known as D-Day or Operation Overlord. The primary hint here was that each of the five answers to this quiz (Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno [Temple], and Sword) was one of the five code names for the beaches that the Allies invaded (“Omaha Beach” is likely the most famous of these culturally). The name of the quiz was also a pun meant to help you—Bayeux is a town located in the Normandy region of France which was the first town liberated by the Allies. (For trivia junkies, Bayeux is also most commonly associated with the Bayeux Tapestry, a millennium-old tapestry that depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England.)
SIXTH QUESTION LEADERBOARD
CK - 5
SM, ZM - 4
RC, VB - 3
KM, MM, MS - 2
EM, JK, TS, WM - 1