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Below are six trivia questions. If you’d like to participate, you can either reply to this e-mail or submit your answers via Google Forms by using the button below. You can find our rules and guidelines by following this link.
1) “You're the first person ever to win two Olympic tennis gold medals,” said BBC host John Inverdale in 2016. In response, Inverdale was told “I think [BLANK] and [BLANK] have won about four each.” NAME the two individuals who fill in the blanks in the preceding quotation.
2) Though likely not as celebrated as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and the other Americans who advanced the pop art movement, WHAT Scottish artist, the son of Italian immigrants, is notable in the history of pop art for his “BUNK!” series of works, including the seminal 1947 collage I was a Rich Man's Plaything that featured the word “pop” years before the term for the movement was coined?
3) NAME the 2020 film, named after a desert resort city in California, that won actress Cristin Milioti the Critics' Choice Super Award for Best Actress in a Science Fiction/Fantasy Movie and her co-star the Critics' Choice Super Award for Best Actor in a Science Fiction/Fantasy Movie.
4) “But there's really no question. It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying,” is a quote written by WHAT author in Different Seasons, a collection of novellas published in 1982?
5) NAME the limited series that premiered on Netflix in 2021 and is centered on a young mother who cleans houses in order to make ends meet. The show was Netflix’s fourth-most watched show that year; Margaret Qualley (who plays the main character) and Qualley’s mother (who plays Qualley’s character’s mother) were nominated for multiple awards for their performances.
6) WHAT distinction, in a sense also shared by this newsletter, is shared by each of the following countries and no other countries? Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. (As a hint, the correct answer may be written as a single word.)
Trivia Newsletter CXXIX Recap
1) Also the holder of the naming rights to the largest indoor arena in Louisville, Kentucky, WHAT company, formerly known as Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc., (tastily?) operates the fast-food brands KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell?
This is YUM! BRANDS, INC. “Tricon” sounds like a name that you would pick for your private military company after “Blackwater” became deeply unpopular and controversial, so “Yum!” is definitely a better choice.
Speaking of which, WHAT NAME does Blackwater go by today? They’ve been known as Xe Services and Academi at various times, but they go by a different name now. The answer’s at the end of this newsletter.1
The KFC Yum! Center is where the men and women’s basketball teams for the University of Louisville play. Is “KFC Yum! Center” the silliest stadium name in the U.S.? The Smoothie King Center (primarily the home of the New Orleans Pelicans) is not great, and neither is the home of my Chicago White Sox, Guaranteed Rate Field. I think for now, though, I’ll go with where the Cleveland Cavaliers play, the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse.
2) The 2019 television show Watchmen includes several allusions to WHAT musical, which first opened on Broadway in 1943, including references to the songs “People Will Say We’re in Love” and “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’”?
This is OKLAHOMA!, which makes sense—the events of Watchmen (the show) primarily take place in Oklahoma. The show may be most notable for being one of the very first pieces of pop culture to portray the 1921 Tulsa race riots:
Over the course of three days, dead bodies were stacked up on trucks and railroad cars and buried in secret around the city by white aggressors. Even afterward, few Black families had a chance to organize a funeral or mourn their dead. Many Black Tulsans simply disappeared.
Tulsa’s Greenwood Cultural Center tabulates that in the span of 24 hours 35 city blocks of Black Wall Street were burned to the ground. The white mob blocked firefighters while 1,256 homes were destroyed and another 400 were looted. A massive share of people in Greenwood were left homeless. The destruction also included many businesses and community institutions: four hotels, eight churches, seven grocery stores, two Black hospitals, two candy stores, two pool halls, two Masonic lodges, real estate offices, undertakers, barber and beauty shops, doctors’ offices, drugstores, auto garages, and choc joints.
Oklahoma’s Tulsa Race Massacre Commission reported that 100 to 300 people were killed, though the real number might be even higher. “There’s really no way of knowing exactly how many people died. We know that there were several thousand unaccounted for,” Mechelle Brown, program coordinator for the Greenwood Cultural Center, told CNN during a 2016 interview.
3) “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful one hundred percent,” says the titular character in a 1940 work after he has been tricked into sitting on an egg by an irresponsible bird. NAME the 1954 work that continues the story of this titular character as he tries to save a tiny planet located on a speck of dust.
The 1940 work is Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hatches the Egg, and the 1954 work is HORTON HEARS A WHO!
Today is the vernal equinox and consequently the first day of spring. As of this writing (about a day or two ago), the wind chill here in Chicago is below zero. What I’m saying is that I identify strongly with Horton in the below image:
4) Glass Joe, King Hippo, Don Flamenco, and Soda Popinski are opponents in WHAT 1987 video game released for the Nintendo Entertainment System that was once described as a “brilliant puzzle game [disguised] as a sports game”?
This is PUNCH-OUT!!, once called Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
We live in an incredible age of long-form YouTube storytelling. Whether you want to learn about the race to identify the 118th element2 on the periodic table and one scientist who may have fabricated data to that end, or learn about a plane that crashed into a football stadium fifteen minutes after a playoff game ended and almost certainly would have killed several people had the game not been a blowout, you can find an incredible video to that end. Up there with those videos is an account of the Punch-Out!! speedrunning community and its years-long attempts to surpass the records of a mysterious expert.
5) “If it’s true that guilty feet have got no rhythm, then [they] at least helped an indeterminate but undeniable segment of the Chinese public find their footing amid those transformative times,” wrote Biography about the boundary-breaking concert in Beijing in 1985 starring WHAT pop duo?
This is the group WHAM! The line “guilty feet have got no rhythm” was the big clue here, as that’s a line in the song “Careless Whisper.”
It sounds like the concert was a great time:
Underscoring the challenges facing the Western performers, a warm-up act was sent out to entertain the crowd with breakdancing. Shortly afterward, a voice blasting from the public address system warned everyone that dancing was not allowed.
The crowd then watched in near silence as Michael and Ridgeley bounded onto the stage in their big-shouldered suits, backed by an 11-piece band and dancers, and launched into their greatest hits. "No one had ever seen anything like that before," remembered the show’s host, Kan Lijun. "The singers were all moving a lot and it was very loud. We were used to people who stood still when they performed."
At one point, while singing "Club Tropicana," Michael attempted the tried-and-true rock tradition of getting fans to clap along, only to have the confused audience respond with polite applause. They eventually picked up on how to clap to the beat, recalled Napier-Bell, while some "even learnt to scream when George or Andrew waved their butts."
If you were surprised to hear that Wham! (and not, say, Queen or the Rolling Stones or some group that has a larger cultural footprint) was the first major Western musical group allowed to perform in China, you’re going to be even more surprised to learn who the second group was—they performed ten years later. Listen to your heart and the(n) look for that answer in the footnotes below.3
6) NAME the distinct characteristic, also alluded to in this newsletter, notably held by each of the films and television shows referenced in the following list: The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad (1988), Mars Attacks (1996), Just Shoot Me (1997-2003), Moulin Rouge (2001), Teen Titans Go (2013—), Documentary Now (2015—), Shazam (2019).
We trickily used the phrase “films and television shows referenced in the following list” and not merely something like “these films and television shows,” because I had technically written them incorrectly. Each of these works should HAVE AN EXCLAMATION MARK in the title. Similarly, each of the answers in this newsletter (Yum! Brands, Oklahoma!, Horton Hears a Who!, Punch-Out!!, and Wham!) is written with at least one exclamation mark. The newsletter title, “Trivia Factorial,” is both the name of this newsletter and a reference to the “factorial” function in mathematics, which is signified with an exclamation point. (The last few paragraphs of our “about” page, of course, describe why this newsletter is called Trivia Factorial.)
Question #6 Leaderboard
The Question #6 leaderboard can be viewed at this link.
Blackwater today goes by the name CONSTELLIS.
The 118th element was named oganesson in 2018. It’s named after Yuri Oganessian, a nuclear physicist. It’s the only element named after a person who is alive as of today, and is one of two elements named after people who were alive at the time that the element was named (the other is seaborgium).
Somehow, the second major Western music group to tour in China is the Swedish pop duo ROXETTE (most notable for songs such as “Listen to Your Heart,” “The Look,” “Dangerous,” and “It Must Have Been Love”).