July 1
Quick Hits
Welcome to new subscribers. As a note to all, this month is going to be a little bit unusual. I have been tasked with writing an extensive question set for the upcoming Trivia Nationals event that will be held in early August in Las Vegas. I’m writing that alongside my usual output this month, but I might be slower here and there with posting. However, on the back end, you’ll have at least 70 brand spanking new questions to partake. Registration is still open for that event if you have any interest in going. I cannot attend myself, but I would recommend checking it out based on prior experience. Their website is https://trivianationals.org.
Questions
Plovdiv, Bulgaria is considered to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in Europe, with settlement there dated back to 6000 BC. I’ve seen that asked elsewhere before, so I hardly can ask you that here. So, what’s the oldest continuously inhabited city in Western Europe? Founded as Gadir by the Phoenicians around 1100 BC, in turn it would become a major launching point for another people’s colonies elsewhere in the world. This city’s beautiful cathedral, shown below, is known in full as the Cathedral of the Holy Cross over the Waters, and it has a yellow-tiled dome designed to shimmer like gold - an ongoing reminder of this city’s golden age during the height of an empire. As the picture below shows, the city has no appreciable beard, so any singeing of that beard purely would have been metaphorical.
The image below was taken from a 1955 film directed by one man, with him playing in a supporting role in the work as a mustachioed safe-cracking expert. The film is well-regarded even today because of a 30-minute sequence of a heist, taking place at a jewelry store on the Rue de la Paix, that was filmed in complete silence, outside of whatever incidental sounds were created by the actors as they went about their mock criminality. This man’s son went a different direction in his career, as can be heard below, with him quite audibly endorsing the charms of another street in Paris. Give the name of both the filmmaking father and the musician son behind the works just discussed.
Not only does this quote never actually appear in its supposed source film, but it originated on Twitter in November 2021, months before that film even debuted. It was then that user rhidaneelolivaw, in a probable nod to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers franchise - or possibly to the Fantastic Four - proposed this as a saying. When its purported source film debuted in April 2022, another Twitter user, Rank10YGO, commented that “the best part of” that film was this line - and few people questioned him, as few people actually had seen the motion picture. Yet now the line is in some sense canonical, as it would appear in 2024’s comic issue Amazing Spider-Man – Blood Hunt #2. What phrase, certainly more popular than its related motion picture?
This phrase lends its name to album titles by 21 Savage, LCD Soundsystem, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, as well as to the title of a 1960 play by Edward Albee. Dusty Rhodes made this phrase his nickname, and pluralized it becomes the title of a Philadelphia-set television series that aired on NBC from 2002 to 2005. In its better known, more historical context, it was popularized by James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book The Epic of America, where he wrote of “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.” What phrase?
This stadium has held the least attended Super Bowl, with only 25,000 attendees, as well as the first Super Bowl where one of the competing teams had the opportunity to play the game on their usual home field. In fact, both those facts regarded the same edition of the Super Bowl, suggesting that the home field advantage would have been minimal - but that “home” team won anyway. What stadium is this?
Water turning green despite the best efforts otherwise to prevent that outcome has been in the news lately. Prior to the current fiasco with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, probably the most notable example of such an ill-timed greening occurred at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, where - stop me if you have heard this before - someone poured hydrogen peroxide in a pool, causing a reaction that triggered an algal bloom that not only gave the pool a green hue, but a smell “like someone had farted.” The unfortunate pool, shown below, is part of the Aquatic Centre named for what woman (second below)? In 1932, this woman became the first woman from South America to compete at the Olympic Games, and it is felt that she likely would have been the first South American woman to win a gold medal, too, had ensuing Olympic Games not been cancelled due to World War Two.
The shown molecule is an antibiotic sold under the name Macrobid. That antibiotic commonly is used to treat uncomplicated urinary tract infections and rarely is prescribed for anything else. At the center of the molecule (as highlighted in red) - and, indeed, at the center of the generic name given to the antibiotic - is a heterocyclic organic compound where a single oxygen atom joins four carbon atoms to form a five-membered aromatic ring. What five-letter name is given to such a five-membered ring structure?
Antipater of Sidon wrote the following couplet about a work of art:
Paris, Adonis, and Anchises saw me naked,
Those are all I know of, but how did Praxiteles contrive it?
Great question that I often ask myself! - and apparently a controversial one in ancient times, as the town of Kos was offered the first opportunity to receive this work, but declined, opting for a clothed alternative instead. This work is notable in the history of art as being the first known life-sized statue of a naked female figure in Greek art - and perhaps anywhere in the world at all - as up to that point we only have evidence of life-sized nudes of males in statuary form. What sculpture is this?
This food (shown) probably is the product of Chinese traders who lived in the southeastern part of that country, which would explain how it is popular both in the Philippines and Indonesia, with the thought being that its name comes from Hokkien words meaning “soft cake.” That “cake” is more of thin, crepe-like pastry, with the filling depending on where you are eating it. In the Philippines, a common variety is the Shanghai, and it usually has pork, carrots, and onions, while braver palates can opt for the dinamita, containing a whole chili pepper. In Indonesia, the most famous version is the Semarang, which avoids pork in favor of chicken or shrimp, with bamboo shoots and scrambled eggs added for extra flavor. What is the shared name for this kind of spring roll common to both nations?
The range of this bird goes across most of Central Asia, with populations also found in Turkey, the Lower Nile, and India. More formally known as Grus virgo, the common name by which this bird is known today goes back to at least 1750, and it is meant to reference how elegant and light this bird is, as it is the smallest member of the crane family. So, any connections to those working in establishments frequented by Picasso and located along Barcelona’s Carrer d'Avinyó is unlikely. What bird?
