March 19, 2024: Answers
Hey, everyone.
Here’s the key for yesterday’s list.
Some News:
We’re going to finally start posting on our long-dormant Instagram account starting next Monday, with quite a few other new features set to drop over the next couple weeks. So, some changes coming, but nothing that’ll effect the newsletter too much.
1. After gaining their independence from neighboring Colombia in 1904, what 29,000-square mile Central American republic named its new and enduring national currency after Vasco Nunez de Balboa, the legendary Spanish conquistador credited as being the first European to sight the Pacific Ocean from the New World?
· Panama – Despite being considered a ‘conquistador’ in our era, Balboa never really did much conquering, at least in comparison to Coronado, Cortes, Pizarro, Ponce de Leon, and others with whom that term is now synonymous. Nevertheless, he did ultimately help to establish, in 1510, what’s today considered to be the first permanent Spanish settlement in South America: Santa Maria la Antigua del Darien, in modern Colombia. Balboa served as the town’s first magistrate, and later its colonial governor.
It wasn’t long after his appointment in 1511 when natives from the area, with whom the Spaniards frequently traded, told Balboa and his men stories about a vast, gold-rich civilization to the southwest - likely the Inca Empire. A few months later, Balboa led a scouting party of around 1,000 men to investigate, but rather than finding a vibrant pre-contact civilization overflowing with gold and riches, they instead ran into a giant ocean on the western edge of Panamanian isthmus not yet listed on any Spanish maps. Balboa, then, ceremoniously claimed it for King Ferdinand of Castille, and named it Mar del Sur, or South Sea. It was later renamed the Pacific Ocean by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1520.
As for the Balboa currency, it replaced the Colombian Peso in 1904, and has been valued at an exchange rate of 1:1 with the U.S. Dollar, Panama’s other national currency, ever since.
2. With a radius of nearly 1,700 miles, the largest object in our solar system that is not a planet - and is in fact bigger than both Mercury and Pluto - is Ganymede, one of the four primary moons of what gas giant?
· Jupiter – So-named for the mythological Trojan prince Ganymede, a young boy kidnapped by a shapeshifting Zeus and forced to serve as the royal cupbearer at his court on Mount Olympus.
It’s ~665,000 miles from Jupiter, and like Earth’s moon, Ganymede – as well as its three nearby siblings Io, Europa, and Callisto - is ‘tidally locked,’ meaning the same side is always facing the planet.
The Galileo probe - named for the man who first discovered it – found evidence of a massive saltwater ocean beneath the moon’s surface in 2002, but its existence wasn’t confirmed until 2015, when the Hubble telescope captured a handful of images showing the presence of water vapor in its atmosphere. NASA’s associate administrator of their Science Mission Directorate, John Grunsfeld, said of the discovery:
‘A deep ocean under the icy crust of Ganymede opens up further exciting possibilities for life beyond Earth.’
It’s estimated to contain more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.
After discovering them in 1610, Galileo chose to name the group of four moons the ‘Medicean Stars’ in honor of the the Medici banking dynasty, and specifically their then-patriarch Cosimo I. The gesture not coincidentally earned him the family’s patronage until his infamous censure by the Papacy in 1633.
3. Founded by a group of settlers led by Spanish colonial officer Pedro de Peralta in 1610, what UNESCO City of Crafts and Folk Arts - whose official name roughly translates into English as ‘The Royal Town of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi - is the oldest state capital in the United States?
· Santa Fe, NM – While not founded specifically to be the new capital of the Spanish colony Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico, it was only a year old when it was relocated there from San Juan de Los Caballeros (modern Espanol, NM) in 1610. Control of the settlement was transferred over to the Mexican government after their successful independence movement in 1810, but just 36 years later, it was captured by an American army detachment - led by General Stephen Watts Kearney – in the first year of the Mexican-American War. It was made the capital of the American Territory of New Mexico in 1848 after the land was ceded to the U.S. via the Treaty of Guadeloupe-Hidalgo, and aside from a few days in 1863 when the Confederate flag flew over city hall, it remained the seat of the territory’s government until it became the young state of New Mexico’s capital city in 1912.
The next oldest American state capitals:
Boston, Massachusetts: Founded in 1630 by English Puritan settlers.
Annapolis, Maryland: Founded in 1649 by Puritan exiles from Virginia.
Dover, Delaware: Founded in 1683 by Pennsylvania namesake William Penn.
Richmond, Virginia: Founded c. 1737 by English surveyor William Byrd.
The city’s original, and now legal name: La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís.
4. Introduced into the English lexicon by 19th century Scottish poet Sir Walter Scott, what seven-letter term defined by the OED as: ‘out of control with anger or excitement; wild or frenzied,’ is derived from the name of a legendary class of ruthless Norse Viking warriors, mythically believed – according some accounts - to shapeshift into bears while in battle?
· Berserk – According to the OED, he first used the term - in his 1822 work The Pirate - as a way to reference the notorious savagery of the bygone Icelandic ‘Berserkrs,’ who aided in the Viking conquest of the novel’s setting – the Shetland Islands – in the 8th and 9th centuries AD.
Characterizations of the berserkers vary pretty wildly depending on the saga or myth in which they appear, but typically, they’re described as the elite of the elite Viking warriors, with some accounts going as far as to say that they were even capable of transforming themselves into near-immortal bears, immune to both fire and steel. There’s no hard or even soft evidence to support any of that, unfortunately, but the origin of those legends isn’t as murky. It’s just an escalation of the etymology of the term itself, which derives from the Old Norse for ‘Bear Shirt,’ in reference to the bear pelts they wore on their backs when they served as the personal guards of the jarls of 8th century Norway.
5. Now a universally recognizable fixture of the sport, the pre-play football ‘huddle’ was originally created, in 1894, by the starting quarterback – sophomore Paul Hubbard - of the school team from what Washington D.C. university, founded in 1864 to educate the deaf and hard of hearing?
· Gallaudet University – The story goes that, before the first offensive play of their early season game against the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, quarterback Paul Hubbard gathered his teammates in a circle so they could use ASL to communicate the playcall without their opponents, who also understood ASL, being able to see what they were doing.
It obviously wasn’t necessary against teams whose players didn’t know any ASL, but the Bison continued to use what would eventually be dubbed ‘the huddle’ for the rest of the season anyway, more as an opportunity to rest and regroup than as a strategic meeting to plan the next play.
How exactly it became a mainstay of the sport is a mystery that’ll never be solved, but Hubbard certainly played a major role in spreading it around to the rest of the country, in particular the Midwest, where he worked as the head coach and later athletic director of the Kansas School of the Deaf from 1899 to 1942.
6. For his memorable role as title character Patrick Bateman in the 2000 adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, Christian Bale drew inspiration not only from the portrayal of Bateman in the novel, but also from the mannerisms and demeanor of what iconic Syracuse, New York-born American actor and action hero?
· Tom Cruise – In a 2009 interview with Black Book magazine, American Psycho’s director Mary Harron briefly touched on the story behind it, saying:
‘And then one day [Bale] called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy…’
The novel’s author Bret Easton Ellis wasn’t generally a fan of the movie, but not because Bale wasn’t right for the role of his now iconic anti-hero. In a 2016 interview with Larry King, Ellis described the first time the two of them met:
Ellis: ‘The first time I met Christian Bale was when… he wanted to meet me. He wanted my approval, even though he had already been approved by the studio and the director. He wanted my approval, and so he told me to meet him. And it was at a restaurant down on Beverly Blvd and I was at the bar and suddenly I got a tap on the shoulder and it was Christian Bale completely dressed like Patrick Bateman, completely acting like him, with that accent shaking my hand. And of course the movie hadn’t been made yet so he didn’t know how chilling it was going to be, but it was pretty chilling.’
King: ‘Pretty chilling…’
Ellis: ‘And so by the time I sat down, after about five minutes I asked him, you just have to stop this. I want to enjoy dinner...’
Have a great rest of your week, everybody.
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