A Note From Bob
The decade you were there for
Saturday, and a new month. Most of what we quiz you on here happened long before any of us drew breath. Today is different. The 1980s sit close enough to touch. A hockey rink in Lake Placid. A mountain in Washington State losing its summit on a Sunday morning in May. A wall in Berlin coming down while the whole world watched it live. If you were there, and most of you were, this one is less a history test than a memory test. Fifteen questions on the decade. And because the eighties made as much noise as any decade on record, a second quiz on the history of rock and roll is waiting further down. Pour the coffee.
Trivia Question of the Day
In December 1979, two Canadian journalists sat down to play Scrabble, found tiles missing from the box, and decided to invent a game of their own instead. Five years later it was selling twenty million copies a year in the United States. What was the game?
The answer is at the bottom of this email.
Today's Featured Quiz
The 1980s Part One
A team of college kids beating the Soviets on a rink in Lake Placid. Mount St. Helens erasing its own summit. A shuttle called Challenger and a reactor called Chernobyl. Personal computers arriving on desks, a music channel arriving on cable, and a wall in Berlin that finally gave way. The decade moved fast, and it left marks you can still find. How much do you remember? 15 questions.
The Answer
Trivial Pursuit
Chris Haney, a photo editor at the Montreal Gazette, and Scott Abbott, a sportswriter for The Canadian Press, sat down to play Scrabble on December 15, 1979, and discovered the set was missing tiles. Rather than buy a replacement, they sketched a trivia game of their own at the table. Trivial Pursuit reached stores in 1981, nearly broke its inventors along the way (the first copies cost more to make than they sold for), and then caught fire, moving roughly twenty million copies in the United States in 1984 alone. There is a decent chance a copy still sits in your closet, a few wedge pieces missing in tribute to the Scrabble set that started it all. Consider this newsletter a distant relative. Today's second quiz is just below.
On This Day
On this day in 1981, at one minute past midnight, a new cable channel signed on with footage of the Apollo 11 launch and a promise to change how America heard its music. MTV's first video was The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," a title that proved to be half prophecy and half warning. Forty-five years later, the long road that led there, from Sun Studio in Memphis to the British Invasion and beyond, is today's second quiz. 15 questions.
Stay
Curious.
Bob
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