I’m your Quizmaster, Aimee Lucido, and I hope you’ve been following the news because this week’s Pointed is ready to play. Some of this week’s categories: prizes, scams, hotels, and ’90s nostalgia. It’s already looking like a hard one. Can you bring the average up?
Our new game, Alphadots, just finished its third week. This week’s clues were from Jeff Chen, who helped create the game and whom you already met. He’s a writer and puzzlemaker based in Seattle, Washington the creator of two daily puzzle games that aren’t Alphadots: ImSqueezy.com and PairDown.com. His favorite clue this week was yesterday’s: [Where director’s cuts are made?] Answer: BOARD MEETING. From Jeff: “So many times I wonder why directors aren’t directed to cut more from their cuts by boardroom directors.”
You did pretty well last week! No questions were true stumpers and the average score was 78.5, which is 7.5 points higher than the week before.
Most of the questions had get-rates hovering in the 70-80% range. But one caught you…
Hardest Question of the Week
On Oct. 8, President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. Three countries mediated the negotiations alongside the US. One is a country Israel struck in an airstrike on Sept. 9; one is the country that cosigned the Camp David Accords with Israel; and one, in 1949, became the first Muslim-majority country to officially recognize Israel. Which countries helped the US broker a deal?
A) Turkey, Qatar, Egypt B) Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria C) Jordan, Qatar, Egypt D) Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria
Qatar is probably the easiest country to identify since the news item happened the most recently–Israel launched an airstrike against Qatar on Sept. 9. That narrows down the answers to A or C. Both of those also contain Egypt as an answer, and Egypt was the country that cosigned the Camp David Accords with Israel in 1978. That means that either Turkey or Jordan was the first Muslim-majority country to officially recognize Israel as an independent state. Turkey is the correct answer, which means the answer was A: Turkey, Qatar, Egypt. Only 53% of you got that last week, and the rest of you can read more about it here. Coincidentally, this question was also the hardest for us to write last week, so I’m glad it tripped some of you up.
Trivia From Outside the News Cycle
I spent last weekend traveling to the Bay Area to celebrate the launch of Words Apart, my puzzle-adjacent novel written for 8-12 year olds. The bookstore that hosted me was in Berkeley, and it’s named for a Virginia Woolf novel that begins “____ said she would buy the flowers herself.” Which name, also the title of the novel, fills the blank?
Oh, and here’s the answer to last week’s Trivia From Outside the News Cycle question. The question was: ″Which man-made gemstone did Taylor Swift name a song for on The Life of a Showgirl? It’s perhaps particularly meaningful for October babies.″ The answer is Opalite! Such a bop. The whole album is full of bops. Been singing it on loop since it came out. My favorites are, in order, 1) The Life of a Showgirl, 2) Opalite, 3) The Fate of Ophelia. What are yours? Maybe you can convince my editor the album is something other than “pleasant enough.”
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