Skeleton Trivia for Tuesday, 2025-12-02

Hiya Skeleton Crew,

Happy December! It’s holiday season full-swing, which means I’ll be takin some time off to regroup, reorganize, & just basically chillax. But we got a couple of admin things to take care of before I head off.

• It was the telegraph mogul Ezra Cornell who founded “an institution where any person can find instruction in any study”. Mr. Cornell was one of the folks involved in settin up a li’l company called Western Union, maybe ya’ve heard of it??
• The school with the Syriac motto Ephphatha is Gallaudet University, the premier university for the deaf and hard of hearing in the U.S. The motto comes from a Bible story where Jesus restored hearing to a fella who couldn’t hear.

In yesterday’s mini-quiz email, I had some technical difficulties with the xkcd comic image I included. For EXTREMELY BORING reasons, the redaction box I added to the image ended up being gray instead of red. That’s fixed now! Sorry if any of youse guys thought ya were maybe suddenly going color blind.

I missed some trivia days last month, so there were a bit fewer total points on offer for the November leaderboard. But I adjusted the cutoffs proportionally; here’s what I came up with:

Starbuck tier (a.k.a. First mates, 31+ points)

• revdrj (33)

Stubb tier (a.k.a. Second mates, 25–30 points)

• AngleScott (30)
• anasing99 (28)
• Jay Ess (26)

Flask tier (a.k.a. Third mates, 18–24 points)

• Rarebitfiend (24)
• MRS (24)
• alliaphage (24)
• petesmithphd (21)

Let’s have a round of grog for the mateys!!

I dunno if ya ever subscribed to Ryan Smith’s Trivia Factorial newsletter, but it’s a trivia newsletter that I’ve really enjoyed for the past couple of years. I even did a guest post for Mr. Smith way back in the day!

Well, I was sad to see that apparently the ol’ Factorial is closing up shop. Packing it in! Winding down!! Hanging up its spurs!!!

Uff da!

Lemme tell youse guys: it ain’t easy to come up with the type of high-quality trivia that Mr. Smith was puttin out on a regular basis. He did a great job, it was always one of the trivias I most looked forward to.

The only silver lining here is all the Trivia Factorial archives are opened up to anyone who wants to check ’em out. So I’d highly encourage ya to go in there & take a look around.

Ya might even wanna sign up to the newsletter still, ’cause even though it ain’t updating RIGHT NOW, maybe Mr. Smith’ll decide he’ll do somethin else & send out a li’l update to that email list? I dunno, crazier things have happened!

I ain’t gonna lie: I had some trouble keepin up with the update schedule this year—’specially with all the craziness going on in my day job. There’s a real good chance I’ll hafta pare things back a li’l bit next year, at least on the free tier side of things.

For premium subscribers, my plan’s to stick to havin a themed mini-quiz four times per month. Here’s the link if ya aren’t premium yet but wanna sign up:

One thought I had was to change it from havin TEN different monthly scoreboards throughout the year to somethin more like LearnedLeague’s FOUR annual “seasons”. Each season’d be a bit longer than a month, but there’d probably be less free trivias OVERALL? I dunno, it’s just one of the ideas I’m kickin around.

I’ve also got this big ol’ archive of old trivias burnin a hole in my proverbial pocket, so maybe I’ll republish a few of those? But if ya think it’d be annoying to get your inbox cluttered up with old trivias, I guess gimme a holler at mister@skeletontrivia.com. Or if ya have any other feedback for me, that’d be cool too.