JAQR - April 20, 2025
Irish actors, stabiles, American authors, fictional characters, 2024 musicals, famous last lyrics, baseball, Anthony Doerr, and more...
Thank you for reading another issue of the Jeopardy Answer & Question Recap, or JAQR [“jacker”] for short. This recap includes at least one clue from each Jeopardy! episode between Monday 4/14 and Friday 4/18. The recap includes Daily Doubles, Final Jeopardy clues, and Triple Stumpers. There’s also questions about material from last week and Bonus Clues about long ago covered topics. The first half of the recap includes just the clues so you can quiz yourself if you want. The second half gives you some (hopefully) interesting information about the clues and/or some related info.
DAILY DOUBLE #1
IRISH FIRST NAMES
It can be spelled with a "K", or with a "C" as in the name of the Best Actor Oscar winner for 2023
DAILY DOUBLE #2
THE ARTS
Grand Rapids, Michigan has a public sculpture by this man--a 42-ton stabile
FINAL JEOPARDY #1
AMERICAN AUTHORS
Like a character in one of his novels, this author hid in a meat locker during an Allied bombing
FINAL JEOPARDY #2
FICTIONAL CHARACTERS
This character's efforts in Africa to end an epidemic killing monkeys inspired Jane Goodall to do something similar
TRIPLE STUMPER #1
THE WORLD ALMANAC 2025
The 2024 Tony Awards for Book of a Musical & Original Score went to this show whose title is from women trying to get the vote
TRIPLE STUMPER #2
FAMOUS LAST LYRICS (name the song)
2021: "You said forever, now I drive alone past your street"
TRIPLE STUMPER #3
BASEBALL
The carousel at Comerica Park features not horses but these animals
TRIPLE STUMPER #4
OFF THE SHELVES
In this Anthony Doerr bestseller, Marie-Laure escapes to the walled Citadel of Saint-Malo after the Nazis invade Paris
LAST WEEK RECAP #1
What star of the 1957 movie The Three Faces of Eve was married to Paul Newman?
LAST WEEK RECAP #2
The second movement of Bedřich Smetana's Má vlast is titled for what river that flows through Prague?
BONUS CLUE #1
TV TITLE CHANGE A LETTER
Donald Glover's superspy on Amazon is replaced on the wedding cake by Jimmy of "NYPD Blue"
BONUS CLUE #2
TV TITLE CHANGE A LETTER
Billy Bob Thornton & Jon Hamm are hard at work in the wide-open Texas rendered pig fat business in this Taylor Sheridan hit
BONUS CLUE #3
THE BOOK OF THE DECADE (name the decade of publication)
"Red Storm Rising" rises on the bestseller list
BONUS CLUE #4
PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEES
The year the Democratic nominee gave his "Cross of Gold" speech, the GOP nominee was this man who backed the gold standard
DAILY DOUBLE #1
IRISH FIRST NAMES
It can be spelled with a "K", or with a "C" as in the name of the Best Actor Oscar winner for 2023
***CILLIAN***
The actor Cillian Murphy was born in 1976 in Cork, Ireland. He starred in the 2002 movie 28 Days Later, which was directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland. He played a bike courier who wakes up from a coma four weeks after much of London has been overrun by zombie-like victims of the Rage virus. A 2007 sequel was titled 28 Weeks Later. An upcoming trilogy of sequels includes 28 Years Later and will star Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. The trailer (see below) uses a chilling recording of the 1915 poem “Boots” by Rudyard Kipling. These movies are not to be confused with the 2000 movie 28 Days, in which Sandra Bullock’s character enters rehab for alcoholism.
Murphy co-starred with Colin Firth (who played the artist Johannes Vermeer) and Scarlett Johansson (who played the title character Griet) in the 2003 movie Girl with a Pearl Earring. It was based on a 1999 novel by Tracy Chevalier and shares its title with a 1665 Vermeer painting. Murphy co-starred with Rachel McAdams in the 2005 airplane thriller Red Eye, which was directed by Wes Craven. His villainous character’s name was Jackson Rippner, a not so subtle reference to a certain serial killer. He co-starred in the 2007 movie Sunshine (another Boyle/Garland collab), in which a group of astronauts are sent to reignite the dying Sun by launching a nuclear payload.
Murphy starred in the British crime drama Peaky Blinders from 2013-2022. It aired on BBC Two and BBC One, and can be seen in the U.S. on Netflix. The show is set mainly in Birmingham between 1919 and 1934. Murphy plays Tommy Shelby, the leader of the title gang that is known for its “sartorial elegance.” The show’s opening theme is the song “Red Right Hand” by the Australian rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. An upcoming movie that is a continuation of the show is titled The Immortal Man.
Murphy has appeared in six movies directed by Christopher Nolan:
Batman Begins (2005) - his character, Dr. Jonathan Crane (aka Scarecrow), works at Arkham Asylum and is a psychopharmacologist who developed a fear-inducing toxin; he also had small roles in its sequels, The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Inception (2010) - Leonardo DiCaprio's character attempts to plant an idea in his character’s mind
Dunkirk (2017) - plays a character credited as “Shivering Soldier” who is rescued from a wrecked ship
Oppenheimer (2023) - plays the title character in the movie, which was based on the 2005 Pulitzer-winning biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
DAILY DOUBLE #2
THE ARTS
Grand Rapids, Michigan has a public sculpture by this man--a 42-ton stabile
***ALEXANDER CALDER***
Alexander Calder was born in Pennsylvania in 1898. His grandfather (Alexander Milne Calder) designed the bronze statue of William Penn that is located atop Philadelphia's City Hall, and his father (Alexander Stirling Calder) designed Philadelphia’s Swann Memorial Fountain. Calder received a degree in mechanical engineering, but moved to Paris in 1926 to study art. One of his first works was a depiction of Josephine Baker made of twisted strands of wire. Another of his early works was the wire sculpture Romulus and Remus (1928), which depicts the mythical founders of Rome being suckled by a she-wolf. His work Cirque Calder was a miniature circus containing mechanical performers made of wire and found materials. Those works helped him earn the nickname “The King of Wire.” In 1932, Calder asked “Why must art be static?” and stated “The next step in sculpture is motion.” In 1937, he created the sculpture Mercury Fountain, which accompanied the display of Picasso's Guernica at the Paris International Exhibition.
Calder is best known for his mobiles, a term coined by Marcel Duchamp. Mobiles are kinetic sculptures powered by motors or the air. Probably the most famous one is titled Lobster Trap and Fish Tail (1939), which is made of wire and sheet aluminum. It was commissioned by NYC’s Museum of Modern Art for a third floor stairwell. Calder is also known for his very large sheet metal sculptures called stabiles, whose name was coined by Jean Arp. His most famous stabile is titled Flamingo (1974) and is located in Chicago's Federal Plaza. The stabile mentioned in the clue is called La Grande Vitesse, whose French title would typically be translated as “the great swiftness,” but could also be translated as “the grand rapids.” His stabile Bent Propeller was located at the World Trade Center, but was badly damaged on 9/11.
FINAL JEOPARDY #1
AMERICAN AUTHORS
Like a character in one of his novels, this author hid in a meat locker during an Allied bombing
***KURT VONNEGUT***
The author Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922. He enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945 because he was housed with other POWs in an underground meat locker in a slaughterhouse. That event inspired his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade (1969), which begins with the line “All this happened, more or less.” The anti-war novel centers on Billy Pilgrim, who is "unstuck in time," meaning that he jumps between different points in his life. Events in the novel that probably weren’t inspired by real life include Billy being taken by aliens to the planet Tralfamadore and being exhibited in a zoo. Billy is known for saying the fatalistic phrase “So it goes.”
Other novels by Vonnegut include: