A quiz on pop culture related to, and arising out of, our present (as of April 2020) difficulties

1. PANDEMIC POP
CULTURE
(CONDUCTED ON 19 APRIL 2020 FOR
THE VIT QUIZ SOCIETY)
KUNAL SAWARDEKAR

2. QUESTION 1
 Alton Brown, the food show presenter and host of Good Eats, has
been putting out videos in a series called “Pantry Raid” on his
YouTube channel to help home cooks to prepare meals in our current
difficulties using ingredients they may have in their pantries. These
videos end with a tagline, common to many YouTube videos (as well
as TV shows), with one word slightly changed to make it appropriate
for the current environment. What is this changed tagline

3. ANSWER 1
 Thank you for Washing

4. QUESTION 2
 Towards the end of March, Columbia University’s Mailman School of
Public Health published a series of videos starring Matt Damon,
Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet and Jennifer Ehle on topics related
to our current difficulties such as washing hands, maintaining social
distancing and listening to experts. Why were these actors chosen?

5. ANSWER 2
 They are the cast of Contagion

6. QUESTION 3
 This band, a notorious one-hit wonder, saw their recognisable 1979 hit
become relevant again due to the refrain of their song rhyming with a
word we have become very accustomed to these last three months.
Bert Averre, the guitarist of the band said in a video he uploaded on
24 May that they’ve been asked to make their own parody of the
song, but he did not feel comfortable singing, and the vocalist of the
band (Doug Fieger) had passed away in 2010. Instead, Averre gave a
tutorial on how to play the guitar solo of the song, with him and
bassist Prescott Niles singing the parody refrain at the end. Name the

7. ANSWER 3
 The Knack – Their single My Sharona was parodied as Bye, Corona!

8. QUESTION 4
 This man passed away from natural causes (not related to Covid-19)
on 24 March. Among many tributes to this person by his many fans,
were several people noting an eerily named character in a 2017 entry
in a series that he created (though he was not personally involved
with the 2017 work). Kiran Mazumdar Shaw wrongly credited this man
(and his creative partner who died almost a half-century ago) with the
prescient work, and Javed Jaaferi was one of many other Twitter
users who noted this similarity. Who was this man?

9. ANSWER 4
 Alberto Uderzo

10. QUESTION 5
 This pop culture phenomenon that belongs wholly
to 2020 arose from an episode of the show
Pyunstorang from 2 January, where actor Jung Il-
woo tried something in Macau that reminded him
of a specific type of sponge candy from his country
(though it is made in quite a different way, with
baking soda being used for aeration instead of a
mechanical process or muscle power). The name
he gave stuck, and thus a social-media
phenomenon was born in his home country, soon
spreading to people in the rest of the world. What
is the name of this candy?

11. ANSWER 5
 Dalgona

12. QUESTION 6
 On 9 March, this Frenchman did something on camera that was
derided at the time, and criticised even more stringently when he
tested positive for Covid-19. However, following these events, several
journalists and Twitter users have taken to calling him an accidental
hero for unwittingly prompting the US’s cascading lockdown
measures and calls to “flatten the curve”. Name him.

13. ANSWER 6

14. QUESTION 7
 While this person’s Twitter feed is now almost completely given over
to our current difficulties, prior to mid-February, he tweeted mainly
about milestones related to the date he tweeted on (e.g. “On July 2,
1959, Sam Walton opened the first Walmart store” tweeted on 2 July
2019), and random statistics (e.g. SpaceX’s completed missions by
year since 2011). Apart from his current fame among Indian Twitter
users (and his tweets getting featured in news stories from all over
the world), I could find few facts about him apart from the fact that
he speaks English and Hungarian natively, lives in Dublin and considers
himself a “Data Storyteller”.

15. ANSWER 7

16. QUESTION 8
 On 11 April, this group (who are from the Netherlands, despite one of
their most famous songs being about another country) released a
video parody of their 1999 hit single. The group parodied this song
because a word that appears four times in the song’s title rhymes with
a service that is helping many people deal with our current difficulties.
The 52-second track, whose video seems to be made with the service
in question, ends with the singer proposing that the band and the
listener spend the night together in “our breakout room”. Give the
name of the parody song.

17. ANSWER 8

18. QUESTION 9
 This 79-year old retired author and politician is the grandson of a politician
killed in the aftermath of World War I, and is also partly descended from the
King of Wurttemberg (though none of these are his most famous relatives).
He is no stranger to controversy, and the revelation in a book published by
his daughter in March that he intends to apply for French citizenship drew
allegations of familial hypocrisy. He attracted attention in our current
difficulties for saying in a TV interview on March 17 that he would continue
going to pubs, and writing an article in The Telegraph on 22 March where he
claimed that a book he wrote 40 (The Marburg Virus) predicted Covid-19.
You may best know him, however, as the father of one of the most famous
victims of Covid-19 in the world. Name the Covid-19 victim in question.

19. ANSWER 9
 Boris Johnson

20. QUESTION 10
 This Netflix show debuted to a tepid response on 20 March (with an
average minute audience of only 280,000 on its first day compared to
395,000 for the first season of Altered Carbon). However, as
lockdowns drove up Netflix viewership, buzz quickly built, and Nielsen
estimates that it was watched by 34.4 million unique viewers in its first
10 days, possibly a record for a Netflix show. The show has become a
cultural phenomenon, and it even featured in a question asked to
Donald Trump during his press conference on 8 April. Which show?

21. ANSWER 10