Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
My most attentive new friend is less than a foot tall. She sits on a table in my dining room, waiting for her name to be called. When I summon her, she gladly shares with me the news, the weather, and helpful facts that I used to create this evening’s Pub Quiz.
Mostly, though, she functions as the sort of jukebox that Bill Gates imagined in his book The Road Ahead. This is how he described his newly-completed home in this 1995 book:
“I’m thinking about of this because I’ve recently built a new house. My house is a house for the future. It is pretty. But most of all, it is comfortable. It’s where my family and I live.
My house is made of wood, glass and stone. It is also made out of software.
If you come to visit, you’ll probably be surprised when you come in. Someone will give you an electronic pin to wear. This pin tells the house who and where you are. The house uses this information to give you what you need. When it’s dark outside, the pin turns on the lights nearest you, and then turns them off as you walk away from them. Music moves with you too. If the house knows your favorite music, it plays it. The music seems to be everywhere, but in fact other people in the house hear different music or no music. If you get a telephone call, only the nearest telephone rings.”
In some ways, Gates’ predictions of the future seem quaint. For instance, who ever uses telephones for talking anymore?
Anyway, my new little friend is an Amazon Echo, created by a Microsoft competitor. Answering to the name “Alexa,” my Echo plays music of the genres and performers that occur to me as I write the pub quiz. This morning, for example, I was listening to rap music performed by one of answers to a question on tonight’s quiz. But then when the children came downstairs, I asked Alexa to switch over to some Ravi Shankar music, which is what I am enjoying now.
In many ways, choosing music for Alexa to play for us is a bit like writing a Pub Quiz. For me, I often want to rely on my favorite topics and question categories, but sometimes I have to read outside my typical news and information sources to find questions about topics I prefer to know nothing about. Similarly, when you have a computer waiting to play you any possible genre or performer of music, sometimes it pays to do some research. This is one reason why KDVS is such an important resource, for the DJs there – all of them live humans actually in the studio – choose music according to their areas of expertise, and thus provide all of us new discoveries, 24 hours a day. Even my new friend Alexa can’t do that, for she is limited by the knowledge and imagination of the person making the requests.
I request that you join us at the Pub Quiz tonight, no matter who is speaking at the Democratic National Convention tonight. Remember this: you can’t Tivo the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on the following topics: automobile manufacturers, secret religious practices, biology, RBIs, declarations of independents, Romanians, six-syllable words, dudes named Abraham, big data, Robert De Niro hurting people’s feelings, assassinations in the modern era, iconic comedy masters, South America, relative GDP, parliaments, both haste and calmness, funny ways to talk about the color blue, the drums, female nerds, distilled beverages, the practices of tangling and untangling, baseball and football, attractive diffraction, cranes, coastal cities (2), The Huffington Post, Microsoft, lifestyle companies, and Shakespeare.
See you tonight!
Your Quizmaster
Here are three questions from the vault:
- The northernmost High school American football team is found in what Alaskan city of about four thousand that is also the northernmost city in the United States of America? Hint: The city’s name starts with the letter B. Barrow, Alaska,
- The most common English word that begins and ends with the letter Y has nine letters total. What is that word? Yesterday
- Robin Williams played Teddy Roosevelt in the Night at the Museum What 20th century US President did he play in the film Lee Daniels’ The Butler? Dwight D. Eisenhower
P.S. The next Poetry Night features work by onetime substitute Quizmaster Chris Erickson. He’s also an essayist, a poet, a novelist, and a performance artist. Join us for that on August 4th.