Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
My numerous jobs allow me to meet many varieties of Davisites. I teach from three to six classes a year, and all those classes overflow with curious, insightful, and highly intelligent students. When I first started teaching and 1990, most of my students were Californian, even Northern Californian. Today, I encounter students in my classes from around the country, and around the world. I consider myself lucky that UC Davis attracts the best of the best, and that I get to talk with such students about writing, critical thinking, and literature.
I have met many more students as a radio personality at KDVS over the last 16 years, and students have served on committees with me, as my interns and assistance, and as student employees at Academic Technology Services, where I have an administrative position. Students also flock to the poetry readings that I host, such as the reading this coming Thursday with Linda Lancione and Laurie Glover. As Davis poet laureate, I have had a chance to mentor many young poets, eager aspirants exploring new avenues of creativity and expression.
While I enjoy all these opportunities, one of my favorite places to encounter new students and make new friends is our own de Vere’s Irish Pub as your Quizmaster. Nowhere else do I get to meet students of veterinary medicine, announcers for the Metropolitan Opera, pharmacists of all stripes, and grown men who have become famous because of their work with pudding (and of course I don’t mean the disgraced Bill Cosby).
One frequent participant in our Pub Quiz is Lauren Jabusch. At UC Davis, Lauren has participated for more than eight years, and the last two years as chair, in the California Student Sustainability Coalition, a network of student organizations that promote sustainability. In that capacity, Lauren launched the Students for Energy Justice campaign and the Solidarity Organizing Program. Any organization that works for justice or solidarity is one I can support. Lauren has also been working with other UC’s on neutralizing carbon. Is she a superhero?
Well, UC President Janet Napolitano seems to think so, for at a recent meeting of the UC Regents Napolitano presented Lauren with a UC President’s Award for Outstanding Student Leadership. Three such students from across the UCs were thus honored, and two of them, not surprisingly, come from UC Davis! The other is Mariah Watson, the first female African American president of the UC Davis student body (in 2015-16). Congratulations to Mariah and Lauren for this important recognition.
Lauren will be joining us again tonight at the Pub Quiz. In Hollywood as in Davis, as I get older I notice that the celebrities keep getting younger and younger. I hope that you will also be joining us this evening at 7.
Here are the hints. Expect questions about five famous people who have or had unusual occupations. You will also get to answer questions about Italian princes, the Pips, big Birds, Denmark, planks, cartoonists, things that are a matter, feuds, space travel, the meaning of axes, what works in Ireland, skirmishes in “onesies,” rich rainbows, Cecils, Rick Perry (remember him?), broiled hens, Chinese abs, find your friend, ironic comedians, two-syllable contradictions, Great Mexicans, El Nino, baseball greats, richest among peers, lists where Virginia comes last, the example of Controversy, schoolchildren, beaches, good-paying jobs, and Shakespeare.
Your Quizmaster
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Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
- Mottos and Slogans. What airline used the commercial slogan “Something Special in the Air”?
- Internet Culture. What became the most popular Internet browser in the world in April of this year, overtaking Internet Explorer?
- Newspaper Headlines. Today a Mexican judge said that the extradition of what drug lord to the U.S. can proceed?
P.S. Thursday night is Poetry Night in Davis! I’m looking forward to welcoming Linda Lancione and Laurie Glover.
Linda Lancione grew up in the Bay Area and was educated at the University of California, Berkeley. She began writing poetry in the early 1970s under the sway of feminist poets such as Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich, Susan Griffin and Alta. Her poems have been published widely in literary journals and anthologies, such as Baltimore Review, Cimarron Review, Connecticut Review, Crazyhorse, Harpur Palate, The MacGuffin, Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore, and Spillway. Her poetry chapbooks include Wanting the Moon, This Short Season, and 2% Organic, Poems from a West Marin Dairy Barn. Finishing Line Press will publish her next chapbook, The Taste of Blood, in June, 2016.
Laurie Glover’s writing seems always to do with place, whether that place is her childhood mountains, the San Gabriels, northern California rivers, Greek islands, or Tasmania. Her poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Women’s Studies, Terrain, and Nimrod International Journal. Glover is also a poet of collaboration, completing poem cycles with Latina poet Maria Melendez (Seven Fords, Four Cattleguards) and Israeli-American Yosefa Raz (The Dome of the Sky Held the Waters in Check). She has been a resident at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony and was a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in 2015; one of her poems will appear in their anthology, Written Here, in 2016. Her current work arises from the summers she spends working on backcountry trails at a retreat center in Sonoma County. The most recent is about freeing strangled trees from obsolete barbed wire.
We meet Thursday night at 8 at the John Natsoulas Gallery, 521 1st Street in Davis. Find out more about this event by visiting http://poetryindavis.com/archive/2016/05/poets-laurie-glover-and-linda-lancione-perform-at-the-john-natsoulas-gallery-may-19th-at-8pm/.