Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Thinking back, I believe now that my family and I were the troublemakers in my Washington, D.C. neighborhood. During the 1970s, my mom would throw parties (salons, really) that were exclusively attended by women, sometimes too many women to fit in our Glover Park row house. I bet they didn’t make too much noise, but I’m sure some of the neighbors were scratching their heads.
My brother Oliver and I often did explore the joy of volume when we later encountered rock and roll. At a yard sale I picked up a large drum with a taut serpentine spring across its surface. We discovered that if one were to sufficiently increase the volume on the hi-fi while playing Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” the spring on the drum would vibrate sympathetically with the deep bass of the song, providing “live” percussive accompaniment. You can imagine how much the neighbors appreciated this auditory experiment.
Oliver and I played a lot of Frisbee back then, throwing the disk back and forth to each other in the front yard. Our front yard was only about 15’ by 20’, so we would take advantage of the yards of the adjoining homes. One time we realized that we could listen to our favorite records while playing Frisbee merely by moving the huge speakers of our record player to the front door and the front window. One of our elderly neighbors, who I haven’t thought of in a long time, and who has probably been dead for 25 years, dropped by to talk to us about the volume of our music, inquiring whether or not we were hard of hearing. I think he once worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Shambhala Buddhist Lama Sakyong Mipham once said that “Like gravity, karma is so basic we often don’t even notice it.” I found myself reflecting on karma this morning when deciding what to do about our neighbor’s dog. Perhaps our neighbor, too, is hard of hearing, for after she lets her dog out at 10 PM, 1 AM, or, most mornings, 6 AM, she seems not to hear the incessant barking that has fractured our sleep. That dog has a message that can be easily hard over the collective message of I-80, built along the same road that Mark Twain took to visit San Francisco, or the subtler message of the crickets, who perhaps are celebrating that all the frogs have disappeared. I sometimes wonder if that dog is the insistent reincarnated soul of that elderly neighbor who seeks to remind me of my childhood appreciation of the deep bass, the sympathetic drum, and the speakers in the windows of our home on Tunlaw Road.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions about fathers and sons, Japanese companies, bricks and mortar, Republican governors, Oscar-winners (including one born in Mexico), women who are not Taylor Swift, football on television, wrestling, missing systems, POTUS, stingers, times and places to wear jeans, two unusual words (so bring your linguist), musicians, “yule lines” for Santa, tabloid rumors, that which binds and limits, martial arts, best-selling memoirs, rich white dudes, African countries, organic chemistry, big prizes, awful diseases, Greek cities, Las Vegas, IT workers, and Shakespeare.
Do join us tonight for the fun.
Your Quizmaster
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
- Mottos and Slogans. What product used this tagline? “Image is nothing. Thirst is everything. Obey your thirst.”
- Internet Culture. Yesterday was the anniversary of the death of Steve Jobs. How many years?
- California. After LA and San Diego, what is the third most-populous city in California?
- Four for Four. Which of the following states, if any, are home to the closest 2014 midterm Senate races (with less than a 4% spread)? Colorado, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan.
- Sports. The number of medals that Michael Phelps has won is also the same as the following: the sixth discrete semiprime number, the atomic number of titanium, the retired jersey numbers of Jim Palmer, Clyde Drexler, and Emmit Smith, the number of yards in a chain, and the name of a song on Taylor Swift’s album Red.
P.S. James Ragan reads Thursday night at 9 at the John Natsoulas Gallery, and you should come. James Ragan is an internationally recognized poet, playwright, and essayist. Translated into 12 languages, he has authored 8 books of poetry including The Hunger Wall and The World Shouldering I. He has read for six heads of state and in 1985, was one of 4 poets including Seamus Heaney, Bob Dylan and Robert Bly, invited to perform at the First International Poetry Festival in Moscow. Honors include three Fulbright Professorships, two Honorary Doctorates, the Emerson Poetry Prize, 8 Pushcart Prize nominations, a Poetry Society of America Citation, and the Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award. Ragan’s plays have been staged in the U.S, Russia, Greece, and China. He has worked on staff during the making of The Godfather and in production on The Deer Hunter, The Border and recently, The House. He is the subject of a documentary, “Flowers and Roots,” based on his life in the arts (Arina Films, 2014). For 25 years he directed the Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.