Your Quizmaster — Home of the Quizmaster of Sudwerk Brewing Company in Davis

Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

Newspaper Headlines. What did Jerry Buss most famously own?

Food and Drink. The honey and malt whiskey liqueur known as DRAMBUIE comes from what country? Canada, Ireland, Scotland, or Wales.

Pop Culture – Music. What is the title of Adele’s best selling album ever?

Sports. Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Award winners Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart both attended the same California college or university. Name it.

Science. Starting with the letter U, what is the name of the groups of mammals which use the tips of their toes, usually hoofed, to sustain their whole body weight while moving?

P.S Have you ever seen the great local poet and UC Davis professor D.R. Wagner perform? He will appear as part of the Poetry Night Reading Series on March 7. Details next week!

The Incredulous Enthusiasm of RL Stine Edition of the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz Newsletter

by yourquizmaster on February 19, 2013

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Happy Presidents’ Day! I need this day off, for I have spent the weekend participating actively – I served on five panels – at the San Francisco Writers Conference, the foremost such event in the country. This weekend I got to see Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki speak on the topic of his new book APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book. Kawasaki is an excellent speaker – he typically is paid five figures to speak at technology conventions and trade shows – so I was certainly entertained by his remarks, but I think everyone’s favorite keynote was presented by R.L. Stine, whom you probably know as the author of the Goosebumps books, which have sold more than 350 million copies. Telling us the story of how he got started in publishing, Stine informed us that he came to New York from Ohio to write humor. He had been the editor of the humor magazine at Ohio State University, and was hoping to continue such work on a larger scale. Funny and self-deprecating, Stine included choice quotations from some of his favorite letters from children. My favorite was from a boy who wrote, “Dear R.L. Stine. I have read 40 of your books. They are really boring.”

Lucky me, I got to talk with Stine and his wife for about 45 minutes at the VIP party Saturday night. I asked him about the inspiration of his interest in humor. He told me about his love for Burns and Allen, Sid Caesar, Jack Benny, and others. These were all radio comedians that I knew well, for in my childhood home we had records of those old radio shows that I would listen to repeatedly, with the encouragement of my father. I told Stine that my brother and I had grown up hearing routines by these comedic masters, as remembered by my father who had studied their work as a young magician, and then later as a college student when he hosted a live kids puppetry and variety show on Columbus television called Davey Jones’ Locker.

That’s when R.L. Stine revealed to me, with incredulous enthusiasm, that he and his brother Bill watched my Dad’s TV show every week, regaling me with stories of my father’s attempts at humor, and what he used to do with puppets. He couldn’t believe the coincidence. Evidently his love of comedy, and mine, were fostered by the same source: My Dad.

Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on books not written by R.L. Stine, online education, Wild Watermelon, food and drink, best-selling albums, physics, World War II, football, keeping on your toes, cities that start with the letter A, mammals, wild fruits, gardens of roses, transformations, genetics, scorpions, unusual modes of travel, English novelists, bonus sports topics, basketball, Europe, chickens, macho sheep sweat, security guards, power plants, Americans born overseas, 80s detectives, RJ, science fiction, blind women, Ireland, hometown newspapers, and Shakespeare.

My wife and her brother will be joining us at the Pub Quiz tonight as players (unless too many friends volunteer for the team, in which case they will audit). See you tonight at 7!

Your Quizmaster

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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

State Parks. Bashful Peak, at 8005 ft., is the tallest mountain in Chugach State Park, the third-largest state park in the United States. In what state is it found?

Film Quotations. The title character of what 2004 film says the following words: “I’m very important. I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany.”

Pop Culture – Music. What is the mononym of the musician who had hits, of sorts, with the songs “Trouble,” “Sober,” “Funhouse,” and, this week, “Try”?

Sports. Michael Vick has agreed to a pay cut, and to continue to work with his coach, Chip Kelly. In what city does Coach Kelly coach?

Science. What is the chemical symbol for GOLD on the periodic table?

P.S. As a special treat, we will be joined at the intermission of tonight’s quiz by The Spokes; I believe they are the best all-female a cappella group in California. They are prepping for Hella Cappella on March 1.

de Vere’s Irish Pub, 217 E Street, Davis, CA 95616

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The Berkeley Bowl Magnet Edition of the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz Newsletter

by yourquizmaster on February 11, 2013

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

This coming Friday and Saturday I’ll be giving talks, serving on panels, and hosting performance events at the yearly San Francisco Writers Conference. Having served on the SFWC faculty for the last eight or so years in a row, and I’ve come to look forward to seeing some of the same presenters and participants every year. Almost everyone has a new book to hawk, so every year I return to Davis with book ideas and firmly-held resolutions. While typically such resolutions fade in the face of more immediate deadlines and responsibilities, this year I hope at least a chapbook version of my current collection of books and essays will be ready for Friday. If and when that book is ready, I’ll be sure to let you know, and think of ways to compel you to purchase a copy, especially because all the profits will go to a good cause. Details to come.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking about San Francisco. A cultural and employment magnet hovers over cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle, or so say the students of mine who flee our fine city as soon as they graduate from UC Davis (recently named by Business Insider to be one of the Best Colleges in America). I ran into one such recent graduate this weekend, and she shared that she’s working at The Berkeley Bowl and trying to decide what to do next with her life. If you are too cool or indecisive to adopt a prospective career path early in your undergraduate years, you may end up working at the equivalent of The Berkeley Bowl (as I did). Today my LinkedIn connections list is filled with my former writing and Technocultural Studies students, each hoping that the connections they forged while in Davis will help to secure them better jobs, or really any sort of meaningful employment at all.

Such students teach me to wonder whether it makes more sense to value a job, or a city, even if that city is filled with the closest friends made at UC Davis, and even a future spouse. With that last criterion in mind, I value the city of London the most of all (and I’ll have to save that story for a future newsletter). Did a job bring you to Davis, or do you think that it’ll be a job that will send you on to the next city you call home?

Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on the University of California, Indian tribes, mononyms, popular websites, tall mountains, history, fruit, soap, words that start with C, tropical hardwoods, trouble, gold records, Facebook, submarines, airports and seaports, strings, ages, categories of drama, mixed drinks, comedies, televised breakdowns, private jets, borsht and what follows, military ranks, the 1960s, people named Richard, tragedies, intercollegiate sports, popular names, Oscar nominees, thieves, wealthy people, Austrian hardships, and Shakespeare. Should I also ask a question about the Pope?

I hope to see you this evening. Even though the undergraduates should be studying for their midterms, we’ve been filling every table at the Pub Quiz. Come early to claim a favorite spot!

Your Quizmaster

Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

Internet Culture. What’s a LAN?

Newspaper Headlines. The last British king to have been killed in battle was recently found under a parking lot in Leicester, 100 miles north west of London. Name him.

Mathematics. In our American system of mathematical progressions, what denomination come after million, billion and trillion?

Pop Culture – Music. The musical group Earth, Wind and Fire was founded on the last year of what decade?

5. Sports. In 1999, who was crowned "Sportsman of the Century" by Sports Illustrated & "Sports Personality of the Century" by the BBC?

P.S. From this morning's USA Today:

“Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, elevated to cardinal in 2010 and head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, is so smart, says [National Catholic Reporter Vatican specialist John] Allen, ‘if you were picking a quiz bowl team in the College of Cardinals, most people would start with Ravasi.’” I’m sure that if Cardinal Ravasi were to join the other three members of Trivia Newton John, that new team would win the Pub Quiz every week. If that happens, you’ll learn about it in a future newsletter.

The Paratactic Fever Edition of the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz Newsletter

by yourquizmaster on February 4, 2013

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

I hard a fascinating story on National Public Radio this morning. Evidently Autism researchers don’t have enough brain tissue samples to do the research they would wish to on the causes and possible treatments of the disorder. The most compelling part for me was hearing the perspective of Jonathan Mitchell, one of the most eloquent people with autism I have ever heard. He speaks of being “embittered” because of his life’s missed opportunities, but hearing him speak, I was just struck by the absorbing way in which his sentences become rapid-fire paragraphs.

Although I have my own personal connections to Autism, Mitchell’s words resonated with me this past weekend because of the ways that the fever I was wrestling with on Friday and Saturday has inhibited, complicated, and warped my own thinking patterns. Mitchell said, “I have an impaired ability to relate to people. I can't concentrate or get things done," and I, too, found that this weekend I could get almost nothing done but write tonight’s Pub Quiz. (For instance, one of my children gave himself a haircut while I was napping on Saturday.)

More a poet than a scientist, I was fascinated by the ways, as I tried to sleep, my febrile brain would race ahead of its own thoughts, not bothering even to attempt to make logical connections, or even suggest a sequence between one thought and the next. Ezra Pound called this poetic composition method of juxtaposing images “parataxis” (as did others before him), and it is in part this sort of paratactic thought that makes modern poetry so difficult, as exemplified by the beginning of Pound’s “Three Cantos”:

HANG it all, there can be but one Sordello!

But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks,

Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the thing’s an art-form,

Your Sordello, and that the modern world

Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in;

Say that I dump my catch, shiny and silvery

As fresh sardines flapping and slipping on the marginal cobbles?

(I stand before the booth, the speech; but the truth

Is inside this discourse—this booth is full of the marrow of wisdom.)

Perhaps one reason some people were / are turned off by modern poetry is its willful resemblance to the ravings of a madman. Of course, one finds great treasures in such a poem once one learns the tactics and vocabulary to approach it.

I think you will find tonight’s Pub Quiz approachable, for it will contain no mention of Ezra Pound, parataxis, or even modern poetry. I shall save those topics for later in the year. Also, I am feeling much better, and am eager to share some thoughts on topics cinematic and otherwise this evening.

Tonight’s Pub Quiz will be dedicated to the memory of Melanie Michailidis, a faculty member at Washington University (and former visiting professor at UC Davis) who was killed in a car accident Friday evening. I got to know Melanie only briefly when she participated at a previous iteration of our Pub Quiz, but I mourn her passing today with friends who knew her well, members of the Pub Quiz team formerly known as Portraits of Mohammed (now Bards Against Humanity). Please take a moment to read about Melanie’s life in the Ladue-Frontenac Patch, a sister publication to the Davis Patch where one encounters this weekly newsletter. Elizabeth Childs, the chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology where Professor Michailidis taught, said “She was an exceptionally bright and thoughtful scholar, an energetic and rigorous teacher, and always an extremely kind and generous colleague.” I’m sure she will be missed by her students and colleagues, as well as by friends in Davis.

Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions about yesterday’s Super Bowl, film, the distance one can see on a clear day, denominations, oranges, fairyland creatures, funky music, great athletes, astronomy, mathematics, Italian words, Ohio State, greens, HBO, Swedes, hopped-up sinners that have been nominated for Academy Awards, miles, the Hastings Racecourse Fact Book, whites, other colors, social science, Ireland, remakes, actors and actresses, medications, closets, dragons, relations, parking lots, and Shakespeare.

Thanks to members of The Wilhelm Screamers, who offered to sub for me if I were to be too ill to perform my Quizmasterly duties, but I will be there tonight, most likely sipping something other than my favorite pint of Guinness. I hope to see you.

Your Quizmaster

Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

2. Internet Culture. Starting with the letter D, what is Adobe’s best-selling web design and development application?

3. Newspaper Headlines. The spokesperson of what 102-year-old Dallas-based organization said today that it “is discussing potentially removing the national membership restriction regarding sexual orientation”?

4. Four for Four. When Rolling Stone magazine compiled its 100 greatest albums of all time, The Beatles rightfully had four in the top ten. Which of the following groups or performers, if any, had two albums in the top ten? The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, The Rolling Stones.

5. The Fictional Rich. Starting with the letter S, what is the five-letter name of the richest fictional character (according to the most recent such list from Forbes Magazine)?

6. The US Government – Know Your Cabinets. In addition to being the world’s largest employer, the US Department of Defense is also the largest Cabinet department in the US government. Name the second or third largest Cabinet department, as measured by number of employees, in the US government.

P.S. Come to Poetry Night this coming Thursday night! Zara Raab will be reading at the John Natsoulas Gallery at 8. The afterparty begins at about 10 at the Irish Pub. You are invited.

The Stewardship and Sustainability Edition of the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz Newsletter

by yourquizmaster on January 28, 2013

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Saturday night I attended a high school reunion in San Francisco. This fact will surprise regular readers of the newsletter, for you might remember that I was born in Washington DC, and was raised in the glorious Glover Park neighborhood, around the corner from both the family of Fugazi lead singer Ian MacKaye, as well as various Vice Presidents at the US Naval Observatory. My bike commute from 2454 Tunlaw Road to my high school at 2126 Wyoming Avenue brought me past embassies, an imposing statue of Winston Churchill, and a number of entrances to the 2,000 acres of Rock Creek Park, but nowhere near San Francisco. Since graduation, my classmates and I have dispersed in mostly northern and western directions, and enough of us ended up in the Bay Area to warrant a yearly reunion, especially now that The Field School is celebrating its 40^th anniversary. And whereas no one from my graduating class of 40 came to the SF reunion (not surprisingly), I got to catch up with two of my favorite teachers, including the blues musician and jazz journalist Will Layman – he’s one of the intellectual heroes who inspired my interest in reading and writing.

Also at the reunion I met Leo Buc, the CFO of Common Vision, a nonprofit organization that seeks to plant orchards on the grounds of California schools, and teach schoolchildren and their teachers about permaculture and sustainability. Also drawn by the opportunity to catch up with Layman, Buc and his wife drove down from Ukiah, an even more impressive drive than mine from Davis. Buc’s zeal and vision reminded me of our own sustainability efforts at UC Davis, widely recognized today as the coolest school in the country. Sierra Magazine awarded us that special honor not only because of the inherent coolness of, say, radio station KDVS, the UC Davis contingent of hipster students, and at least 5% of our faculty (many of them teaching in Technocultural Studies). Sierra also recognized our campus-wide efforts to emphasize sustainability, green living, recycling, and renewable energy, such as turning organic CoHo food into the energy faculty, students and staff need to pedal about our beautiful campus.

In recognition of these efforts, I have invited members of the Office of Environmental Stewardship and Sustainability to join us at the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz this evening, and in return I have promised to ask five questions inspired by widely available “Cool Facts” about UC Davis. Because they have been tipped off to a significant amount of the content of tonight’s quiz, and because I value the integrity and fairness of the Quiz above all other Quizmasterly concerns, I’d like you to have the same advantage. Visit and study this web page to come as ready as our friends from our friends at the Office of Environmental Stewardship and Sustainability. As Louis Pasteur said, “Fortune favors the prepared mind.”

Also expect questions about rich people and creatures, the greats of 20^th century rock and roll, web design, seeing America, know your cabinets, whistling, professional basketball, facts that I learned from Sir Richard Attenborough’s science documentary on the magic of flight, czars in quotation marks, millennials and job interviews, US wars, actresses who have been nominated for Oscars and Emmys, nothing, again with the soundtracks, sustainability at UC Davis (five questions – see above), swoony antiheroes, Benedict Cumberbatch (who will not be the correct answer), cities with made-up names, the TV show Friends, science words that start with K (worth 5 points in Scrabble), authors whose names you actually know, uncooked nursemaids, low-scoring sports, Reddit, and Shakespeare’s influences.

The sustainability enthusiasts will be crowding the pub tonight, probably asking complex questions about the ingredients of the delicious food on the menu, so I encourage you to come early to claim a table. See you tonight!

Your Quizmaster

Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

1. Four for Four. Which of the following former US Presidents, if any, attended today’s inauguration of Barack Obama? George Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton.

2. The First Family. The name “Sasha” in this instance is actually a nickname. What is Sasha Obama’s given first name?

3. Film Quotations. In what 2012 film does Jack Black, playing himself, speak these words? “Where am I? Why am I so fancy? This is not good for my image!”

4. Pop Culture – Music. The best-selling soundtrack of all time came from a 1992 film with 12 letters in its name, and features the best-selling song of 1993. Name the film.

5. Sports. Who won 2012 Kia NBA Most Valuable Player Award?

The Great Americans Edition of the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz Newsletter

by yourquizmaster on January 21, 2013

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Happy Inauguration Day! Happy Martin Luther King Day! I wrote the entire Pub Quiz while watching this morning’s inauguration ceremonies, and that may have affected my question topics, as I hope you will see this evening.

It’s interesting watching such an event in the social media era, if only to enjoy the admiring and snarky remarks of all my friends on Twitter and Facebook. Some people were quoting favorite lines from President Obama’s speech, while others were quoting fifty year-old speeches by Reverend King. Some were comparing Beyoncé to Aretha, while others were remarking that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor hates poetry. My seven year-old had one of the best lines of the day: "Hey! Inauguration Day ended up on Martin Luther King Day! Wow – that's a really big day!"

A number of my friends attended the event in Washington DC, but not as many as last time, when my Mom had a great vantage point for the 2009 speech. I received a picture and note from two former Pub Quiz regulars, Kevin and Natalie, as they were all bundled up on the Mall, waiting for the action to happen. This year my Mom decided to watch the presidential inauguration on TV, like the rest of America. She enjoyed the inaugural poem by Richard Blanco, which you can find reprinted (without line endings) in the Los Angeles Times. I heard echoes of Walt Whitman and Robert Pinsky in the poem. Howabout you?

Tonight’s quiz will touch on today’s events and on related people, concepts and associations, including discussions of cars, governors, snakes, people born in Sacramento, Irish percentages, given first names, rotten eggs, comedies, the Guinness Book of World Records, notes to one’s self, really old buildings, people dressed so fancily, donkeys, New York, presidents of the US, basketball, megahits, salutes, big cities, fluid dynamics, medical terms, great Americans, chefs, people with Italian names, greatest American movies, powerful African-American women, Harry Potter, guns, and Shakespeare.

We had an absolutely full house last week, and I expect the same this evening, so please allow extra time for your team to claim a table and get settled. In my experience, every full team that arrives by 6 PM gets to play. See you tonight!

Your Quizmaster

Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

Hang Gliding Records. It took 11 hours for two men to beat the hang gliding distance record. The y glided from Zapata, Texas to the Texas panhandle, the equivalent of flying from Times Square to the outskirts of Detroit — or from Paris to Dublin. With a margin of error of 100 miles, how many miles did they glide?

Expense Accounts. According to the New York Daily News, McDonalds, Subway, Panera Bread and Burger King were the 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th most expensed eateries in the US last year. What was number one?

Pop Culture – Music. What first great American songwriter wrote “O Susannah” and “My Old Kentucky Home”

Sports. What single baseball player holds the career records for most stolen bases and the most runs scored?

Science – Recognizable Dinosaurs. A distinctive double row of kite-shaped plates rose vertically along the rounded back of what kind of herbivore dinosaur?

P.S. Members of the UC Davis Office of Environmental Stewardship & Sustainability will be joining us at the Pub Quiz next week, and providing swag. In appreciation of their efforts, some of the questions next week will focus on Sustainability!

The Superfluity of Doctors Edition of the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz Newsletter

by yourquizmaster on January 14, 2013

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons from the 1980s was by J.B. Handelsman (whose work appeared in the magazine for more than 40 years). Under a picture of a maître d' on the telephone is a caption that reads, ''Certainly. A party of four at seven-thirty in the name of Dr. Jennings. May I ask whether that is an actual medical degree or a Ph.D.?'' Such class distinctions are more important to snooty headwaiters in French restaurants than they are to the people of Davis, a city that abounds with doctors. Including those “mere” Ph.D.’s, most of my colleagues in the Writing Program, English Department, and Cinema and Technocultural Studies are doctors. Back when I ran the Manly Man Movie Club of Davis, we had a number of doctors in attendance, and they chose not their social standing with either tone or demeanor. Rather than at the golf course, in Davis one is more likely to encounter a doctor urging his or her children on the victors from the sidelines of a soccer game.

I’ve had the “good fortune” to encounter a number of fine doctors over the last week, for my pesky leg injury has inspired a great deal of attention and discussion in and outside of waiting rooms in the various medical offices north of Sutter Davis Hospital. Finally I ended up in the hospital itself, as x-ray technicians and finally an ultrasound expert tried to determine the causes and treatments for my mangled leg and foot (which today looks like it is wearing a fat suit). After the various diagnostic tests came back negative, I was proscribed a cane (!) and some antibiotics. “A cane makes me look much more distinguished,” said no post-Victorian man ever. Anyway, as I was getting dressed to limp home from the emergency room, the confident and helpful Dr. Deven Merchant asked a question every performer loves to hear: “By the way, aren’t you the PubQuiz Quizmaster?” The service I received was top-notch even before he realized that we knew each other. It’s comforting to be cared for by people with actual medical degrees, rather than just Ph.D.s.

Tonight’s Pub Quiz will include no medical questions, depending on how tightly you define medicine. I learned recently, for example, that astronomers can actually help doctors. You should expect questions about civil rights, coffee, firearm bans, Ernest Hemingway, large objects, Paris and Dublin, expense accounts, Trojans, popular music, baseball records, bony plates, rebels that we celebrate, antonyms that almost rhyme, rap music, famous tyrants one should beware, film directors, astronomy, Zeus, one-note bands, Oscar-winning films, Africa, AIDS research fundraisers, RenderMan, authors whose books I know only from their covers, the planets in alignment, football, Canadian cities, and difficult choices in Shakespeare.

Come earlier than usual if you plan to join us at the Pub Quiz night. Some folks had to go home disappointed last week because of a lack of seats, and I wouldn’t want you to know that disappointment.

See you tonight!

Your Quizmaster

Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

Countries of the World. What is the largest and most famous city in Morocco?

Queens of Spain. The most famous ever Queen of Spain was born in what century?

Science. Regarding a phenomenon first discovered and explored by Heinrich Hertz in 1886, what term do we use to refer to radio detection and ranging?

Books and Authors. What Austrian’s last book was titled Moses and Monotheism and was published in 1939?

Current Events – Names in the News. What is the name of the former Nebraska Senator who once told his Senate colleagues. "If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes”?

P.S. Happy birthday to frequent Pub Quiz participant John Lescroart. I understand that his next book, The Ophelia Cut, is due out in May. Happy birthday, John!

The Adventures in Sledding Edition of the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz Newsletter

by yourquizmaster on January 7, 2013

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Where I come from, almost nobody died in sledding accidents. East of the Appalachian Mountains, Washington DC is indeed a hilly place, but the hills are relatively smooth and almost welcoming, especially suited for winter sledding. As the smallest of youngsters, I remember often dragging my sled two and a half blocks from our home on Tunlaw Road to Guy Mason Park at the corner of Calvert Street and Wisconsin Avenue. There one could find a significant hill, perhaps the equivalent of two or three stories tall, about the height of our own Slide Hill in Davis. The height seemed daunting to us as five and six year-olds, but down we would descend, over and over, for much of a day until we would return in the afternoon, cold and wet and hungry, but relatively unscathed, despite all our fun.

By contrast, I went sledding this past week on a similarly-sized hill in a public park outside the town of Mount Shasta, and the entire experience seemed precarious right from the start. Unlike the gentle and well-hewn slopes of Guy Mason Park, at Mount Shasta we were confronted by sharp drops, unforeseeable divots of sod beneath the snow, shards of rock that were exposed by the last ice age, unwelcome platforms of ice that dislodged us from our sleds, and other sudden and increasingly painful obstacles. On one of my first runs down one of the less precarious looking sledding courses, my son and I started to tumble off the sled at the steepest drop-off. Like a good dad, I hurled my body beneath my seven year-old, such that his body, or his head, or the sled, came down hard on my shin. Had he been my older son, the leg bone would have broken, but instead, I limped away with an impressive hematoma. The doctor I was sledding with used colorful language to describe my injury: “I’ve seen asses smaller than that big-ass bruise.” Later we all agreed that my leg seemed to have grown a second calf. Your tectonic mountains here in the west, they seem to have it out for me, but my son Truman, he just yelled what every dad wants to hear: “That was so awesome!”

Speaking of awesome, tonight’s Pub Quiz at de Vere’s will feature questions on towels! We will also learn something about The Library of Congress, Twitter, Gallup polls, helmets, Heinrich Hertz, feminists, forts, Coruscant, the pronunciation of Worcestershire sauce, radio ranging, Moses, shoe salesmen, séances, American football, millionaires born in 1988, California sports, the elaborate symphonies of cell biology, actual shivs, little people, surprising sheriffs, martial nomenclature, Nebraska, coffee, Oscar-winners, Prince, people who darn in Yolo, American cities (multiple questions), the language of mathematics, weekend trips to Hawaii, cities that start with the letter C, famous queens, tragic senators, and Shakespeare.

A question to consider: how should Pub Quiz enthusiasts be rewarded for sharing their anticipatory enthusiasm on Facebook and Twitter? Remember that in the beginning of the year, for every team that goes on vacation, two or more teams stand ready to claim the extra table. I hope you will bring one such team this evening. See you tonight!

Your Quizmaster

Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

Internet Culture. Which of the following Gillian Flynn thriller novels was the most-reviewed book of 2012 on the website Goodreads.com? Dark Places, Gone Girl, Sharp Objects.

Girl Scouts. According to Michelle Tompkins of Girl Scouts of the United States of America, what percentage of US girls are girl scouts? Ages were not specified in this statistic. Is it 8, 18, 28, or 38%

New Year’s Eve in the Movies. In what 1989 film does one of the title characters say this on New Year’s Eve? “I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

Pop Culture – Music. 1. According to Pollstar, what 54 year-old performer from Bay City, Michigan had the highest grossing concert tour in 2012, raking in nearly $300 million?

Sports. Born in 1962, what 1985 Heisman Trophy winner was the first athlete to be named an All-Star in two major American sports?

P.S. Some of the question topics on the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz present themselves to me when I am helping my daughter with her homework. A frequent participant on one of our smartest teams teaches my daughter ninth-grade Shakespeare, and often helps her own ninth grader with his homework. Fair, or unfair? Are any of us smarter than a ninth grader?

The Bunches of Dynamos Edition of the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz Newsletter

by yourquizmaster on December 31, 2012

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Welcome to the last Pub Quiz newsletter of 2012. December 31^st is a time to take stock of the year, and our own experiences and accomplishments. Many consider these to be uneasy times, uneasy because of our ever-fragile economy as we try to recover from ill-advised decisions made by past political leaders, and uneasy because of the violence and heartbreak that we see in the news. In returning President Obama to office, we might consider what to make of his first term, perhaps with more optimism for his second. Years from now we might think of Obama as the president who oversaw the radical diminution of government effectiveness, largely because of legislators that make Harry Truman’s “Do Nothing” 80^th US Congress look like a bunch of dynamos. Or we might remember Obama as our Mourner in Chief, a president called upon repeatedly to console the nation after a terrible tragedy, usually involving gun violence. If you’d like to see Obama’s sense of humor, as well as his public compassion, I invite you to review this collection of photos of President Obama from 2012. My favorite, and that of occasional Pub Quiz participant Naomi Williams, is of Obama giving a shoulder massage to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison.

I’m grateful for a number of people when I look back on 2012. The year makes me think of Kate and our children, of our dear friends here in Davis and beyond, of the incredible colleagues that I get to work with at UC Davis, and of my many hard-working and engaging students. Publicly, I get to interact with a great number of Davisites through all my volunteer and community work: my radio show, the poetry series, and my arts advocacy work with the Cultural Action Committee (see below for Thursday night’s reading at the John Natsoulas Gallery). And every Monday you kind people let me assess and harass you while enjoying a 20-ounce Guinness. What fun!

Tonight’s Quiz, not surprisingly, will touch upon the year in review. You can also expect questions about Poland, the month of December, girl scouts, the color red, other colors, fish, New Year’s Eve and its traditions, concordances, the letter D, traffic accidents, Michigan, our crust, veins, all-stars, Portugal, secure communications, Copernicus, visible eyebrows, demonyms, sticks, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, teenagers, Beavertown, hands, jazz and disco, Hawaii, big films, Irish peninsulas, current events, and Shakespeare. Somehow, I ended up asking no questions about Neil Armstrong, arguably the most famous person to have died in 2012, so I will just mention him here.

The terrific de Vere’s manager, Karli, wrote me to say that there will be a New Year’s Special tonight: slow roasted prime rib served with potato croquette, broccolini, red wine braised shallots and au jus (which is French for “with its own juice” – Karli speaks French fluently). I hope you can spend part of your New Year’s Eve at de Vere’s tonight, and that you will be safe in all your travel choices tonight and early tomorrow morning.

See you tonight!

Your Quizmaster

Here are five questions from the December 17 quiz:

Words in Common. What do the following words have in common? Clay, Eight, Ford, Hill, Hudson.

Versatile Actors. What Oscar-nominated actor in the 1990s played Arthur Dimmesdale, Ludwig van Beethoven, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Count Dracula?

Pop Culture – Music. The name of the performer who won the BET Award for Best Female Hip-Hop Artist a record five times is an anagram of the phrase LIMITLESS TOY. Name the performer.

Sports. What Dominican-American professional baseball first baseman hold the record for the most home runs in the month of April, at 14. He broke this record in 2006.

Science. In a 2006 study conducted in Louisiana, 79.8% of the stomach contents of adult alligator snapping turtles were found to be comprised of which of the following? Armadillos, muskrats, opossums, other turtles.

By the way, this coming Thursday night is Poetry Night in the city of Davis, and BRIONY GYLGAYTON will be the featured poet. Gylgayton in 2013 will finish her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, the top-rated such program in the world. Her masters thesis, titled LOAD SAVE GAME, about survival horror video games and folk and fakelore, is in progress.

Gylgayton has won multiple awards for her writing, including placing second for the University of California system-wide 2010 Ina Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Prize and placing for both creative writing categories in the 2010 Pamela Maus Contest for Creative Writing, winning first in fiction and second in poetry.

Gylgayton graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, Davis in June 2010 with a BA in English-Creative Writing and a minor in Art Studio. Her Creative Writing Honors Thesis was awarded the 2010 Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize for Best Undergraduate Honors Creative Work. She currently teaches Interpretation of Literature at the University of Iowa. A web designer, Briony also created the website for Your Quizmaster.

P.P.S. Thanks to the late Kevin Quinn for many years of friendship and laughter.

The Beauty and Devotion Edition of the De Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz Newsletter

by yourquizmaster on December 17, 2012

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

This past Saturday I attended two radically different performances, and they both affected me profoundly.

The first was the graduation ceremony of UC Davis students who finished their coursework in the fall of 2012. One of my favorite students invited my son Jukie and me to join his friends and family at the celebration in The Pavilion, the same building where I graduated UC Davis with a PhD so many years ago (though back then we called it the Rec Hall). I saw proud smiles on the faces of graduates and their families, but a barely repressible sadness overshadowed the event. After the processional music and the entrance of the graduates, the MC of the morning’s ceremony, Dean Jessie Ann Owens (mu dean, incidentally), invited us to observe a moment of silence to remember and keep in our thoughts those who were so senselessly killed and wounded in Newtown, Connecticut the day before. As almost all five thousand of us stood in remorseful silence, we found ourselves listening to the impatient cries of the youngest siblings and cousins who didn’t wish to be made to sit still. These young ones cried and cried, playing for all of us our own internal, wailing, national soundtrack. Inviting catharsis, they cried for all of us there, and for those for whom all crying had ceased.

That Saturday night I saw my youngest son star in the Davis Children’s Version of The Nutcracker. I say “star” in the way that every parent feels that his or her child is the “star” of the show, even if he plays only one of the adorable bears, as my boy did. I was happy to see a few Pub Quiz regulars in the audience, and look forward to hearing what parts your kids played. I had seen the same show Thursday night – the night before the elementary school shootings – and was struck then by the novelty of all these children, many of whom I knew, playing their roles so confidently and waggishly. But Saturday night, despite the inevitable hilarity, I found the poignancy of the performance almost too much to bear. Wide-eyed and attentive, as parents we watched our children at their most joyful and confident. From the audience, I felt as if our children’s moments on stage were like graduation ceremonies, family reunions, and Christmas mornings all wrapped up into one moment of intensity. We recognized that these beloveds would look forward to their own graduations, to first loves and heartbreaks, to winning the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz, to lifetimes of passion and discovery and loving familiar support. In our time of mourning and loss, this was a moment for all of us to recognize how lucky we are to be in the presence of such miracles and wonders.

At a time like this, I am grateful for the peacemakers, the “helpers” (as Mr. Rogers would say in a recent internet meme), the mental healthcare workers, the teachers, and the gun safety advocates; I hope their voices are heard and heeded during the national debate and the legislative action that we have now, finally, been promised. I am also grateful for the artists: the poets, painters, choirs of angelic singers and child actors who can help us better understand and express how and what we feel when our emotional load is so heavy and distressing. Not all of us can lobby for new weapons regulations before Congress, but all of us can support those local organizations that spark and guide the imaginations of our children, and that support the expressions of empathy, creativity, and artistic accomplishment of all of us who participate. We are lucky to live in a community that recognizes education, the natural world, service, collaboration, and the arts as forces that can help us all to grieve, and to give hope to a troubled soul. As Leonard Bernstein said after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” I hope some artist, composer, singer or poet will help you and your families celebrate, and be comforted by beauty and devotion, during this difficult time.

I hope you can join us for tonight’s pub quiz. It will feature questions on oil, Microsoft, Brazil and Indonesia, clays and hills, Dimmesdale, limitless toys, a Christmas song, political talk shows, fresh and salt, Dominican-Americans, amusing use of punctuation, current events, armadillos and muskrats, Oedipal nature poetry, Latin phrases, hobbits, BAFTA, rock and roll, woodbine blurs, groups of people that have something in common, fast Americans, Scots, the history of consciousness, Irish culture, handicaps, past presidents, trees, royals, comic strips, wells, US cities, misery, fish, the magazine industry, big spenders, baseball, and Shakespearean antagonists.

We will not be holding a Pub Quiz on Christmas Eve, but I eagerly anticipate seeing all of you on New Year’s Eve at 7pm, even if other sorts of celebrating await you after the Quiz.

Your Quizmaster

Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

1. Mottos and Slogans. “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work” is the motto of the American Federation of WHAT?

2. Internet Culture. The woman who wrote what is considered to be the first computer program was also the only “legitimate” child of the poet Lord Byron. Her name is an anagram for the common imperative: EVADE A LOCAL. What is her name? You probably knew that her name is Ada Lovelace – Google featured her on its home page on the day of the Quiz.

3. Newspaper Headlines. International hero Nelson Mandela is resting in hospital today. Within three years, how old is the former South African President? (Hint: he is older even than the Jazz great Dave Brubeck was when he passed away last week.)

4. Four for Four. NASA's 35-year-old space probe may be about to leave the solar system more than 11 billion miles from Earth, CNET says. Which of the following is the name of that space probe? Endeavor 1, Enterprise 1, Explorer 1, or Voyager 1. This question didn’t stump many people.

5. Fleeing the US Senate. US Senator Jim DeMint currently represents which state of 4.7 million people?

P.S. Poetry Night returns to Davis on January 3^rd with Briony Gylgayton. I hope you can join us then at the John Natsoulas Gallery.