Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

I spent a delightful afternoon at the Davis Cemetery yesterday. Although I had never been on the grounds of the cemetery, it seemed oddly familiar to me, in part because of all the time I spent in cemeteries as a child. My best friend Tito, later known on his pilot’s license as Montague David Lord, lived across the street from The Holy Rood Cemetery in the Glover Park neighborhood of Washington DC. Fascinated by ghosts, hauntings, and other spooky subjects, Tito and I spent many afternoons reviewing the names and the birth and death dates of the thousands of people buried there. Known when I was a child as the best-documented slave burial ground in the city, Holy Rood Cemetery has been in a state of disrepair for many years. Georgetown University, which owns the land, investigated the possibility of disinterring those buried there, but protests from relatives and people eventually hoping to be buried there with those relatives dissuaded the university from moving forward with that plan. This interest in Holy Rood among the living seems strange to me now, for during all our visits I don’t know that Tito and I ever saw a funeral take place at 2126 Wisconsin Avenue – I remember more graves of Civil War veterans than of soldiers who took place in our subsequent conflicts.

The Davis Cemetery District, by contrast, contains one of the best-maintained cemeteries I have ever encountered. Unlike almost everywhere else in Davis, it also has topography, by which I mean, it has a hill. To the east of the burial plots one finds a large expanse of lawns, mature trees, a huge number of recently planted trees, and some actual wildlife: my children counted two jack-rabbits and a dozen or so wild turkeys. It was a beautiful site for a poetry reading, and yesterday I got to perform with Amy X. Neuburg, the electronic musician and opera singer who impressed and surprised the older crowd of 50 or so art and music lovers who attended the event. I myself was surprised by the large number of my poems that included mention of graveyards and memorials. Perhaps without knowing it I return to the images and settings that were so important to Tito and me when we were first starting to understand history and mortality.

Tonight’s Pub Quiz will include some questions about dead people, so prepare yourself for that. Expect also questions about young and accomplished people, Scarlett Johansson, April 14^th, bands that have appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, animation, undefeated people, China, opening doors, diamonds, former kings, dust, Iowa, eclipses, the Central Valley of California, dogs, spiders, Joe Biden, contiguous states, the US Senate, elderly protagonists, Americans with insufficient consonants, soybeans, the language of law, the Center for Reproductive Rights, Hungary, a man’s fist, the pronunciation of “Buscemi,” and Shakespeare.

The San Francisco Beat poet AD Winans comes to town this coming Friday night at 7 to read from his original work. Find out about Winans below, and about this weekend’s Jazz/Beat Festival at http://www.natsoulas.com/schedule/.

I hope to see you this evening for the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz!

 

Your Quizmaster

https://www.yourquizmaster.com

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yourquizmaster@gmail.com

 

Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

 

7.         Pop Culture – Music. The number one song in the nation this week, "One More Night," is performed by what LA-based pop rock band? 

 

8.         Sports.   You may have heard that Miguel Cabrera has recently achieved the baseball triple-crown. One of the three categories is home-runs. What are the other two? 

 

9.         Science.   The Hardy-Weinberg Principle most concerns which of the following disciplines? Astronomy, Chemistry, Genetics, Physics. 

 

10.       Great Americans.  In what year did Steve Jobs die? 

 

11.       Unusual Words according to Urban Dictionary. What P word do we use to describe a photo that has been ruined by someone or something that was not supposed to be in the photograph? 

 

P.S. More on AD Winans: A native of San Francisco, Allan Davis Winans is a poet, essayist, photographer, and short story writer whose work has appeared in over 2,000 literary magazines and anthologies, including City Lights Journal, Poetry Australia, The New York Quarterly, Beatitude, Beat Scene, and Rattle. In addition, he has written 50 books of poetry and two books of prose. Winans was close friends with Beat poets Charles Bukowski, Bob Kaufman, and Jack Micheline, having participated in the Beat and post-Beat era starting in 1958. From 1972 to 1989 Winans edited and published Second Coming Magazine, which produced a large number of books and anthologies, including the highly acclaimed California Bicentennial Poets Anthology. In 2006, he was awarded a PEN National Josephine Miles Award For Excellence in Literature, and, in 2009, PEN Oakland presented Winans with a Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2010, Bottle of Smoke Press published a 300-page collection of Winans’ selected poems, and in February 2012 Little Red Tree Press published Winans’ San Francisco Poems. To find out more about A. D. Winans, visit http://www.adwinans.mysite.com/.

 

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Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

 

Tomorrow is John Lennon’s birthday – he would have been 72 this week had he not been killed in 1980 outside his home in New York City. The Beatles’ Red and Blue albums seemed always to be spinning on our RCA record player when I was a child, and my interest in Lennon and his music spanned my earliest years, which were Lennon’s last, as well as the decades since his death. I remember my Lennon posters making one particular college roommate particularly uneasy. He came from a family of Republicans who taught him that Lennon was a radical, a communist, and an insurgent. It was known by then that President Nixon tried for years to have Lennon deported from his adopted country, in part because the anti-war activist participated in a large San Diego concert on the same evening as the 1972 Republican National Convention. The voting age had been recently lowered to 18, and Nixon was worried that Lennon would woo all those new voters, most of them Beatles fans, to the anti-war cause. Then-Senator Strom Thurmond even sent President Nixon a memo suggesting that “deportation would be a strategic counter-measure” to all of Lennon’s activism. History proved that Nixon had plenty to worry about, but McGovern wasn’t really one of them, for Nixon won the 1972 contest with the largest margin of any presidential election before or since, with McGovern winning only Massachusetts, and my hometown of Washington DC. On that election night, John Lennon attended a symbolic wake, and then separated from Yoko Ono. In documents that have been turned over to Lennon biographers, the FBI concluded, “Lennon appears to be radically oriented; however, he does not give the impression he is a true revolutionist, since he is constantly under the influence of narcotics.” I suppose that if you want to be a true revolutionary, you need to keep your head about you.

 

Speaking of political movements and rallies, a very different sort of President will be joining us in Davis tomorrow, as Bill Clinton campaigns on the Quad for local Democrats. I’ve seen Presidents Carter and Reagan from afar, and presidential candidates Jesse Jackson and Ted Kennedy up close. The crowds were too crazy the last time Clinton visited us – I think to spark interest in his wife’s candidacy four years ago – but I think there should be room for all of us on the Quad this coming Tuesday morning at 10:30. As we learned in November, the Quad can hold a large number of enthusiasts.

 

Expect a John Lennon question on the Pub Quiz tonight (a tie-breaker concerning two relevant songs). Tonight at de Vere’s you will also hear spicy film taglines, talk of fonts, comparisons to The Beatles, The Princeton Review, The US Civil War, Texas, LA-based pop rock bands, sports records, your choice of sciences, Urban Dictionary words that you can say on the radio, televised sports, Trivial Nail Canals, Triple A, the centers of things, Washington DC, Rick Perry (who?), California counties, buildings on the UC Davis campus, Irish actors, Paris, Spanish birds, medical maladies, presidential elections, The San Francisco Giants, and Shakespeare.

 

I hope to see you this evening for the Pub Quiz. The first team who introduces me to a team of six newly-recruited first-time players will be awarded a plate of fries with a serving of the delicious de Vere’s curry ketchup. Do come early to claim a table.

 

Your Quizmaster

https://www.yourquizmaster.com

http://www.twitter.com/yourquizmaster

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yourquizmaster@gmail.com

 

Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

 

1.         Internet Culture. As of December 2011, version 3.0 of the most popular blogging system in use on the Internet had been downloaded over 65 million times. Name it.

 

2.         Newspaper Headlines.   The candidates for US President are preparing for this week’s first Presidential debate. On what day later this week does the debate take place?

 

3.         Four for Four.  Which of the following members of famous couples, if any, were ever married to each other? Bonnie and Clyde, Cleopatra and Antony, Hepburn and Tracy, Kahlo and Rivera

 

4.         Dogs and Cats. With a 15% margin of error, what percentage of American dog owners own just one dog?

 

5.         Film Quotations. In what 2011 film does the central character say “Do not try the free pistachio ice cream! It done turn!”?

 

 

P.S. Happy birthday to two of our most stalwart Pub Quiz participants. Professor Keith David Watenpaugh will join us tonight, as he almost always does, even though it’s his birthday, while his teammate Don Lipper celebrates tomorrow. These two members of POM recently ran into each other in the Denver airport, so I’m sure they shared potential trivia question topics until they had to board their planes. Happy birthday to Keith and Don, and thanks to all of you who joined me on Facebook recently to share your Pub Quiz question topics. Expect to see all those topics represented in the coming weeks of the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz!

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Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

 

"Will the Real Mr. Howell Please Stand Up?" is not the title of an essay about the multimillionaires currently running for US President, but rather the title of an episode of Gilligan’s Island in which a man who looks uncannily like Thurston Howell III shows up on the island, and reveals his plan to take over the life of the ever-vacationing patrician. This might have been my first exposure to the concept of the doppelgänger, the twin that supposedly each of us has running around the world somewhere.

 

The image of a double spooked all of us who watched the 2010 film Black Swan. According to Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, by the biographer and poet Carl Sandberg, Abraham Lincoln was even more spooked when he confronted images of his own two-faced twin:

 

A dream or illusion had haunted Lincoln at times through the winter. On the evening of his election he had thrown himself on one of the haircloth sofas at home, just after the first telegrams of November 7 had told him he was elected President, and looking into a bureau mirror across the room he saw himself full length, but with two faces. It bothered him; he got up; the illusion vanished; but when he lay down again there in the glass again were two faces, one paler than the other. He got up again, mixed in the election excitement, forgot about it; but it came back, and haunted him. He told his wife about it; she worried too. A few days later he tried it once more and the illusion of the two faces again registered to his eyes. But that was the last; the ghost since then wouldn't come back; he told his wife, who said it was a sign he would be elected to a second term, and the death pallor of one face meant he wouldn't live through his second term.

 

Although without the forebodings of doom that typically surround doppelgänger stories, I had two doppelgänger encounters yesterday that are beginning to convince me that I resemble a generic Davisite. Yesterday at the monthly Davis Flea Market that takes place across the street from de Vere’s, a woman mistook me for the head of a Davis Elections Commission, and thanked me for agreeing to accept her as a new volunteer. I had to confess to her that I don’t work for the Davis Elections Commission, and that perhaps she was mistaking me for Freddie Oakley, our County Clerk Recorder (who looks nothing like me).

Then yesterday afternoon after a KDVS meeting in Freeborn Hall on campus, a nice man who evidently recognized me introduced me to his wife and to their two year-old daughter. I always enjoy meeting people that I supposedly already know, even as I told myself that I can’t be expected to remember the context of everyone I meet on the streets or in the restaurants and art galleries of Davis. Then, as I started to bike away, the man told his wife that I was Professor McCarthy, Chair of the Food Science and Technology Department at UC Davis. If you check out the faculty page of Michael McCarthy, you will see that at least that guy looks somewhat like me, though Professor McCarthy earned his PhD a full decade before I did (no offense to me).

 

None of these people compare in likeness to my true doppelgänger, Ken Norman of the Psychology Department at Princeton, who once was a Fellow in our McDonnell Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience. I was in de Vere’s for the after-party of a bi-monthly poetry reading, and a bunch of people asked if they could photograph me and share the picture with a friend who looks just like me. Ken sent me a nice note (Subject: Doppelgänger) soon thereafter that I must respond to. Because Professor Norman is an expert on how the brain remembers, maybe he can explain the psychological phenomenon of the doppelgänger. Have you met your doppelgänger, a discovered twin somewhere in the world?

 

Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on remembering, twins, American wars, Maine, fashion, famous marriages, blogging, the presidential campaigns, blood, dogs, Cleopatra, pistachio ice cream, boots, fighters, baseball, protein, expensive things, freeways, detectives, togetherness, raciness, likable levies, Oscar-winners, Italian cities, regarding fall elks, Chinese-born Americans, extant 60s rock bands, the middle ages, murals, SNL alums, Irish geography, political math, world capitals, red states, astronomy, magazines and journals, explosions, famous gangsters, shipwrecks, Shakespeare, and cats. According to my wife Kate, at least one of the questions that I will share tonight is too easy, but she is a close follower of the political scene. I expect everyone to score in the double digits.

 

I hope to see you this evening. October newbies will overrun the Irish Pub tonight, so come early to claim a table.

 

Your Quizmaster

https://www.yourquizmaster.com

http://www.twitter.com/yourquizmaster

http://www.facebook.com/yourquizmaster

yourquizmaster@gmail.com

 

Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

 

10.       Face Cards. Which suit is ruled by the suicide king?   

 

11.       Unusual Words. What verb with two consecutive F’s in it means “To reject (someone or something) in an abrupt or ungracious manner”? 

 

12.       Popular Films. According to the Library of Congress, what is the most watched motion picture in history? 

 

13.       Pop Culture – Television.    Andy Griffith’s Andy Taylor was named No. 8 on TV Guide’s list of the “50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time” in 2004. What dad with the initials CH was number one?  

 

14.       Another Music Question. Who had a big hit in 2010 with “DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love”?

 

 

P.S. I hope you will join me at a reading this Thursday by Davis therapist and award-winning poet Julia Levine. She will be accompanies by Ruth Schwartz, and between the two of them, they have authored a great number of books on topics that you will interest you if you care about the human condition. We start at 8 at the John Natsoulas Gallery. Add your name to the Facebook event!

 

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Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

According to a story I heard on National Public Radio recently, the recent surge in the polls for Democrats has as much to do with science as it does ideology. More specifically, the scientific analysis of elections, also known as psephology, allows analysts to determine how best to encourage potential partisans to vote. Evidently Democrats have a big advantage in this field because of all the academics needed to get results – some of them leave graduate school for Washington think tanks, and they know how to work with data. I’m sure that in a few years the Republicans will catch up, but it may take them longer to build the armies of volunteers willing to walk precincts on behalf of their candidates. Until then, depending on what happens in the world and at the Presidential debates, the TPM Electoral Scoreboard may seem predictive as well as descriptive. What’s your favorite swing state?

 

The competing tool that Republicans are using is the new voting law. A study revealed yesterday by The Advancement Project reveals that “New voting laws in 23 of the 50 states could keep more than 10 million Hispanic U.S. citizens from registering and voting, . . . a number so large it could affect the outcome of the November 6 election.” A recent article in Harvard Magazine points out that “Several states, including Florida (once again, a battleground), have effectively closed down registration drives by organizations like the League of Women Voters, which have traditionally helped to register new voters; some states are shortening early-voting periods or prohibiting voting on the Sunday before election day; several are insisting that registrants provide documentary proof of their citizenship.” Even though “The Republican National Lawyers Association in a study found only 340 cases of voter fraud [in the U.S.] over the course of a decade,” as I learned from an August airing of The Daily Show, Fox News helpfully has a “Voter Fraud Unit” to protect all of us. Bill Clinton must not be watching Fox News, for he calls this obsession with fraud a form of vote suppression, and feels that the vote suppression tactics are targeting black churches and the elderly. Don’t the elderly constitute a large part of Romney’s base?

 

By the way, imagine if after mentioning swing states in the newsletter I were to actually ask you a question tonight about the meaning of the word “psephology.” It comes from the Greek word for “pebble,” which the ancients used to use as ballots. A question about “psephology” is known among quizmasters as a “tomato topic,” in that its obscurity would inspire participants to throw tomatoes (in Italy, pomodoros) in protest (and perhaps accuse me of another sort of voter suppression). One of my jobs is to challenge you intellectually – to tax your memory, logic, and learning – without exasperating you with the unfairness or the straightforwardness of my questions. That way, you can leave the tomatoes to the professionals in the kitchen at de Vere's Irish Pub in Davis.

 

Like out politicians, we expect pub quiz questions to draw us in, but neither to mystify nor condescend to us. It’s a challenging balancing act. As the poet Rumi puts it, “Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.” Perhaps e. e. cummings had Rumi’s words in mind when he wrote “(i do not know what it is about you that closes / and opens;only something in me understands / the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses).”

 

Tonight’s quiz will include political questions, comfortable movements, the dawn of butterflies and the dusk of marriage, US states, watches and watching, retail sales, rock and roll heroes, teams that start with the letter B, Greek dawns, face cards, bicycle commuting, counties, The Library of Congress, Andy Griffith as Andy Taylor, effective DJs, nabbed fathers, breaking news, the 47%, rodents’ dentition, New England, poverty, employment, mathematics (hi Elaine!), dryer Londons, countries of the world, caterpillars, Irish culture, birth cities, children’s literature, doctor fathers, resignations, “name the sport,” the distance between Davis and DC, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In fact, I will go ahead and reveal that if you carefully reread Hamlet between now and 7 pm, you should be able to answer the Shakespeare question correctly. I keep the Collected Works of Shakespeare on my iPhone 4S for just such a literature-related exigency.

 

I’m excited for the students to return. Howabout you? I’m sure they will help to fill the Irish Pub tonight, for their responsibilities don’t begin until Thursday, if even then. As for tonight, come early to claim a table.

 

Your Quizmaster

https://www.yourquizmaster.com

http://www.twitter.com/yourquizmaster

http://www.facebook.com/yourquizmaster

yourquizmaster@gmail.com

 

Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

 

5.         Celebrity Birthdays. 50 Cent and Drew Barrymore were born the same year that Saturday Night Live premiered. With a one-year margin of error, name the year. 

 

6.         Famous Names. My research reveals that all of the following last names belong to famous people who share a first name. What is that first name? Lopez, Marchand, McKeon, Reagan, Walker, Wilson. 

 

7.         Pop Culture – Music. What are the five letters in the name of the electropop duo that had a big hit in 2011 with "Sexy and I Know It"? 

 

8.         Sports.   How many minutes are there in each quarter of an NBA basketball game? 

 

9.         Science.   Usually found on the underside of a spider's abdomen, to the rear, what three-syllable word do we use for a spider’s silk-spinning organ? 

 

 

P.S. Thanks for making it to the end of a particularly long newsletter. I try to keep these under 1,000 words to leave you some time on a Monday to read some Shakespeare.

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Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Last Monday, just before Pub Quiz, I was interviewed by News 10 via Skype. Somehow at News 10 they know they can call me for a quote or a comment whenever there is an internet-related news story. I’m considered an expert on such topics because of my 12-year old radio talk show that covers technology, and because of my long tenure teaching at UC Davis, including seven or so years teaching for the Technocultural Studies Program. I may be in someone’s old Rolodex, for Emmy-winning reporter George Warren from News 10 interviewed me back in 1992 as a follow-up to my appearance (along with my new bride) on a national TV show to talk about the way that we met.

           

As this was my first interview via Skype, I appreciated the coaching from the reporter and producers that contacted me. They suggested, for instance, that I remove the teddy bear from the frame where I was sitting in my son Truman’s room. Once the interview started, I learned to stop checking to see how I looked on camera, and just stared into the eyes of the reporter as I spoke, as if she were in the room with me.

           

That night after Pub Quiz I got to see myself on the news, and found that I had been joined by an unexpected costar. Evidently as I was animatedly gesturing while offering insights about the day’s disastrous GoDaddy outage, I had unknowingly shifted the laptop. During my short clip on the news one could plainly see the top of my head as well as the Winnie the Pooh poster behind me. It looked very professional. Time to invest in a tripod!

 

Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on international urban geography, so people who have traveled outside the United States will have a distinct advantage. You might make room for such a person on your team tonight. Expect also questions on internet culture, Korea, cable news, flowers (x2), abductions, TV shows that premiered in the 1970s and are still on the air, people named Lopez, electropop, the NBA, arachnids, famous people born in states where Romney has about a 15% lead in the polls, easy targets, voting blocs, Greek mythology, petroleum, judges, mononyms, poncho clips, popular destinations, existential questions about flight, Jody Foster films, Irishmen, melons, Joe Biden, Diet Coke, anchors, underdogs, new titles in Shakespeare plays, and Swedish exports.

 

I hope to see you this evening. Until school starts next week, we will all have a bit of breathing room at the Pub Quiz. Nevertheless, come early to claim a table.

 

Your Quizmaster

https://www.yourquizmaster.com

http://www.twitter.com/yourquizmaster

http://www.facebook.com/yourquizmaster

yourquizmaster@gmail.com

 

Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

 

1.         Important-Sounding Brits. Was Thomas Henry Huxley a famous British Actor, Biologist, Novelist, or Politician? 

 

2.         Pop Culture – Music. What are the last two words of the title of the current Taylor Swift hit that begins with the words “We Are Never Ever Getting”?    

 

3.         Sports.   On the 21st of what month this year did the NBA Finals conclude, with a big win for the Miami Heat? 

 

4.         Science.   According to scientists and other thoughtful people, what insect is the most dangerous animal on earth? 

 

5.         Great Americans.  William Penn and the pirate known as Blackbeard both died in the same year. Name the century. 

 

 

 

P.S. This coming Thursday is Poetry Night in the city of Davis, so I hope all of you can join me for a reading by Alice Jones (no relation) at the John Natsoulas Gallery. A poet, physician, and psychoanalyst, Jones has seen her work published in myriad journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Ploughshares, Poetry, The Boston Review, The Denver Quarterly, Antioch Review, and Chelsea. Her honors include fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1994, her work was included in The Best American Poetry, so she’s a big deal. Her newest book is titled Plunge. The reading starts at 8 Thursday, the open mic at 9, and the after-party at de Vere’s at 10. Join us for any or all of these events, and find details at http://www.poetryindavis.com. I’m trying to convince Joe Biden to call the Poetry Night Reading Series the “most powerful force in American poetry.” I’ll let you know when that happens.

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Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

 

            It takes some brass to add 2,300 words to one’s keynote nominating speech at the Democratic National Convention. As someone who speaks from a prepared text every Monday evening, I enjoy adding asides, but I doubt I could ever begin to approximate the flair of Bill Clinton, who has been compared to a jazz musician many times since Wednesday evening. Here’s an example by Nathaniel Stein in The New Yorker: “Clinton is such a master of rhetorical strategy—he commands such innate and reflexive mastery of what makes the spoken word resonate—that he cannot help but improve his speech as he gives it. He doesn’t ad lib in the sense that extras in a movie have a restaurant conversation. He improvises, in the sense that Miles Davis or Beethoven would come up with an enduring work of art on the spot.”

            And unlike the opposition between poetry and prose that I explored in last week’s newsletter, I felt that Bill Clinton was rather using the tools of the story-teller, or the preacher. Not many “zingers” in that speech, just a lot of folksy explaining. And now on the campaign trail President Obama is emulating his predecessor, better “explaining” the flaws he sees in Republican plans and policies (He has also been explaining hip-hop music to the uninitiated). Who knows if Obama will be able to sustain his post-convention momentum, but at least the early polls are encouraging for his supporters.

            George Herbert Walker Bush is the favorite Bush in our house, for he was always kind and jokesy with my Dad when they would run into each other at the same video store in the 1980s. Coincidentally, when the then Vice President asked my Dad for film recommendations (Bush knew my Dad from seeing him review movies on TV), Dad recommended the films of Clint Eastwood. The coincidence comes not only from the prominent Eastwood empty chair speech, but because evidently a few years after his conversation with my Dad, the elder Bush considered choosing Clint Eastwood as his running mate.

            The elder Bush was also president when, 20 years ago this week, I married my dear bride and best friend, Kate. She and I enjoyed an anniversary escape to Lake Tahoe this past weekend. Joining us in that escape were our three kids and the bulldog. Happy anniversary, Kate!

            Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on addictive snacks, Irving Berlin, healthy choices, famous Brits, Microsoft, breakups, the Miami Heat, bugs, pirates, sharpness, superhero movies, zoos, police procedurals, rock and roll icons, solar hernias and other maladies, Nevada, St. Louis, enjoying the scenery, winter Olympics, Wendy’s inventor, Hitchcock films, Irish culture, malfunctions, the iPhone, labor, grandmas, cigarettes, four Richards, apparati, local memoirists, the NFL, and the last lines of Shakespeare’s plays.

 

See you this evening! I hope you can come early to claim a table.

 

Your Quizmaster

https://www.yourquizmaster.com

http://www.twitter.com/yourquizmaster

http://www.facebook.com/yourquizmaster

yourquizmaster@gmail.com

 

Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

 

1.         Mottos and Slogans.    What six-letter company uses the commercial slogan “Because you’re worth it”? 

 

2.         Internet Culture. The game Angry Birds was first released for Apple's iOS in December of what year? 

 

3.         Four for Four.  At his big speech last week, Clint Eastwood said “We don’t need lawyers in the White House.” Which of the following Americans, if any, have law degrees? Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan. 

 

4.         Food and Drink. Bourbon is a type of American whiskey – a barrel-aged distilled spirit made primarily from what grain? 

 

5.         Pop Culture – Music. Last year’s pop song “On the Floor,” one of the best-selling singles of all time, appeared on the seventh album, Love?, of what singer and actress? 

 

 

 

P.S. What’s older than all of the following?

 

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Lollapalooza

Nirvana’s Nevermind

REM’s Out Of Time

Selena Gomez

Hot Shots!

The Death Of Freddie Mercury

Taylor Lautner

Michael Jackson’s “Black Or White”

Disney’s Beauty & The Beast

Thelma And Louise

 

Answer: My marriage!

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Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

 

Mario Cuomo once said, “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” I was thinking of that quotation this past week while watching the speeches presented at the Republican National Convention. In his acceptance speech, Romney had an interesting line in which he seemed to confront the poetic magic of President Obama’s campaign rhetoric:

 

Many of you felt that [optimistic] way on Election Day four years ago. Hope and Change had a powerful appeal. But tonight I'd ask a simple question:  If you felt that excitement when you voted for Barack Obama, shouldn’t you feel that way now that he’s President Obama? You know there’s something wrong with the kind of job he’s done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him.

 

Perhaps one of the strongest points Romney made Thursday night, he suggested that many Americans voted for Barack Obama because we were moved by the great speaker’s rhetoric – the poetic sway of his words – and perhaps because we were appealing to what President Lincoln called “The better angels of our nature” by confronting our racist past with our votes for a post-racist (and for many, a post-Bush) future. As we’ve been told many times, President Obama is also likeable.

 

In some ways, Romney’s emphasis seeks to inoculate us against Democratic rhetorical flourishes in the future, and, more specifically, he raises the bar for President Obama’s speech Thursday night. As a poet, I have been reflecting upon the opposition Romney and the RNC insinuate between that which is rhetorical, poetic, or even artsy, and that which is practical and businesslike. I often find myself trying to confront or ignore those commercial interests that seem to obscure the more substantive pleasures of reading, play-going and concert-going, or writing or performing something myself, even a Pub Quiz. We know, for instance, that Romney has said that he will seek to end federal support for the arts if he is elected, saying in a Fortune Magazine interview that he will seek to eliminate “the Amtrak subsidy, the PBS subsidy, the subsidy for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities.” I wonder if the need for such investments in the artistic souls of future entrepreneurs is not more evident than ever.

 

As an educator, by contrast, I agree with Sir Ken Robinson, who argues the value of imagination and creativity. He says,

 

Imagination is not the same as creativity.  Creativity takes the process of imagination to another level.  My definition of creativity is “the process of having original ideas that have value.”  Imagination can be entirely internal.  You could be imaginative all day long without anyone noticing.  But you never say that someone was creative if that person never did anything.  To be creative you actually have to do something.  It involves putting your imagination to work to make something new, to come up with new solutions to problems, even to think of new problems or questions.

 

You can think of creativity as applied imagination.

 

Imagination is necessary, of course, for the playwright, the opera singer, or even the owner of a small business. Thinking about the musicians that matter to her, a colleague of mine recently opined that the Democrats have a “deeper bench,” and I suppose that deep bench of creativity will be on display this week when delegates enjoy performances by Earth, Wind and Fire, The Foo Fighters, and Mary J. Blige. By contrast, I was amused by the long list of evidently Democratic-leaning lyricists who have objected to the Republicans using their songs: Last week Dee Snider of Twisted Sister said “no” to Paul Ryan who wanted to arrive to rallies to “We’re Not Going to Take It,” Survivor earlier said Newt Gingrich could not have their “Eye of the Tiger,” Tom Petty said that Michele Bachmann was not his kind of “American Girl,” and even Bruce Springsteen told President Reagan that he may not use “Born in the USA” at any of his rallies. Do such public refusals and denials by some of our best-known songwriters suggest some central and unrecognized power that creative people have over all of us? All this makes us wonder if, as Percy Shelley once said, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

 

Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions about Republicans, creativity, stand-up comedians, birds (x2), iOS, Clint Eastwood, lawyers, food and drink, August disasters, pop songs that didn’t qualify for my “new energy dance mix,” impressive athletes, the Southern Hemisphere, big boys, New Jersey, things that way as much as five tons, California history, trickery, millennials, Atlanta, tattoos, water, classical music, male sinners, movie taglines, Brown hair, Florida, important books of the 1960s, Norse myths, the Irish economy, lists created by The American Film Institute, big impacts, flowers, faraway countries, a Shakespeare question that’s actually about other countries, fatal mishaps, and hay.

 

Bring a big team or two tonight to compensate for those people with Tuesday night conflicts. See you at 7!

 

Your Quizmaster

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This week’s quiz will be a cake walk compared to last week’s. Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

 

10.       Great Dutchmen. According to Forbes Magazine, making $25 million a year, Tiësto is the highest paid WHAT in the world?

 

11.       Unusual Words. What five-letter word beginning with the letter L means easily understood; completely intelligible or comprehensible?

 

12.       Books and Authors. What Ayn Rand book most inspired Paul Ryan?

 

13.       Pop Culture – Television.     The name of the current anchor of The CBS Evening News is an anagram for PETTY CELLOS. Name him. Hint (for the newsletter): his first name is Scott.

 

14.       Another Music Question. Who had a big hit in 1965 with “The Tracks of My Tears”?

 

 

P.S. This coming Thursday night is Poetry Night in the City of Davis, and I hope you can join us. We will be welcoming poets Cynthia Linville and Christopher Yu on Thursday, September 6^th at 8:00 PM. They will be performing at the John Natsoulas Gallery at 521 1^st Street in Davis. The after-party will begin Thursday night at about 10 at de Vere’s Irish Pub in Davis. People who are up late watching President Obama’s speech may come only to the after-party.

 

A former pupil of prominent Sacramento poet Dennis Schmitz, Cynthia Linville has taught English at California State University, Sacramento, since 2000 and served as editor of both Poetry Now (2008-2012), and Convergence: an online journal of poetry and art. She is a regular contributor to the Sacramento News and Review, Medusa’s Kitchen and WTF. She has also appeared in The Sacramento Bee, The Rattlesnake Review, and Song of the San Joaquin. She periodically hosts readings for The Crocker Art Museum, The Vox, and The Sacramento Poetry Center, as well as performances with the group Poetica Erotica.

 

Christopher Yu is a recent graduate of The University of California, Davis, where he earned degrees in both English and Economics. He was among the winners of the 2012 Pamela Maus Prize for Poetry, and hosted the LLAMA Radio Show on KDVS. He studied with poets Joshua Clover and Joe Wenderoth, and his poetry has appeared in the new literary anthology All the Vegetarians in Texas Have Been Shot (2012), from Absurd Publications. Chris Yu has been an occasional Pub Quiz participant, so he deserves your support. I have not asked him what he thinks about Clint Eastwood.

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Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

 

            The end of August marks a significant transition for most renters in Davis, as well as for the Pub Quiz. One reason (among many) that it is so difficult to find an available table at the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz over the summer is that many renters have few summer responsibilities outside of preparing for moving from their beloved adopted hometown. As a result, July and August provide ideal opportunities for them to relish time with friends, enjoy a beverage, and prove to themselves and to the other teams that they have learned something during their years of instruction at UC Davis. Vibrant people who choose not to subordinate their leisure time to one (shrinking) screen or another often prefer to look their friends in the eyes as they rack their brains for a tip-of-the-tongue response to something they feel they should know. The competition, laughter, element of chance and camaraderie provide many summer Davisites moments of instant nostalgia that they can carry to their next lease or to their next adventure outside of our entirely relevant city.

            Once September rolls around, we will see who has remained. Will the fall months pack our Irish Pub the way the summer months have? Will Dr. Andy choose valuable items of swag from the free-for-all yard sale goods found outside every apartment complex in Davis this week? Find the answers to these and many other questions at the de Vere’s Irish Pub Quiz. To September and beyond!

            And speaking of our obsessions with screens, I’m just as guilty as anyone else when it comes to reaching for a smart phone whenever I am off walking by myself, or when I am taking my children trick-or-treating, as portrayed in a famous October 2009 cover illustration of The New Yorker. Because I have impulsive children, I consider myself especially aware of my surroundings, for my first job is to keep them safe. Nevertheless, after Pub Quiz last Monday I didn’t hear that bicyclist speeding down D Street without a light. I was also distracted, while crossing the street, by my cell phone, for I was texting my wife Kate that I’d be right home to help put the kids to bed after their day at Stinson Beach. When the unapologetic cyclist slammed into me, I was just about to hit “send” – instead, I watched my beloved iPhone skirt down the block, the screen facing upward and clearly visible in the crepuscular evening. Of course, it didn’t help that I wasn’t watching where I was going, and that I was dressed like a ninja. Fortunately, like a ninja, I walked away from my conflict without a scratch. At least I didn’t end up like that woman who stumbled into the mall fountain while texting. Be safe out there, folks! The Pub Quiz is not the only time when you should take a break from your smart phone.

            Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on many of the expected topics, including a great deal of film questions. Expect to be asked about blockbuster films, online films, sequels, and action-adventure films. Expect also to be asked about otters, people of European extraction, bicycles, Republicans, millionaires, the people of Davis, intelligibility, Unitarians, Hannibal, hockey, Boston, caimans, Dutchmen, New York Times bestsellers from the 1950s, petty stringed instruments, tears, geode notches, iMAX, screws, People Magazine, countries that import their fish, final fantasies, botany, great poets, jazz, incredible pitchers, and Shakespeare.

            I hope you will join the capacity audience for tonight’s quiz, and that you will help me in September to recruit new players to replace the departed renters. Thanks for all your attention this summer!

 

Your Quizmaster

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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz, this time with a few answers.

 

1.         Mottos and Slogans.    What company proclaims that you should “Leave the driving to us”?  

 

2.         Internet Culture. Not adjusted for inflation, what is the most valuable company in history?  

 

3.         Newspaper Headlines.   Swimmer Diana Nyad is currently attempting a swim between what two countries? Cuba and the United States (she didn’t make it)

 

4.         Four for Four.  Which of the following actors, if any, were born in Russia? Yul Brynner, Kirk Douglas, Peter Falk, Natalie Portman. (YNNN) At the end of his life, I got to see Brynner play The King on stage.

 

5.         Sports.   What NFL quarterback holds the record for career completions?

 

 

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Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

 

Recently I ran into a university colleague who had left teaching for a position as a project manager elsewhere at UC Davis. He said that he loves working with “an adult population” on the far west side of campus, far away from undergraduates. I smiled and told him that I was pleased that he was happy with his new position. What I didn’t tell him was that I hold a radically different opinion, for I am sustained and (appropriately) challenged by my classroom interactions with undergraduate and graduate students, I find that the energy of college students feeds my own, and I feel that potentially shaping the choices and futures of Aggies makes my work as a member of the UC Davis faculty important and meaningful. I suppose this is why I teach, and value teaching. As Aristotle tells us (or warns us), “Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.”

 

Speaking of promising youth, this past Saturday night I attended an event hosted by Absurd Publications, a new publishing collective established by UC Davis undergraduates and recent graduates. This impressive group of students, most of whom met in a poetry seminar that I taught a year ago, have published an anthology of poetry and fiction, stated distributing a free experimental journal called The Oddity, and established a workshop series that offers support and critique of the creative output of anyone who cares to attend (free of charge). As a vegetarian, I’m still deciding what I think of the title of their most recent publication (All the Vegetarians in Texas have been Shot), but I totally admire the content. I encourage you to pick up a copy this week at The Avid Reader to see if you agree (and to support local artists and authors).

 

Tonight’s Pub Quiz at de Vere’s will include questions on most of the following topics: transportation, fruit, dogs, jellyfish, Russians, arable land, tall men named Sacha, Natalie Portman, single-digit numbers, tall men, Oscars, country music, football, amateurs, POTUS, short stories, dashes of emotion, stenography, world languages, epistles, Asia, Africa, monocular vision, people named Hawkes, hunting in Ireland, vice presidents, water, six-syllable words that might come up in your biology class, Moroccan women, baseball, and Shakespeare.

 

Even though summer is almost over for the schoolchildren of Davis, I still expect enough parents, energetic UC Davis students, new participants and regulars to effectively “sell out” tonight’s Pub Quiz. Do come early to claim a table.

 

Your Quizmaster

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yourquizmaster@gmail.com

 

Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

 

 

1.         Mottos and Slogans.    What US state uses the following as state slogans: “The Greatest Snow on Earth” and “Life Elevated”? 

 

2.         Internet Culture. Which of the following popular news websites uses as its tagline “Read Less. Know More”? Chooser, Loser, Newser, or Snoozer? 

 

3.         Newspaper Headlines.   Helen Gurley Brown, author of the empowered-woman classic Sex and the Single Girl, died today at age 90. She was the longtime editor of what international magazine for women that was first published in 1886? 

 

4.         Actors and Actresses. Who had first billing in the 1999 science-fiction comedy parody film Galaxy Quest? 

 

5.         Local Celebrities. About what UC Davis Nutrition professor has it been said that she teaches more students in person than any professor west of the Mississippi? 

 

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