Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

I’ve been impressed with the turnout at the Pub Quiz this summer, despite these being traditional vacation months. We can thank one of my favorite educational reformers, Horace Mann, among others for the timing of our summer vacations. In the 1840s, (a decade before becoming the founding President of Antioch College, alma mater of both my father and my wife Kate), Mann worried that crowding schoolchildren into humid classrooms would encourage the spread of diseases, and that the overstimulation of young minds would drive children to agitation, and even insanity. Oliver Wendell Holmes was a schoolchild around that time, and he must have agreed with Mann, for he once said, “Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed.” One can only conclude from this logic that you should bring your “accurate” and overtaxed mind tonight to answer some tough questions. As Holmes also said, “A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.” You can start on those tasks and questions tonight at 9!

Speaking of your regular attendance at the Quiz, it has been brought to my attention that sometimes on the same Monday night that the hostesses have turned away teams of players who wish to participate in the Quiz (as may be the case tonight), other teams have gladly enjoyed the entertainment and camaraderie that we have grown used to on Monday nights, but chosen to order almost no food or drink. Although I get to focus only on the fun and challenge of amusing you for a couple hours, I do recognize that is a business that pays for the time and labor of the excellent wait staff and barkeeps that keep you happy and nourished while I prattle on about Supreme Court Justices and educational reformers. So if you enjoy the show, please support the restaurant that provides you that show. Other folks (folks who don’t plan ahead or remember to call 756-4556 by Sunday or so) are often available to take your booth if you don’t fill it – sometimes you see these folks crowding around the bar, hoping that SportsCenter will provide them an advantage on questions numbers eight and twenty-nine.

In addition to making Pub Quiz happen, also supports the Poetry Night Reading Series. This coming Monday night, before Pub Quiz, the reading series brings UC Davis alumnus James Kaelan to town. You might have seen Kaelan on the cover of the current Poets and Writers magazine, talking about his Zero Emission Book Project book tour – Saturday he left Los Angeles on his BIKE, and he is stopping in cities and bookstores from LA to Vancouver as he wends his way up the West Coast this summer. He’ll be stopping at The Avid Reader on 2^nd Street this coming Monday, July 19^th. I’ll be hosting that event at 7:30, just before hosting our trivia event at 9, so this week I will have to read Kaelan’s novel We’re Getting On. To find out more about Kaelan’s bike tour (with maps, pictures and movies), visit http://www.zeroemissionbook.com/, or register your interest in attending this event via Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=107634285951344&ref=ts .

Here are the hints regarding tonight’s Pub Quiz. Expect questions about publishing companies, internet culture, Canadians, state flowers, potent potables, philosophical economists, Chaka Khan (karaoke hint!), football, insects, Sesame Street, public servants, words beginning the letter “E,” fight songs, those who labor in freedom, basketball, actors and more actors, novelists, questions whose answers you can find on DavisWiki.org, Gary Saylin, Seeds and Grasses, famous socialists, California cities, remarkable California buildings, the obligatory LeBron James question (sort-of), and a Shakespeare play that you might actually have seen. I hope you have fun tonight.

See you tonight for the Pub Quiz!

Your Quizmaster

P.S. Last week’s Pub Quiz can be found in its entirety on the new website of the Your Quizmaster. I will be launching the site for real perhaps next week.

Friends of the Pub Quiz, and those curious about all the fun and fuss associated with the Pub Quiz, should come to de Vere’s Irish Pub in Davis (217 E Street), the highly esteemed pub and restaurant that fills up every night because of the superb quality of food, drink and company that can be found there. The de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz takes place every Monday at 7pm, though players are encouraged to arrive early to claim a table. As always, find out more about the Pub Quiz by visiting https://www.yourquizmaster.com. For more on de Vere’s Irish Pub, visit http://deverespub.com/.

Posted via email from yourquizmaster’s posterous

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Happy Independence Day! I hope you enjoyed the holiday festivities you’re your families yesterday. We had a spot so close to the Community Park fireworks that, once they began, we all had to lie down rather than crane our necks. We were too far from the grandstand to hear our Davis Poet Laureate, Allegra Silberstein, read a poem, but I was thinking about a Langston Hughes poem called “Let America Be America Again” that could be appropriate for the day. Here’s how the poem concludes:

O, let America be America again–

The land that never has been yet–

And yet must be–the land where every man is free.

The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME–

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose–

The steel of freedom does not stain.

From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,

We must take back our land again,

America!

O, yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath–

America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

We, the people, must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain–

All, all the stretch of these great green states–

And make America again!

Inspired by this poem, I’ve written a few questions for tonight that reflect upon this theme. You will also encounter questions on manly men, the internet, British royalty, Art Tatum (do you know his music? You might go download “Cocktails for Two”), tires, Star Trek, clever rhymesters, hormones, Broadway, objects worthy of pursuit, fireworks, fictional magazines, The Wall Street Journal, the filthy rich, the US Constitution, American Presidents, American films, Iraq, shipping, a white dwarf star, Spider-Man, Afghanistan, France, and Shakespeare, who once asked this famous question in Sonnet 65:

O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out

Against the wreckful siege of battering days,

When rocks impregnable are not so stout,

Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?

Before signing off I would like to acknowledge the contributions to the Pub Quiz of UC Davis Professor Ben Orlove, his family, and his friends. Ben attended his last Davis Pub Quiz this past week, and is now headed to a new teaching gig in Columbia. Congratulations, Ben. You and your team will be deeply missed by me, and somewhat less deeply by all the teams you would beat at the Pub Quiz every week. I hope you enjoy your memories as much as I have appreciated the memories of you and your teammates!

 

Your Quizmaster

P.S. Poetry Night returns to this coming Wednesday with Chris “Whitey” Erickson and his wife Mischa Erickson, about who poet Joe Wenderoth has said the following: “Chris Erickson and Mischa Kuczynski Erickson are tremendously talented writers.to have the chance to hear them read is to have the chance to be shaken and seized by the shape of where we are.or by the rushing veins of whatever it echoes with.it is a chance to free yourself, literally, from the delusion of on-going communication.it is a chance to feel the houses that you’ve slept in.” Wednesday at 8pm at . See http://www.poetryindavis.com or http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=136812969677861&ref=ts for details.

P.P.S. Here are four questions from last week’s Quiz. How many did/could you get right?

10.Know Your Historical Figures (taken from the “A” chapter of the World Book encyclopedia). How many years older was Aristotle than Attila the Hun? They were born around the same time, Aristotle was about 400 years older, he was about 800 years older, or he was about 1600 years older.

11.Unusual Words. What two-syllable, six-letter word starting with the letter “H” means “relating to the sense of touch; tactile”?

12.Another Music Question.Nikki Sixx, Tommy Lee, Mick Mars and lead singer Vince Neil, who yesterday was arrested on suspicion of a DUI one week after publicly declaring his sobriety, together make up what American rock band that was formed in Los Angeles in 1981?

13.Pop Culture – Television. What rotund comedian beat out Dolly Parton for the gig of host of the 1999 revival of the TV game show Family Feud? Hint: He stayed on the game show until 2002.

Friends of the Pub Quiz, and those curious about all the fun and fuss associated with the Pub Quiz, should come to de Vere’s Irish Pub in Davis (217 E Street), the highly esteemed pub and restaurant that fills up every night because of the superb quality of food, drink and company that can be found there. The de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz takes place every Monday at 7pm, though players are encouraged to arrive early to claim a table. As always, find out more about the Pub Quiz by visiting https://www.yourquizmaster.com. For more on de Vere’s Irish Pub, visit http://deverespub.com/.

Posted via email from yourquizmaster’s posterous