Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Usually when I appear on the radio program Insight (weekday mornings at 9 on Capital Public Radio, KXJZ), the host starts with an apology. I know from hosting a radio show myself for the last 22 years that conversations can run a little long, so the people at the end of the show (where my stories inevitably were, after the crime or forest fire stories) get less time than they might have been promised.

This status of coming at the end of the broadcast is a family tradition. My dad, Davey Marlin-Jones, was the theatre and film critic for the CBS affiliate in Washington DC all through the 1970s and most of the 1980s. The movie reviews came last because the arts are almost always seen as the least newsworthy element of the day’s news. This meant that my dad had to heed the hand signals that he was getting from camera operators; one told him to chat amiably with the anchors after his review, while the other told him to talk faster because the broadcast had to conclude exactly on time so that locals could watch the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.

Ironically, going last on Channel 9 enhanced my dad’s local star-power considerably. In an era when most people got their information about the world from TV news, and at a time when Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America (could you imagine a journalist having that designation today?), and at a time when people gathered to watch the news because they didn’t yet own VCRs, all the local news junkies knew my dad as that wacky guy on Channel 9 who reviewed the films. At Boston University I made friends with a guy named Paul who told me that he often tried to convince his parents that Davey Marlin-Jones must have owned the TV station, for why else would they let him do such nutty things on the air?

Because of my dad’s local celebrity, people would yell his name from passing Metrobusses on Wisconsin Avenue, he would get sat immediately in nice restaurants (I later learned that he would habitually tip the maître d’), and he’s get into conversations with Vice Presidents of the United States. Once my dad noticed a bunch of armed men in suits visiting our sandwich shop (at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Macomb Street), so he told my brother and me to get ready to duck under the table. Then Walter Mondale walked in, and ordered a sandwich. They had to dine outside because Eleanor Mondale wasn’t wearing shoes. As we were leaving not long thereafter, Mr. Mondale spotted my dad and waved him over for a conversation and for the shy children to meet each other. I got the sense that reported wild child Eleanor was not terribly interested in Oliver or me, but we still had to make small talk while our dads chatted about film and politics.

None of us could have imagined Twitter back then, but on this past Thursday I was the lead-off guest to talk about Elon Musk buying Twitter, and what it will mean for online micro-discourse. I invite you to listen to my lead-off appearance on the KXJZ’s Insight website. I enjoyed the conversation, losing my words only once, channeling my mom who has outlived my dad by a couple decades so far, and who now has trouble with conversation. As Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock says, “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” Many of us feel that way, whether we are chatting with vice presidents in sandwich shops or discussing Elon Musk’s attempt to take over what he calls “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity will be debated.” 

When it comes to the media, these are strange times and likely to become stranger, with a concentration of media ownership and influence in the hands of an ever shrinking number of men. Not only does Musk have more followers (almost 90 million) than Walter Cronkite had more viewers (almost 30 million), Musk will soon own the medium, just as my friend Paul thought about my dad and Channel 9 in Washington DC in the late 1970s. I look forward to commenting on these changes. Look for me at the end of the broadcast.

In addition to topic raised above, this week’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on the following topics: breakfast cereals, blizzards, hurricanes, detectives, Madison Square Garden, pool players, gladiators, habitable landmasses, plant materials, best pictures, Ireland exports, French terms, oily misinformation, delish words, mountain peaks, golden shovels, museum finds, uplifting spoonfuls, little puffs, Superbad resignations, recipients of calls, Roman gods, people born overseas, categories of delicacies, successful singers, music videos, current events, and Shakespeare.

Thanks to all the supporters on Patreon who make all this happen, especially the Outside Agitators, the Original Vincibles, and Quizimodo, who sustain this enterprise. Kudos to the players who pledge for their entire team! Let’s look forward to a time when we can all gather again to chat amiably over sandwiches. 

Be well.

Dr. Andy

P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:

1. Internet Culture. Increasing in popularity, is “BeReal” a new dating app, music platform, photo sharing social medium, or video game?  

2. Newspaper Headlines. The city of Tver is a “city of oblast significance.” In what country is it found: France, Israel, Russia, Turkey?  

3. The City of Dixon. According to the city of Dixon’s 2019 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, the top employer in the city has 470 employees. Name it.  

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Today is Picnic Day in the city of Davis, and the excitement is palpable.

Returning after a two-year Covid hiatus, the boisterous shindig that celebrates UC Davis and the mostly agricultural history of our top public university will bring thousands of people to the campus and to the city of Davis. Most of the activities take place outside, though regular campus denizens will be expected to complete their symptom surveys before entering any buildings. I hope everyone departing this big party at the end of the day, or even right after the parade, will remain healthy and symptom-free for the rest of the springtime.

Speaking of the parade, I’m excited to return to my role as grandstands Picnic Day Parade Announcer, a function I have performed perhaps a dozen times before, starting in 2009 or so. It wasn’t my award-winning UC Davis faculty status that first inclined a long-since graduated group of undergraduates to choose me for this honor, but rather my proven ability to read copy with enthusiasm, a skill I have honed on the radio and behind the Poetry Night microphone for decades. Did you know that Picnic Day is the largest student-run event in the country?

The aforementioned “grandstands” refers to the beginning of the Parade, where leaders in the Associated Students of UC Davis (student government) gather to be recognized, give speeches, introduce the UC Davis Chancellor, and introduce the Parade Marshall Dr. Nam Tran. Dr. Tran and I are very different sorts of doctors. He is the senior director of clinical pathology at UC Davis Health, which means that he has been a key figure in local COVID-19 testing. He said, “I will be there to represent the many UC Davis laboratory professionals who joined the fight against COVID-19.” I look forward to meeting him. I wonder if he will be wearing gloves, as well as two masks. Will he shake hands or want to bump elbows?

The theme for Picnic Day this year is “Rediscovering Tomorrow.” While many people will be happy just to rediscover their way back to campus, as a Buddhist, I would be happy just to see more people rediscover their todays, or their nows. As the Buddha said, “The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.” C.S. Lewis said something similar more succinctly: “This moment contains all moments.”

Speaking of now, the time has come for me to walk over to campus to be given my commemorative T-shirt, my bottle of water, and my microphone, everything I need to start the Picnic Day Parade at UC Davis’ 108th Picnic Day, being held in person on the Davis campus this morning and all day on Saturday, April 23. Perhaps I will see you there!

Be well.

This week’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on topics raised above, and on the following: Reality, kings found in America, significant regions, funny nicknames for scandal-ridden scalawags, Black Panthers, football clubs, sub accounts, crayfish, forestry, southeastern Europe, Oscar-winners, Romantic poets and poems, losing streaks, lovely peaks, British colleges, things that are built to stay free, American princes, outdoor dining, people from Toronto who speak Esperanto, binary compounds, draft picks, sweet children, common surnames, friends in Dixon, current events, and Shakespeare.

Thanks to all the supporters on Patreon who make the Pub Quizzes and the newsletters possible, especially the most stalwart supporters: the Outside Agitators, the Original Vincibles, and Quizimodo. I’m always grateful to players who pledge for their entire team. Speaking of the future, let’s look forward to a time when we can all gather again to play with our friends! 

Happy Picnic Day!

Dr. Andy 

P.S. Here are three question’s from last week’s quiz (which I will gladly send to  you if you request it via email):

1. Internet Culture. Which one of the Big Five American information technology companies has Andy Jassy as its president and CEO?  

2. Newspaper Headlines. Starting with the letter V, what is the name of the den of voter fraud allegations that calls itself America’s premier Active Adult Retirement Community located in sunny central Florida?  

3. Taxes. The U.S. office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue was created during what war in which the United States took part?  

P.P.S. Thanks to Peggy Stein for making the jump from Pub Quiz regular to Poetry Night attendee! Our next event is on May 5^th, and will feature Joseph Millar and Dorianne Laux, two huge names in poetry.

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Welcome, ROTARY friends! Please join me on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/yourquizmaster.

On this rainy Saturday I get to perform a 31-question Pub Quiz before a live audience. I used to do this every week, but now I am semi-retired from this work, sending quizzes out to a select number of devoted Patreonsubscribers, perhaps including you.

In her most famous song, Joni Mitchell asked the immortal question, “Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got / Till it’s gone?” I felt incredibly lucky to connect with my Pub Quiz friends and the many enthusiastic strangers every week, but, like so much of our lives, like walking without fear into an art museum or a used book store, I didn’t pause to imagine what life would have been like without the rituals that we had come to depend upon.

Consider this photograph of Princess Elizabeth at 14. You can tell that she is finishing a book, and probably had a lot of time for reading in 1940, when she wasn’t raising money for, say, the Queen’s Wool Fund, that bought and collected wool for soldiers’ uniforms. Elizabeth was born April 21, 1926 (she turns 96 next week), and Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, so she had just over 13 years for play, leisure, reading, and family before everything changed.

Like all of us beginning in March of 2020, Princess Elizabeth stayed home when war broke out, but which home? It was proposed that the heir apparent be evacuated to Canada, but her mom (later the Queen Mother, who outlived Princess Diana) objected. She said, “The children won’t go without me. I won’t leave without the King. And the King will never leave.” I’m sure King George VI of England inspired his citizens much the way that the rapidly-aging Volodymyr Zelenskyy inspires the people of Ukraine and the people of the world today.

Princess Elizabeth spent much of her early teens holed up in the Balmoral (Scotland) and Windsor Castles, where her castle was her home. After she came of age, she trained as a driver and mechanic, and was given the rank of honorary junior commander. That’s probably not the title that comes up most often. When Elizabeth turned 21 during an overseas trip to Africa, she made this pledge: “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.”

Queen Elizabeth’s life has indeed been long, practically the longest of anyone with a job like hers. She is the longest-lived and longest-reigning British monarch, beating Queen Victoria by seven years so far. Elizabeth is the longest-serving female head of state in history, and if she maintains her spot on the throne for another year and a half, she will beat the record of Louis XIV of France. Even older than Dianne Feinstein, QE2 is the oldest and longest-serving incumbent head of state. Assuming her memory is intact, she has stories to tell about meeting most of the important figures from most of the 20^th century, including, for example, Winston Churchill, Harry S Truman, Charles De Gaulle, and Barbra Streisand.

Like Charles Foster Kane, Elizabeth probably misses simpler times. As we are all younger than she is, and probably somewhat more nimble, we might consider that we need not wait to reminisce about earlier times. The present is the earlier time. Let’s be present with the present, take gaps to notice the fickle weather, and gather with our friends for a drink or a performance, just as we did all the time, not knowing how lucky we were.

This week’s Pub Quiz will be sent out Saturday night, for first I will present it to a large group sponsored by the Sunrise Rotary Club of Davis. When it arrives, you will recognize questions about topics raised above, as well as the following: Fast runners, big five leaders, famous roses, incessant questioning, golden gloves, prominent poets, medical adjectives, people who are ahead of Germany, Coliseum workers, Boston notables, upper Manhattan, young lovers, best-selling books, odd smells, cocktails, financial trackers, aromatic treats, world geography, valuable toes, sure ladies, nee-Westerns, low ebbs, trellises, bellwethers, basketball teams, California cities, one-word titles, current events, and Shakespeare. Some of these hints refer to the same questions as other hints.

Thanks to all the supporters on Patreon who make all this happen, especially the Outside Agitators, the Original Vincibles, and Quizimodo. Please join these players on Patreon! I’m always grateful to players who pledge for their entire team. Let’s look forward to a time when we can all gather again to play with our friends and competitors! Until then, I appreciate your remote support.

Best,

Dr. Andy

P.S. Here are three questions from last weeks’ quiz:

1. Four for Four. Of the following oldest buildings of their kind still in operation, which opened for the first time in the 19^th century: Airport, movie theatre, shopping mall, zoo?  

2. Martial Arts. What Michigan-born actor and Aikido practitioner was granted Serbian and Russian citizenship in 2014?  

3. Pop Culture – Music. Born in New York City, what singer-songwriter enjoyed a 20+ year solo career, during which time he produced 33 top 40 hits in the U.S., all of which he wrote himself? Hint: He had three number one hits in the 1980s.  

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Today my daughter Geneva is moving into her first post-collegiate apartment. Now that she has a job as a paraeducator at Patwin Elementary, the school her brother attended and for which I have hosted a number of fundraisers over the years, she and her girlfriend can afford the outrageous rents that students pay to be close to the corner of Sycamore and Russell here in the city of Davis.

They chose that location because of its walkable proximity to Patwin, but also because their new home is across the street from Trader Joe’s. My wife Kate and I lived across the street from a small grocery store in London, so we remember how convenient it is to stroll a mere 20 yards from one’s front door to pick up ingredients for the evening meal. Some Davisites might remember how overjoyed we felt when Trader Joe’s came to town, thus precluding trips to Sacramento to stock up on favorite signature products, such as their seasonal butternut squash macaroni and cheese. Geneva and Amanda will have all those inexpensive food and wine options a 90-second walk from their home, allowing them to save money that they will instead hand over to their new landlord.

So late last night I drove over a vanload of boxes and small furnishings, including furniture donated by local friends, double-parking with the hazards lights on as groups of UC Davis students strolled by in the dark, laughing, some of them in party dresses. I almost asked a group of six young men if they would like to help my daughter move into her new digs by carrying the contents of the van to her first-floor apartment all at once, rather than my having to make 30 trips, but then I remembered that I was behind on my steps for the day (I ended up with 15,678), and I needed the invigorating workout. 

I enjoy physical activity and labor (Kate and I even got married on Labor Day, 1992). In my head, I’ve always mistranslated the Biblical phrase “every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour” as “labor is its own reward.” I feel this way about physical labor, for I know that I sleep better after a day that included lifting weights or lifting boxes, though I should quickly add that I expect to be compensated fairly for my scholarly labor. After all, UC Davis is not UCLA, which recently posted an assistant adjunct position in Chemistry, with an expectation that the successful applicant would not be paid: “Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position.” Ouch!

While the new opportunity for Geneva is exciting for her, we will miss having her at home. I enjoy our walks along the greenbelt, and hearing her stories about the spirited children she gets to support at Patwin. Geneva knows I also appreciate hearing about her (often online) interactions with her far-flung friends from Davis Senior High School and Beloit College. She runs Dungeons and Dragons games for two or three groups of friends, so she is always creating encounters, challenges, and adventures in her head and in her notebooks. We love hearing the laughter coming out of her room, and the muffled voices of her friends on Zoom and Discord. 

Sometimes during one of these marathon sessions I find myself delivering to Geneva’s room (the room where she has lived since 2004) a burrito or one of her mom’s famous omelets. That’s when I hear the phrase “Hold on: There’s a knock at the door.” Her online friends inevitably grow anxiously quiet when she says this, knowing that the knock might come from an ogre or a displacer beast in the world she has created. Instead, it’s just her dad, hand-delivering a meal, communicating in one of many small ways how much we appreciate having all five members of the family under one roof.

This week’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on topics raised above, and on the following: Central images, union labels, unmentionables, Will & Grace, ice breakers, New York City boroughs, happy ladies, tall hills, cleansers, arcs and arches, catfish tunics, old zoos and airports, Serbian citizens who were born in water winter wonderlands, popular valleys, reality TV shows, African countries, charts and the absence of charts, singer-songwriters, people named Andre Iguodala, propulsion and signaling, French ladies, prophetic dreams, difficulty concentrating, rails, Brendas, rails, dogs with famous names, horns, land bridges, vengeful villains, current events, and Shakespeare.

Thanks to all my subscribers. If you value these newsletters, please consider subscribing via Patreon. Those who help out at the $10 level or higher get the Pub Quiz every week: 31 questions and 31 answers. Shout-out to the regular subscribers who came to see the Julia Levine poetry reading this past Thursday!

Enjoy today’s invigorating winds!

Dr. Andy

P.S. Here are four questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:

1. California Culture. What notable (now late) Californian said, “If you are working on something that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you”?  

2. Books and Authors. The first musician (and first non-European) to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913) was Rabindranath Tagore. Who is the most recent lyricist and musician to win the same prize?  

3. Sports.  The AUDL is the top professional ultimate league in the world. What does the D in AUDL stand for?  

4. Shakespeare. To what does Shakespeare refer with the phrase “the green-eyed monster”? 

P.S. If there’s a smallish kitchen or dining-room table in your Davis garage that you would like to see go to a good home, I will gladly come pick that up today. Thanks!

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.” Bob Marley

As a functionally blind theatre director, my father could not rely on notes when observing the run-through of a play during rehearsals. As a result, he had to pay special attention during a performance, organizing in his head all his various encouraging or corrective comments for his actors, lighting and sound technicians, and assistant directors so that his “vision” of the play could be realized in time for opening night.

My dad running a rehearsal was a marvel for me to behold not only because I knew better than anyone else in the room how blind my dad was, but also because of how masterfully and authoritatively my dad communicated all the “notes” that he had gathered for the members of the production. I once remember him telling an actor, rather cuttingly, that she was “answering a question that no one was asking.” The people on stage knew just what he meant.

I saw a similar maestro (in this case, maestra) take the stage at the Richard Brunelle  Performance Hall at Davis Senior High School this morning. After a Concert Band performance, which included my son Truman on alto saxophone, Susan Hamre came out of the audience to talk to the musicians. Hamre is the outgoing director of the Symphonic and Concert Bands and the Musical Theater Ensemble at American River College (where I have also taught), and someone who knows her craft exceptionally well.

Maestra Hamre was clearly meeting these apprentice musicians (at the “Earth and Alchemy” Music Festival) for the first time, for she spent her first few minutes orienting herself to the location and numbers of the musicians who made up the concert band. And then she started with the lessons, asking groups of musicians to play certain parts of the classical pieces that they had previously performed, and pointing out to them what makes the pieces lush, bracing, exhilarating, or sublime. She explained why she needed more gusto from the supporting instruments, and why she needed the higher-pitched instruments, such as the flutes, to play more quietly. By breaking works and movements into combinations of sounds, with different tempos and musical emphases, the visiting conductor helped the students and parents in attendance hear magic in the music that they would not have otherwise noticed, or reveled in.

While I felt lucky to be in the audience for this 20-minute lesson, I also found myself wishing that I had taken musical performance classes in high school or college. Nostalgic for my college days, I found myself also missing those times in my life when I could sneak into Boston University classes that I was not enrolled in, just to hear a great speaker analyze or reassemble a great work of literature. During my last two years as an undergraduate, the combination of “stolen” classes and public lectures made me feel like my mind and heart were constantly brimming with facts and performances.

When I arrived practically penniless in Berkeley as a new college graduate, I continued this habit by slipping into the back of lecture halls at Cal, learning about classical music history and theory from a Music 27 large lecture class (“Introduction to Western Music”) taught by a seemingly venerable but energetic professor who taught while sitting and playing at a grand piano. (He was probably about the age that I am now.) A couple decades after illegally taking that class at UC Berkeley, I helped Kern Holoman, an equally charismatic authority on classical music, figure out how best to use our campus learning management system to share music files with UC Davis students in Music 10: Introduction to Music. That welcome assignment required that I sit in on some of Kern’s lectures – what a treat! I was reminded what Billy Joel once called music: “an explosive expression of humanity.” 

While now my artsy conversations with my dad take place in my memories and in my dreams, I do feel lucky in this life to have had so many opportunities to learn from, interact with, and gain inspiration from great teachers, including music teachers. When I retire in a dozen years or more, I might have the time and budget to return to instruction in a musical instrument or two. Perhaps by then I will be teaching Zoom classes while sitting at my own piano, whether warranted or not.

This week’s Pub Quiz will feature topics raised above, as well as the following: Quantum mechanics, shadowy figures, faraway cities, replacement playboys, green lawyers in other languages, prisoners of war, friends with Mercury, eye color, playing catch, Nobel Prizes, names in the news, chemical properties, Patreon, big cities, rarified sports, the all of vision, detanglers, poetry, keys, confirmed prisons, the importance of action, winning the acronym, ablation concerns, youthful athletes, NPR designations, kennels, common last names, current events, and Shakespeare.

Julia Levine reads with Frank Gaspar this Thursday night at 7 atop the John Natsoulas Gallery. It’ll be a warm day, so dress in layers!

Thanks for reading to the end. Be well.

Dr. Andy

P.S. Her are three questions from last week’s pub quiz. Please SUBSCRIBE via Patreon to receive 31 questions every week.

1. Pop Culture – Music. With its passionate vocal and sweeping orchestration, the 1960 release of the song “At Last” is often chosen for weddings and wedding receptions. Name the musician who famously performed the 1960 version of this 1941 classic.  

2. Science. What sort of jawless fish may be characterized by a toothed, funnel-like sucking mouth?  

3. Pop Culture – Television. Of the four primary actors in the TV show I Love Lucy, who died first?  

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

One of my favorite quotations by the current Dalai Lama is a long one: “Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others; to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.” 

Yesterday I came across someone who sought to benefit others. It seems that an entire high school robotics team was visiting Davis for a competition, and all 20 of them (including drivers and chaperones) got in line at the south Davis Guadalajara just before my son Jukie and I arrived at one of our favorite places to dine outside. We beheld the unusually long line and secured a table.

Jukie doesn’t mind waiting for me outside of Mexican restaurants while I go in to place our burrito order, especially during this era when I try to keep our little obsessive anti-masker out of all public buildings. Once while I was placing an order at Dos Coyotes, I came out to the patio and was told by four elderly women at a table close to Jukie’s that they so delighted in hearing the crooning sounds he was making, as if he were warming up for an operatic performance.

Like any of us, Jukie sings to bring himself pleasure. His inability to form actual words with his singing or speaking voice does not keep him from exercising his vocal cords, and on our long walks (we did about eight miles together yesterday), I let him sing as much as he wants. 

In and outside restaurants, however, or when I am taking a particularly important phone call, I use sign language to tell Jukie that he needs to quiet down. Yesterday, however, while I was standing in line about 30 feet from my boy, I could not convince him to keep quiet, and diners at the other tables were noticing. Liberated by the physical distance between himself and his minder, Jukie was yodeling louder than Heidi.

That’s when a dad in line behind me told me that I should go sit with my boy, and that he would wave me down when it was time for me to order. So I thanked him and then walked right over to Jukie, giving him a kiss on the top of his head, and then texted to my wife Kate that our town is filled with such kind people, proclaiming “It’s like that dad just handed me a Disneyland fast pass!”

So today I salute this man, his parents, and even his out-of-town robotics team, all in their matching T-shirts. At a time when war is ravaging Ukraine, Yemen, and Ethiopia; when partisan divides escalate caustic rhetoric; and when judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is berated for a variety of issues and past events that have nothing to do with her or her work on the bench, we need more people like this “good and decent man” who, as Ted Kennedy said at his brother Robert’s funeral, “saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it.”

I bet you will have an opportunity to act compassionately towards a stranger, whether that person be a refugee on the other side of the world or a person you encounter in town who could use your help. I hope you will act on that opportunity, for, as Anne Frank wrote, “No one has ever become poor by giving.”

Thanks to new Patreon patron Brooke who will be enjoying weekly trivia questions in San Diego. Like my friend James Lee Jobe, I will sometimes use Patreon to share new poems. National Poetry Month starts in a few days, and all of us should feel invited to participate. I hope to write a poem a day next month, and I will be posting at least a poem a week for you and other subscribers to review. Join us there to enjoy all this sweet content!

This week’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on topics raised above, as well as on the following: staying ahead, texts from a new widow, athletes named Michael, moral banks, California governors, sonnets, flames, the state of Virginia, neighbors, founding fathers and mothers, collateral, examples of rockabilly, poems for departed friends, push-ups, desalination projects, inadvertently destructive oafs, secret sharers, monarchs to cheer for, pilots, Academy Awards, big cities, citron dust storms, country music, people named Fred, underwater monsters, brackets, wedding receptions, foods and drinks, book collections, current events, and Shakespeare.

Stay safe, and welcome to springtime!

Dr. Andy

P.S. Find here three questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:

1. Books and Authors. Zelda Fitzgerald, Erich Fromm, and Margaret Mitchell were all born in the same year ending with a zero. Name the year. 

2. Greek Mythology. In Greek mythology, what is the name of the Cretan princess who is best known for having helped Theseus escape the Minotaur?  

3. Science. What do we call baby peacocks and peahens?  

The Oversharing Homeric Dreams of Home Edition of the Pub Quiz Newsletter with Dr. Andy

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Today is the most overcast day that we’ve had in a month, but if my wife Kate and I had stepped outside on a day like today when we lived in London, it probably would have been the sunniest day we could have enjoyed during the fall of 1987, a rainiest of all autumns when the two of us met and moved in together.

I remember finally returning home from studying abroad that December, perhaps a week before Christmas, setting my huge black rucksack by the front door of my Tunlaw Road house in the Glover Park neighborhood of Washington DC. I collapsed in the recliner my parents had bought a decade earlier when they were still together in that house, a place that resonated with all the influences upon my nascent identity. Both my (then) living grandparents had joined us for dinners in that house. My (then) living best friend Tito had slept over perhaps 100 times. I was 20 years old, and I was just beginning to understand who I was, or who I might be. Younger than my years, I was probably unable to grow a proper beard.

Returning to my DC home should have brought me comfort and relief. After all, everything was pretty much the same as when I had left four months earlier. Along the walls of our living room I saw the familiar high-end replications of paintings by Gustav Klimt and Friedensreich Hundertwasser (we seemed to love the Austrians), movie posters from my time working at the Tenley Circle Theatre, and an upright piano that none of us knew how to play with two hands. What’s more, my row-house had central heating, a working stove, and a shower that maintained a steady temperature.

Any of those luxuries would have been relished in the closet-less, phoneless, shower-less hardscrabble fourth-floor walkup barely-heated Hampstead flat where Kate and I lived. We weathered the pervasive autumn rains when our tall windows wouldn’t close all the way, but the November frost necessitated additional measures: more visits to the landlord, more woolly jumpers, more blankets, and more closeness.

I appreciated all the ways that Kate found humor in hardship, joking that while we were approaching the end of the 20^th century, we had somehow chosen to study abroad in the 19^th century. Denizens of the Underground, takers of long walks, our eyes seeking out the spires of Christopher Wren churches, we did not see the inside of a car during our entire time in London. As residents of our street did 100 years previously, we took baths and bought groceries from the shops across the street. We could see from our window if our local market was stocked with fresh oranges, KitKat bars, or Ribena blackcurrant juice.

I had never met anyone as lovely and charming as Kate; recollections of our conversations sustained me during the long flight back alone. Back in DC, the December skies were bright, but my mood was dim. I had no firm reason to believe that I would see my “beautiful London roommate” again. I remember on the plane staring at the scant photographs I had of my Chicagoan, my London co-explorer, my Indian restaurant dinner companion, my whisperer of stories after the lights were out. I feared that we might have shared our last dinner, our last kiss. I had returned “home,” but peculiarly the only house I had ever known did not feel like home. 

Soon after my return, I was rereading The Odyssey and came across a line in book six, “Shew me the city,” that Odysseus speaks to Nausicaa, a Phaeacian princess, and it reminded me of Kate, an American “princess” that I had encountered unexpectedly, and who had helped to show me the city of London. Odysseus continues: “And for thyself, may the gods grant thee all that thy heart desires; a husband and a home may they grant thee, and oneness of heart—a goodly gift. For nothing is greater or better than this, when man and wife dwell in a home in one accord, a great grief to their foes and a joy to their friends; but they know it best themselves.”

As Odysseus suggests in this clearly heteronormative passage, home is not a location, but rather a place where one can start a new family, what he calls a “oneness of heart,” with one’s beloved. I did not know how or when (and frankly, the odds were against me), but upon returning to the shores of the Potomac, I knew that one day I would reunite with Kate so that we could start living our life together, one that we had rehearsed when we lived so far away. As Odysseus says, “Nothing is better than this.” 

So as I look again at this overcast day, I brim with gratitude that the rain was so intense and so consistent in the fall of 1987, and that my future wife Kate and I had to spend so much time inside getting to know each other. Any Odysseus is lucky indeed to have a Penelope waiting for him to get his act together, to let memories of her love guide his travels, and to return home.

I hope you get to see this week’s Pub Quiz. In addition to topics raised above, expect questions about the following: Happy Days, astronauts, shared passwords, rich celebrities with one thing in common, big cities that are not in Texas, Oscar-winners, hair implements, revelatory hearts, baby birds, palaces, merciful deaths, sadnesses, misspelled words, cushioned people who sleep, Alabama, popular TV shows, famous battles, odd words with columns, young inventors, Mount Everest, wolves, words and pages, the quality of mercy, repeated answers, odeons, yearly Christmas trees, golden globes, years that end in zero, gazelles, current events, and Shakespeare.

Please subscribe so I can send you quizzes!

Thanks to the 50 people who joined us on the roof last Thursday for poetry by Jabez Churchill and Katy Brown. On April 7^th, we welcome Davis Poet Laureate Julia Levine!

Be well.

Dr. Andy

P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s pub quiz:

1. European Cities. What B city of now 1.7 million people was overrun by Soviet tanks in 1956?  

2. Instagram Accounts. As of September 2021, one magazine’s Instagram page has 191 million followers, the most of any account not belonging to an individual celebrity. Name this magazine founded in 1888.  

3. Books and Authors. Marlon Brando earned his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role for reprising the role of Stanley Kowalski in the 1951 film adaptation of what Tennessee Williams play? 

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Shakespeare wrote plays that are worth the effort to (decipher and) enjoy. This becomes all the more clear when another playwright takes on a plot that approximates one of Shakespeare’s and then renders it for a modern audience in heroic couplets.

Such was the case with Lovers and Executioners, a play that my wife Kate and I saw last night at Sacramento’s B Street Theatre, where we have been subscribers for more than 20 years. It was adapted from Antoine de Montfleury’s La Femme juge et partie (1669). Montfleury was a contemporary of Molière, and, along with his father, also a playwright, a rival to the much more famous creator of modern French comedy.

Part of Montfleury’s plot was adapted by John Strand for a play commissioned by Arena Stage, the famous Washington DC theatre where my father directed many productions, and where my stepmother acted in many more. Arena Stage is also about three blocks from my mom’s apartment in Washington DC, so she has worked as a volunteer usher there after she retired from many years as a librarian. The 1998 production of this play premiered six years before my dad’s passing, so I was left to wonder if my dad saw or read the play. Surely he knew John Strand.

Ambitiously, and somewhat awkwardly, Strand has written the entire play in couplets. A poet myself, I would sometimes let my imagination drift from the improbable action of the plot to pay attention to the clever rhymes. I could see why Ezra Pound advised T.S. Eliot to remove the huge section of The Waste Land that was written in couplets, for Alexander Pope and John Dryden had already mastered that form, Pound said, and Eliot could not match their prowess. Eliot wisely took Pound’s advice, thus emphasizing the modern parts of the century’s seminal Modernist poem. 

How does one write an entire play in rhyming couplets in the modern era? With the help of technology. A website that I use when crafting love poems for Kate, Rhymezone, had launched while Strand was working on Lovers and Executioners, so one could conject that the playwright used this service or another to find rhymes for his more ambitious lines. Consider this example:

BEATRICE:

Deliver me from secrets. To the keeper, they’re a plague.

GUZMAN:

It’s by secrets and deception that the great are made,

And undone.

That couplet anticipates a major theme of the play. Some of the rhymes in Lovers and Executioners were awkward, such as when lines keep ending with verbs (or, “such as when the lines with verbs do end”), leading to a stilted way of speaking that, I suppose, might mimic what we could hear in the 17^th century French original.

The lover of Shakespeare will find insufficient subtext in this and most other plays written in verse. Pulling off the linguistic matches time after time is a sufficient feat, we might think, but this approach leaves insufficient room for puns, allusions, and other forms of multilayered wordplay that delight people who can track Shakespeare’s clever complexity in real time. Some of us lament the difficulty of Shakespeare’s language, but when viewing a play written in the same century as Hamlet, the absence of that linguistic and sometimes discursive difficulty makes the mere plot of a lesser playwright or translator (and perhaps every author is lesser than Shakespeare?) into the point of the play, and plots can wear thin without the language and characterization to make them come alive.

The B Street actors did a fine job, as we have come to expect. Kate and I have seen so many productions now that we feel we know the regulars, so we anticipate the treat of seeing how they will bring their own brand of humor, energy, and even pathos to their roles in each new production. My favorites include diminutive John Lamb as the earlier-quoted Guzman, exuberant pratfall artist Amy Kelly as the earlier-quoted Beatrice, and Peter Story as the apoplectic and bellicose Don Lope. Don Lope gets to cross swords with Melinda Parrett, the talented actress who in this one production plays the multiple roles of love interest, swashbuckling rival, and presiding magistrate for Kevin Kantor’s (lead) Bernard. Playgoers interested in gender and sexuality politics will find relevant themes in Parrett’s identity struggles as she wields both a rogue’s rapier and a judge’s gavel.

Is it safe to return to the theatre again? One hopes so. Each of our vaccination cards was checked at the door, and attendees were mostly (though not exclusively) masked. As someone who contracted Covid late last month from some Davis location or another, despite my avid adherence to mask and vaccination protocols, I am perhaps more Covid-paranoid than most. Not all the seats were filled for this enjoyable production, though word of mouth and the lessening fear of omicron may help with attendance. I was happy to attend. Theatres and musicians have been hit hard by the pandemic, so they deserve our support and patronage.

As an aside, radio and other forms of oral media, such as podcasts, also deserve wider recognition in this era. I was told by The B Street Theatre staff that my press credentials were being withdrawn because an audit revealed none of my reviews of or discussions about B Street Theatre productions. As the host of a radio show on KDVS since 2000, I have discussed all the B Street productions I have seen, sometimes with actual actors and playwrights. Once I was stopped on the street to discuss my recent on-air interview with Jack Gallagher as he was plugging his one-man-show A Stand-Up Guy. All that said, I do not publish transcripts of my show. A philosophical question: If an on-air personality lauds a play on the radio (remember radio?), does he make a sound? 

For once, I have written up some thoughts here, so perhaps they will be discovered during the next audit of local journalists. Should that happen, I will just thank Buck Busfield, Jerry Montoya, Lyndsay Burch, and, our favorite, Dave Pierini for all their work bringing such engaging and meaningful theatre to the Sacramento Valley. As I do regularly on my audit-escaping radio show, in discoverable print I hereby encourage readers to visit and support local theatres in Davis and Sacramento, especially The B Street Theatre.

I hope you get to see this week’s Pub Quiz. Expect questions on topics raised above, and on the following: Visas and passports, data packets, cyclones, science fiction properties, passages of time, Alzheimer’s disease, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Bohemians, famous casters, evacuations, inter-metallic compounds, popular Instagram properties, Soviet tanks, synesthesia in the 1980s, baptisms, opportunities to marry an Arab in Detroit, telephone men, dropouts, inspiring characters, words that rhyme and that taste sweet, Dominican friars, acids, soulful men, current events, and Shakespeare.

Thanks especially to my regular subscribers, including the members of Quizimodo, Original Vincibles, and Outside Agitators. Someone tell Keith David Watenpaugh that there’s a Star Trek question in this week’s Pub Quiz! If you would also like to subscribe, please visit https://www.patreon.com/yourquizmaster. I would love to send you the quiz every week.

Poetry Night is Thursday night at 7. We are meeting on the ROOF of the Natsoulas Gallery. You are invited.

Dr. Andy

P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s Pub Quiz.

1. Internet Culture. Every day, almost every writer glances at the letters BIU. What does the letter B stand for?  

2. Newspaper Headlines. UC Davis recently announced that it will begin using a nonlethal noisemaking machine to drive what “pest” away from a field on the west side of campus?  

3. European Geography. If one were to drive from Kyiv, Ukraine to Berlin, Germany, what capital city would one most likely pass through along the way?   

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Word on the street is that today in Kyiv a woman knocked down a Russian drone from a balcony with a jar of cucumbers. Clearly we need to send the Ukrainian people more cucumbers!

One hopes these trends continue, that the people of Ukraine, depending upon antiquated technologies, guerrilla warfare, and home-court advantage, can stop, thwart, and functionally defeat one of the world’s largest and best-equipped military forces. Sadly, a desperate and internationally ostracized Vladimir Putin is now running a terror campaign, targeting civilian population centers in order to compel everyday Ukrainians to demand that their political and military leaders capitulate in order to halt the bloodshed of innocents.

I would like to think that even if Putin succeeds in his military campaign, his country will lose. US, UK, and EU sanctions are functionally disabling the Russian economy. The ruble has lost most of its value, Russian banks have been barred  from buying and selling goods and commodities, and tens of billions of dollars in accounts have been seized by authorities in the countries where Putin and his band of oligarchs have been storing the money that they have functionally embezzled from the Russian citizenry. It’s like everyone has been given simultaneous permission to respond to Russian corruption and aggression, rather than just going along with it.

I need to meditate on why I feel such glee when Russian oligarchs’ villas and yachts are sized by Italian authorities, as was the case in the last 24 hours. Alexei Mordashov, who Forbes calls the richest man in Europe, had one of his yachts impounded in the Italian city of Imperia. Over the last few decades, Mordashov, whose name almost sounds like that of a Harry Potter villain, has been buying up mining companies, banks, telecom companies, and even American steel companies. Even though he was worth almost $30 billion before the ruble crashed, a divorce court in St Petersburg revealed that he was paying only $620 a month to support his ex-wife and son. I’ve concluded that vengeful people with obscene wealth are not to be trusted.

When it comes to class issues, western journalists have highlighted the middle-class status and even the race of the Ukrainian refugees fleeing the country. One expert on the BBC, Ukraine’s Deputy Chief Prosecutor, David Sakvarelidze, said, “It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed.” A senior foreign correspondent for CBS, Charlie D’Agata, said that Ukraine “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades.” Instead, D’Agata said, “This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully, too — city, where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.” 

To speak the obvious out loud, we would not “hope” that unprovoked shelling a civilian areas would not take place in any part of the world, even outside Europe. The value of people is not determined by their country of origin or the pigmentation in their skin or hair. Also, isn’t Mesopotamia, the area that is now Iraq, known as the “Cradle of Civilization”? As James Baldwin used to say on the lecture circuit, in the 1960s schoolchildren were taught about American patriots who took up arms to establish and defend their country during the American Revolutionary War, but politicians and the press simultaneously lamented that people of color, African-Americans and indigenous people here in the United States, would propose similarly protecting themselves from violence.

When I read someone on Twitter say that watching the war coverage in Ukraine is so unsettling because Americans have never been bombed in their own cities, I am reminded of watching TV news footage of the May 1985 bombing of an entire Philadelphia city block by the police in that city. The police thought it justified to use explosive demolition devices that are typically reserved for war combat, if even then. The goal was to bomb members of MOVE, a black liberation group. Eleven people were killed, including five children. Sixty-one homes were destroyed. And we did that to ourselves. So obviously if you ask the people of Philadelphia or Birmingham, Alabama, Americans have known the sort of violence that is taking lives, dividing families, and breaking hearts in Ukraine.

All these groups of people, like the technologically-outgunned but plucky Ewoks or Na’vi that we cheer for in our movie theatres, deserve our sympathy and support.

I hope you and your families continue to be safe and healthy.

Dr. Andy

I hope you get to see this week’s Pub Quiz. I welcome new subscribers and celebrate my sustaining supporters! Expect questions on topics raised above, and on American kingdoms, people named Clark, US capitols, mothers with two jobs, Ecuador, collaborations, double-doubles, boldness, significant plays, revolutions, Cuban anniversaries, farmlands, tarmac stays, noisemakers, problems with Texas, Canadian imports, apologist lamenters, superheroes, wind speeds, military installations, peninsula, musical groups, “Art” projects from 50 years ago, sunsets, people with white hair, blindfolds, The Beatles, baseball players who never got to meet particular presidents, folds, home games, first dances, current events, and Shakespeare.

Thanks to all of you who came to fill up the Natsoulas Gallery on Poetry Night this week. I had to miss it because Covid. Our next event is on St. Patrick’s Day. I remember when that day was such a big deal around here.

P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:

1. Mottos and Slogans. What tire company uses the slogan “A Better Way Forward”?  

2. Internet Culture. What Apple product is being used to track people and cars? 

3. Newspaper Headlines. What mobile application will now let users share their real-time location with friends: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Friendster?