Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

We have just returned from a ten-day vacation in the humid south of San Diego and other southern hotspots. Looking for a synonym for the word “swamp,” for we missed the Delta breezes that chill our summer evenings in Davis, I somehow brought up a poem titled “Swampbed Confession” that is so odd that I don’t even remember writing it.

For this week’s newsletter, I will offer this in the stead of my regular newsletter, transformed here from poetry into prose.

Swampbed Confession

I have returned to the swamp.

I am drawn by the frogs, fattening and unfattening like slippery bellows of mud, gargling sonorously a deep chorus of gongs, soundposts of something primordial, resonant unending lamentation of bug-eyed mucous-melting minions, warty opaque dirge of the hornèd burp; a thousand shades of green scampering in thick slobber, as if kissed but then rejected by God’s bulldog.

The frogs’ loose-necked pillowcase bodies sink boundlessly into the layers of muck, a million years of mulch and wet decay. From creek bed to alluvium to swamp, the thick humidity hangs, sousing my unsteady march to the fetid, enveloping marsh of strangling banyan trees, while the stuff below us, bilious intermingle of water and earth, the creeping unfenced mulch, opens underfoot like the pull of one’s last days.

I march as if in custody to where even the dragonflies will not follow. Imagining here the onetime river, I must step over or into the waterlogged trunk of this onetime tree, now a fly-farm and worm-busy semipermeable muddy outline of dark and rot-rich pulp. You could almost dip your hand in, the bark now too wet, too indistinguishable, to clutch, to hamper reemergence with a fistful of that organic rot.

Something inside me has festered. Call it my amphibian center, my wet and cankerous soul gripped by pneumatic infection, something the last light part of me hopes could be abandoned here In the brackish, clotted water, something heretofore inexpressible, a dark thread affixed for an age to my internal demon’s degenerate anchor.

Oh that I could be unmoored here by this equally dark and sympathetic symphony. The sound of the frogs is moving. Something in the swamp is unclasping. Could it be the void? Release me. Release me. Let the gloaming ache be wooed out by the frogs’ heavy and seductive song. 

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None of this week’s Pub Quiz questions are about swamps. Instead, expect questions on the following: your grandfather’s choices, separated podcasts, American civilians, countries that start with S, best actresses, Whitney Houston, golf balls, ancient love stories, cereal boxes, faraway countries, American poets, two-digit numbers, trade associations, African cities, music collections, bayonets, exchanged letters, changed names, hometown alligators, broken souls, famous cargos, odd medications, nine-letter worries, U.S. presidents, chemical reactions, yearly events, news of the world, and Shakespeare. 

Thanks to all the supporters on Patreon who make all this happen, especially the Outside Agitators, the Original Vincibles, and Quizimodo. I’m grateful to players who support this effort, and who pledge for their entire team. Please subscribe so you can share the fun of the Pub Quiz with your friends and neighbors!

Be well,

Dr. Andy

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

1. Playful Categories. All of the following are examples of what larger category: Benoni, Budapest, Dutch, French, Grünfeld, Italian, Nimzo-Indian, Sicilian, Vienna?  

2. Mountain Ranges. In addition to Tajikistan, the Hindu Kush mountain range is found in two countries. Name one of them.  

3. Pop Culture – Music. Born in 1944, what highly-influential living British guitarist is noted for occasionally playing his guitar with a cello bow to create a droning sound texture to his rock music?  

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz

As a poet, I remain receptive to all possible voices, no matter how faint. For example, recently my shoes have been complaining to me.

Pleas of empathy usually refer to someone’s shoes (or moccassins) as a metaphor, but in this case, the shoe message struck home because I heard it at home while I was lacing up the trusty sneakers that I’ve used throughout 2022. I couldn’t tell if it was the left or the right shoe speaking, but I can tell you the gist of the message:

“Look, I’m just worn out! My manufacturer wisely indicated that shoes such as we should be replaced every 400-600 miles, but look what’ I’ve withstood, over 1500 miles of walking with these two sadist engines, your feet.” That’s pretty sharp language for something that was created to keep me comfortable.

Histrionically, the shoe continued:

“Mercy, please. You should really let me die. Let me recycle as a picnic bench, an immobile playground’s apparatus slide, or the crosswise weft of AstroTurf that on certain days my mate and I, we transverse.”

I never expected my shoes to send me to the dictionary to look up words such as “weft.” Soon it was enumerating its complaints:

“Perhaps if you didn’t walk every single day, I could better suffer the torturous treads, the trudge, of these incessant footfalls? The feat of 20 thousand steps should be an occasional objective, fleet tormentor, not a daily quota.”

For the record, this year I am averaging only about 17,000 steps a day, so obviously the shoe exaggerates like a politician. By the way, you know what an aglet is, don’t you? Let the shoes continue:

“My aglets long since worn away, you burn my shoelace wick on both ends, ruthlessly, unnaturally distending me, such that my fibers now overstretch like the muscles of a should-be overstaying retired athlete, a suited-up relic whose muscled have long since attenuated. As I hear you tell uninterested strangers, you may be in your prime, but I am past mine. You soullessly forsake my insoles. Disassemble me. Let my padding go.”

Did my shoe suggest that it’s time I retire my walking habit, retire my shoes, or just retire? Even my lap dog doesn’t get as exhausted as these two.

“Also, would it kill you to stay on the path? Never aspiring to be a boot, I was built 

for gentle strolls on pavement, not brambly outback adventures! I suppose that even Aaron Burr never generated so many burrs as our obsessive jaunts do, little buds of prickle that attach themselves to me like so many viruses. No tongue has ever been so parched.”

The tongue of these shoes evidently make puns about Vice-Presidents who shoot notable citizens (and I don’t mean Dick Cheney, who is back in the news this week).

“Furthermore, note that because of you I am now tailed by foxtails, chlorophyl fish hooks that make their bed embedded in me, somehow piercing my polyurethane polymer fabric meshed cover, my pincushioned safeguards, all the way down to the rubber.”

Shamed by my own shoes, I’m now just feeling guilty, but at least I’ve found a new way to hit my newsletter word quota. Like Plato when he channels Socrates, and Davis Enterprise daily columnist Bob Dunning when responding to letters from readers, I’m using conversations with others to expand on my own thinking.

Speaking of which, Truman Capote once said, “A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.” Of course, despite its vocabulary, I don’t think we can accuse my shoes of being “intelligent talkers.” OK, let’s turn to my shoes once again to finish this up.

“If I were a clam, the irritable grit you bid join us on our often thrice-daily sashays would yield enough needle-pierced pearls for a fey flapper’s necklace.”

What do shoes know of fey flappers? Thankfully, these pearls of wisdom are about to come to an end.

“Please, sir, you must surcease, desist. Stand still a while, and stand down. You ask too much from both of us.”

Thanks, shoes. As the aforementioned politicians say, I will take all of this under advisement. Now let’s go for a walk.

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This week’s Pub Quiz will feature no shoe questions. Instead, expect questions on non-shoe topics raised above, and on the following: reasons for relaxation, entry-level gadgets, condemned provocations, California cities, playful openings, unknown (to me) Canadians, campaign stops, dress colors, spaceflights, Yiddish surprises for censors, seedless grapes, detective novels, white stripes, World War I, five-pointed stars, chicken in church, hilarious mesomorphs, British rock bands, Olympic games, the purposes of thermoses, baseball teams, notable universities, law enforcement agencies, mountain ranges, Freud’s thoughts on the Irish, people named Henry, art museums, 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. I’m always grateful to players who pledge for their entire team. Please subscribe so you can share the fun of the Pub Quiz with your friends and neighbors!

Be well, and support your local independent shoe store, as I do!

Sadly, this week’s newsletter was not sponsored by Fleet Feet of Davis, but it should have been! Thanks for reading.

Dr. Andy

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

1. Polynesian Countries whose names sound like the first names of famous San Francisco poets. Starting with the letter T, what Polynesian country is also an archipelago consisting of 169 islands, of which 36 are inhabited? 

• Pop Culture – Music. Born in 1995, what British singer/songwriter had huge hits with songs titled “Don’t Start Now” and “Levitating”? 

• Sports. What NFL football team won Superbowl LVI in its home stadium? 

P.P.S. Rest in Peace, Marilyn Monroe, this week sixty years gone. She said, “Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world.”

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Having walked to campus to teach my classes during this past year, I felt confident that I knew how much time to leave when I set out to walk downtown for a dental surgical procedure. I misjudged.

Afternoon classes at UC Davis start at 10 minutes after the hour, and really the classes I teach don’t start until I arrive, but I make it a practice always to arrive five minutes early. As I headed out the door Friday morning to visit my oral surgeon (I will call him Dr. John because that’s his name), I had that 10-minute buffer in mind.

Checking my phone, I remembered that Dr. John’s staff requested that I show up 15 minutes early for my procedure. We patients like to comply with such requests so that any procedures we are undergoing are not rushed. Figuratively running late, I actually started to run.

Now when you walk more than seven miles a day as I do, running two and a half miles is not daunting, but the effort does have a physiological effect. The casual clothes I was wearing did not wick moisture effectively, so I kept standing after checking in, closely reading the doctor’s many diplomas on the wall, trying to expose as much of me as possible to the waiting room’s frigid air.

When they brought me back to the surgery room, the pulse oximeter attached to my finger unnerved me. No patient wants a fast heart rate either to remind them how out of shape they are or to give anyone else the impression that they are frightened of the coming scalpel. It was time to breathe deeply.

Rather than general sedation, I opted for local anesthesia so Dr. John and his team could pull the damaged tooth from the back of my jaw. I figured that with all the meditation training that I’ve done after the last four years, I might as well apply some of the courage that I’ve been studying and, one would hope, fostering.

In his book Conquering Fear: The Heart of Shambhala, Chögyam Trungpa wrote the following: “If victory is the notion of no enemy, then the whole world is a friend. That seems to be the warrior’s philosophy. The true warrior is not like somebody carrying a sword and looking behind his own shadow, in case somebody is lurking there. That is the setting-sun warrior’s point of view, which is an expression of cowardice. The true warrior always has a weapon, in any case … The definition of warriorship is fearlessness and gentleness. Those are your weapons. The genuine warrior becomes truly gentle because there is no enemy at all.”

I thought that I was ready to demonstrate fearlessness and gentleness while staying awake under the knife.

Settling into the most solid and comfortable dental chair that I’ve ever experienced, I first met with the hygienist / doctor’s assistant whom my wife has affectionately nicknamed Charo. She placed two super long Q-tips slathered with the first layer of anesthesia on the location of the coming incision. She then left me alone for at least five minutes, which was helpful because I had an appointment in the sunken place.

Using the strategies that I have learned from the live and Zoom-based meditation classes that I have taken with multiple teachers over the last four years, I retreated into a hypnotic stupor, a sort of willed deep relaxation that I’ve learned to deploy at times like these. I could hear that my pulse was slowing, and then I was visited by what I imagine were especially long needles.

On cue, in my mind I noticed myself retreating first to the Davis Shambhala Center where I first learned to meditate, then to Chestnut Park where I meditate with a group every Sunday morning, and then to my grandmother’s bench swing outside the family cabin in Beavertown, Pennsylvania.

I didn’t really hear what soft-spoken Dr. John was saying over the relaxing sea wave sounds and meditation music they play for anxious patients, but I did register a few of Charo’s directions. When working with an awake patient, the medical professionals have to narrate what’s going on, such as when the patient is told that he is about to feel some “pressure.” “Pressure” is a favorite euphemism of surgery centers.

Turning my head towards the doctor as instructed, I felt a single tear slide down my face. “So much for fearlessness,” I said to myself, prompting a smile. Only my face was not responding to its instructions to smile, or at least I couldn’t tell if I was smiling. Before long, I was almost dreaming.

20 minutes after the suturing, I was smiling to myself again, texting ,my wife Kate that I was heading east on 2^nd Street, walking home from my own surgery, which I thought was especially badass.

More interested in my comfort than in my jumbled narratives of badassery, Kate arranged to intercept me on my walk and drive me home in an air conditioned car where I could return to that sunken place in the form of a nap on our living room couch. A day later, as I told my daughter Geneva this afternoon, my natural Wolverine healing factor was already at work, preparing me for a weekend with family and friends. 

As is true with everyone, I suppose, today my mask will be hiding my internal scars.

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Thanks to everyone who subscribes to the Pub Quiz. This week those lucky people will find a pub quiz with questions on the following topics: restaurant chains, The Simpsons, jazz musicians, three-syllable sports teams, actors in superhero movies, stadia, Kansas highlights, peas, populations of numbers, deserts, family donations, compact cars, ballet dancers, words that come from phrases, famous Italian brothers, Theresas and Esthers, villains, drivers of outrageous automobiles, glands, Arabic words, late harvest names,  prime ministers, current events, and Shakespeare. This week the questions will be sent out Saturday night, so a few more topics may present themselves to me before then!

Thanks to all the supporters on Patreon who make all this happen, especially the Outside Agitators, the Original Vincibles, and Quizimodo. 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!

Be well, and remember to floss.

Dr. Andy

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

1. Great Americans. In the 2002 book Gay and Lesbian Americans and Political Participation, who was called “the most famous and most significant openly LGBT official ever elected in the United States”? 

2. Unusual Words. What larva of a wood-boring beetle is also an avid reader? 

3. Steven King Books. The king of horror subtitled his memoir “A Memoir of the Craft.” What was its title? 

P.P.S. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” Steve Jobs

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

I am writing to you about writing from a writers conference. How meta!

I’ve been attending the San Francisco Writers Conference for the last 15 years. I’ve made a ton of good friends here, met some best-selling authors (such as the iconic authors R.L. Stine and John Lescroart – hi John!), and learned much about writing and the publishing industry that I’ve shared with subsequent clients and students.

But I really keep coming back for the poetry. My friend Brad Henderson and I used to run most of the poetry panels for the conference, but in recent years the conference has established a poetry track that reflects the deep poetry roots of this beautiful city.

Running the track this year is the current San Francisco poet laureate, Tongo Eisen-Martin. Tongo appeared on my radio show earlier this year, as well as reading in my reading series when I was on Zoom. Wielding a rich and allusive imagination that leads him to fresh and surreal juxtapositions of phrases and imagery, Tongo has one of the most original voices that I’ve heard in a live poet.

And because attending a writers conference or working on a writing project leads me inevitably to my favorite Margaret Drabble quotation (“Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations”), I thought I would devote much of the rest of this week’s newsletter to a few of the comments that Tongo Eisen-Martin made in his long introduction to poetry and to the poetry panel this morning at the San Francisco Writers Conference:

Poetry can be a strange sort of hegemonic autopilot.

The internal journey is crucial, too. I hate to be a hippie about it, but you have to blow your own mind first.

Duke Ellington said that “Every musician gets a shot.”

The bourgeois-derived poetry world remains behind closed doors.

Remember that in every room you visit as a poet, there is someone who can help you. A blues guitarist once told me, “Don’t turn down any gig. You never know who is in any room, and every gig gives you a chance to practice.”

I write two to three hours a day, regardless of whether or not I have something to say. I just put a timer on, and I keep at it. When I do this, I don’t sit down to write an individual poem – I sit down just to write. Then I have miles and miles of material to shape poems from.

Your poems should move cooperatively with your own interests in becoming a better human.

Reciting a poem from memory connects the mind, body, and soul, especially if you can imagine waking up to a line of your own poetry. When you let go of your own personal vendettas, your own personal territory, then everything becomes acute.

To find a poetry community, go to where all the underdogs are.

The true journey is the journey to your own voice.

Tongo shared so much other wisdom that I happened not to jot down. Like my UC Davis students taking their favorite lecture-captured courses, I look forward to watching the video even though I was there to hear Tongo Eisen-Martin speak.

I invite you to share with me the names (and occasions) of speakers who you’ve seen who really impressed you with their wisdom and authenticity. Meanwhile, please do watch some video of Tongo Eisen-Martin performing while I rush back to the conference.

Also, enjoy the photo collage that my wife Kate made of her adventures with our boys and Margot while I was masked in a hotel conference room.

Be well!

Dr. Andy

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I had to finish this week’s Pub Quiz early, because I performed 15 questions from it at the Friday breakfast of the San Francisco Writers Conference. As a result of that target audience, the questions are more bookish than usual. Expect questions on topics raised above, and on the following: San Francisco, short names, notable patients, Agatha Christie, greenery, Davis elementary schools, South America, old names, top-grossing films, dystopias, fountain pens, Las Vegas, Versailles, Puerto Rico, neon fleabags, The Grateful Dead, memoirs, titles with colors, boring beetles, American heroes, fancy terms for rocks, super bowls, proponents of levitation,  islands, notable parks, airports, shipments of phones, current events, and Shakespeare.

An increasing number of authors are turning to Patreon as a way of circumventing traditional publishing. Thanks to all the supporters on Patreon who make all this happen, especially the Outside Agitators, the Original Vincibles, and Quizimodo. I’m always grateful to players who pledge for their entire team. I so enjoyed performing in person this week, and hope to do so for you again sometime! 

Dr. Andy

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

1. Mottos and Slogans. Although a pub is not forever, what company uses the slogan “A Diamond is Forever”? 

2. Internet Culture. What Hollywood actress is known to some as the mother of Wi-Fi? 

3. Religiosity. According to polling done from 2014-2018, for only one state in the United States do more than 75% of those polled answer “Yes” to the question asking if “religion is very important in their lives.” This state’s name is found in the first 25% of the alphabet. Name the state. 

P.P.S. “An apt quotation is like a lamp which flings its light over the whole sentence.” Letitia Landon

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

My daughter doesn’t care for the book The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. She finds the military metaphors off-putting, and she has much more faith in support groups and therapists than Pressfield does.

Nevertheless, I teach the book in every iteration of my Writing in Fine Arts class at UC Davis, and I gift a copy to all my kids who want to be writers. Pressfield has helped my students understand the forces that compel them to set aside their creative projects, as well as the perhaps mythical manifestations of support that inspire them to return to the writer’s notebook or the painter’s easel.

Towards the end of the book, Pressfield differentiates people and organizations that think and operate in hierarchical ways from those who claim a territory. As you can see from this long quoted list of elements and examples, the author of The War of Art prefers the territorial:

1. “The territory provides sustenance. — Runners know what a territory is. So do rock climbers and kayakers and yogis. Artists and entrepreneurs know what a territory is. The swimmer who towels off after finishing her laps feels a hell of a lot better than the tired, cranky person who dove into the pool 30 minutes earlier.

2. A territory sustains us without any external output. — A territory is a closed feedback loop. Our role is to put in effort and love; the territory absorbs this and gives it back to us in the form of well-being. When experts tell us that exercise (or any other effort requiring activity) banishes depression, this is what they mean.
3. A territory can only be claimed alone. — You can team with a partner, you can work out with a friend, but you only need your self to soak up your territory’s juice.
4. A territory can only be claimed by work. — When Arnold Schwarzenegger hits the gym, he’s on his own turf. But what made it his own are the hours and years of sweat he put in to claim it. The territory doesn’t give, it gives back.
5. A territory returns exactly what you put it in. — Territories are fair. Every bit of energy you put in goes infallibly into your account. The territory never devalues. A territory never crashes. What you deposited, you get back, dollar for dollar.”

Before I claimed the Irish Pub in Davis as my territory, I found comfort in the writing classrooms in Olson Hall and Shields Library at UC Davis, as well an art gallery in downtown Davis where I host Poetry Night.

These days, I claim as my territory the greenbelts of south Davis, as well as our walking routes downtown, though I eagerly share these places with the people that Jukie and I encounter on our walks. I’ve made friends with pilots, scientists, economists, and learned readers of the New York Times Book Review (hello Michael!). Earlier this week, a woman walking her dog told me that she thought Jukie and I are the only one out on the greenbelts more than she is, for she encounters us on every walk.

That woman wanted to know how many miles we walk every day, so I told her. When I ran into iconic Nutrition professor Liz Applegate downtown this morning, I didn’t wait for her to ask, showing Liz on my phone how many miles I’ve walked so far this year. She did a little mock-genuflecting as if she were Wayne or Garth, but we were both smiling. Liz might remember that I consulted with her when I returned to physical fitness as a goal about ten years ago.

The shift in territory from crowded pub to the wide-open outdoors reflects the gratitude I feel for being a Californian (where we dine outside year-round), and the concern I feel for myself, for my family, and for all of you as the latest uber-contagious variations of Covid sicken a growing percentage of people, including those who are vaccinated and boosted, or who have already had Covid earlier in 2022.

With these hazards in mind, we might think of “territory” both in the way that Pressfield thinks of it, and the way that Huck Finn does when he says, in the final words of the famous Twain novel, “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it.”

We all looked forward to “returning to civilization” and to putting the pandemic behind us. As the pandemic is still with us, I will do my “sivilizing” in books such as Pressfield’s, via Zoom, and on the roof of the Natsoulas Gallery this coming Thursday night as I introduce two featured poet/performers.

Standing at the microphone five stories above E Street, glad to spend outdoor time with one of my favorite communities, I will shield my eyes from the glare of the sun as it sets over my territory, and perhaps yours, of Davis, California.

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I hope you get to see this week’s Pub Quiz. Expect questions on topics raised above, and on the following: impermanent pubs, Wi-Fi passwords, newspaper headlines, The Statue of Liberty, swimming pools, the French Legion of Honor, The Venus de Milo, films with many A-list actors, The Vitruvian Man, religiosity, musical sounds, tetralogies, unfinished works, kinetic energy, film franchises, medical thrills, famous girlfriends who never got married, toes, forceful wiggling, fads from yesteryear, buttons, actress/singers, hard Fs, soups, neighbors from the 60s, facts we learn from The Economist, guardians, prominent Native Americans, 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. I’m working on something special for one of these teams. Let’s look forward to a time when we can all gather again to play with our friends, even if we all are dressed like surgeons at work!

As you can see by visiting the website for Poetry Night, you are invited to join us Thursday at 7 up on the roof.

Be well.

Dr. Andy

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

1. Mottos and Slogans. According to its strictly-fallacious slogan, what drink gives you wings? 

2. Internet Culture. Radiohead self-released their album In Rainbows in the same year that Apple released the iPhone and that Kurt Vonnegut passed away. With a two-year margin of error, name the year. 

3. Four for Four. Which of the following actors made a cameo appearance in a flashback scene at the end of the film The Godfather Part II: Marlon Brando, James Caan, Al Pacino, Abe Vigoda? Rest in Peace, James Caan.

P.S. “Japan’s beautiful seas and its territory are under threat, and young people are having trouble finding hope in the future amid economic slump. I promise to protect Japan’s land and sea, and the lives of the Japanese people no matter what.” Shinzo Abe

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Today is my brother Oliver’s 51^st birthday. Happy birthday, Oliver!

A couple years after I turned 40, I was in conversation with Yolo County Supervisor Don Saylor and a few friends when someone asked if I was going to rent out the John Natsoulas Gallery again for a birthday party. I told them that I only booked room at the Gallery or in our favorite pub for “big” birthdays.

“I attended your last big birthday, Dr. Andy,” Saylor said. “You turned 50, right?” We all had a good laugh over that one. Back then, I had no grey hair on my head, or even in my beard. Because of my jet-black hair and my irrepressible energy, I was widely regarded as a youth. 

Our Davis schoolchildren have all been trained not to bully, but what about our Yolo County Supervisors who are former mayors and former school board members? Should they also have to attend bullying prevention trainings?

Actually, I enjoyed the light roasting. Back then, no one was ever cancelled for giving their friends what Eddie Haskell used to call “the business.” I was left wondering if Saylor enjoyed the primary antagonist (in both senses of the word) of Leave It To Beaver in the late 1950s as much as I did in the late 1970s.

It seems appropriate for people so inclined to throw themselves a big party every ten years or, at the very most, every ten. My brother Oliver recognizes this. Last year on his birthday, I wrote and posted a poem celebrating him and our brother hood. As you will be able to read in the postscript, below, the poem contained all appreciation, and no roasting.

This year, I posted a link to the poem and wished him a happy birthday. When I caught him earlier today on the phone, Oliver said that he was going to hang out with our mom (who had to be reminded more than once that today is Oliver’s birthday – she shared her amazement), but that otherwise he would wait to celebrate when his wife and daughter return from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware (where Oliver, Mom, and I saw Grease in 1978). 51 is not as big a deal as 50.

Last year when President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn celebrated their 75^th wedding anniversary, hundreds of people were on the party invitation list, including President and Mrs. Clinton, and several dignitaries and elected leaders from the State of Georgia. I bet that even some Republicans attended that party.

This year, for their 76^th wedding anniversary, according to their spokesperson, the Carters enjoyed a quiet dinner together and then had some ice cream. 76 years is almost too many to be measured. I read that after 75 years, the U.S. Census stops keeping track of how long people have been married.

As Kate and I got married at age 25, I plan to throw a really big party commemorating the occasion of our 75^thwedding anniversary, to be held in the year of our 100^th birthdays. As that party will take place in the year 2067, many of you will be sadly unavailable to join us.

Hopefully, my younger brother Oliver will attend the party, though. I bet he will lead the roast.

This week’s Pub Quiz will be its own special event worthy of celebrating, I say. I hope you get to enjoy it. If so, expect questions on topics raised above, and on the following: hybrids, country estates, Little Tokyo, faraway cities, ledger awards, revolutions, alphabets, Irish culture, island nations, Kansas accomplishments, Kurt Vonnegut, fallacious slogans, British royalty, famous ladies, singles, decks of cards, palindromes, divorced parents in Texas, pineapples, inventors, hockey humor, famous feasts, gothic stories, 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. New supporters are always welcome. Let me know what I can do for you. While I wish we could gather together, the newspapers suggest this is a good time for us to keep our distance.

Be well.

Dr. Andy

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

1. Books and Authors. In the Peter Pan books and plays, Wendy Darling has two brothers. Name one of them. 

2. Film. According to the American Film Institute, two Billy Wilder films are among the 15 greatest films ever made. Name one of them. 

3. Funeral Culture. The word “mortician” was coined as a friendlier and less funereal alternative to what? 

P.P.S. And here is the poem I wrote to celebrate the 50^th birthday of Oliver Jones:

For Oliver on His 50th Birthday

Oliver, I shared my start with you, 

and it might be said that your arrival –

I remember that first time that mom and dad brought you home – 

also marked my start. 

My earliest memories had long since faded,

their source by now confirmed and perhaps even originated 

in grainy, square photographs rather than anything I can summon.

To make meaning of my own childhood, 

I look to you.

Mom and dad taught me how to smile, 

my watching their young eyes

for hints on how to respond, 

a tiny wannabe actor waiting for direction.

You made us more of a family, 

your arrival opening our ensemble performance.

During those few short years of the four of us together, 

you taught us how to laugh.

As you turn 50, I call for an intermission,

a pause of the inexorable and now rushing sweep of years,

to consider the unspoken and almost unrealized blessings 

of our shared thousands of unrushed hours 

suspended in a state of play.

Play is how this we that we are came to be. 

Dad’s love of games – played and televised – 

kept us attentively orbiting him, sampling his uncompetitive love,

experimenting in myriad new and well-worn 

permutations of connection.

At age ten, I was a short kid who towered 

over five-year-old you,

both of us in unfortunate dressy hobo shoes, or none at all.

The differences between us were plain:

I could carry you, both of us laughing.

Years later, weekend ambassadors between our two families,

we would be called upon to repeatedly pivot,

and come to strain against Dad’s oddly formal family routines,

rituals overwrought.

Back at “home,” with a laugh and a wave

mom would let us loose upon two city blocks 

of unsupervised parks and alleys,

perhaps three hours shared with a Frisbee.

We explored all our differences then,

but forty years later, perhaps mistaken for fraternal twins,

the creaky two of us are chronologically collapsed, 

the momentous conflicts and disparities, 

to which so much attention was once paid, 

now negligible.

Today you are the keeper of our parents’ flame,

kindled by overlapping iterations of adult conversations 

over a beer, your reporter’s ear receptive 

to nuances of humor or history to which I was not privy.

To your credit, as the years pass, 

I see so much of them in you.

Every decade on your birthday, I am reminded

that my own age is real, for, like my crucial foundational

Ineffable, signifying and profoundest early moments,

It is again shared. 

Throughout it all, I have been grateful for the company.

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

A gardener we know approached Kate’s car yesterday to ask if she had any fun plans for the Fourth of July, and if she likes the British new wave band The Cure. Kate said yes, she loves The Cure, but a discerning listener might have been skeptical, for at that moment the car was filled with the sounds of Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” The gardener said that his brother is performing in a Cure tribute band, and that Kate and Dr. Andy are invited. She said that she would keep that in mind, but over dinner last night, Kate made her musical preferences clear by recounting the lyrics while telling her story:

Hold me closer, tiny dancer

Count the headlights on the highway

Lay me down in sheets of linen

You had a busy day today

Speaking of dancing, I was writing a poem this morning about how spending time with my Kate first thing in the morning has to be better than coffee. The verb form “has to” indicates conjecture, for I’ve never had a cup of coffee. Then I wanted to include a line about Kate’s dancing, and one of the rhyming words recommended by my rhyming dictionary was “Stockard Channing.” I dropped everything to see if Stockard Channing is still alive, and she is!

I remember that the entire Rehoboth Beach, Delaware audience and I were so concerned in 1978 that teenager Betty Rizzo (played by Stockard Channing at age 33) was pregnant because back in 1958, that would mean that Rizzo would have to drop out of Rydell High School and have the baby, perhaps derailing her life’s goals, and imperiling her future, both socially and financially. As you may remember (spoiler alert), it turns out that Rizzo wasn’t actually pregnant, so everyone in the movie theater breathed a sigh of relief, grateful that it was 1978 and not 1958.

In real life, Stockard Channing has been married and divorced four times. She has no children. She fled to London to commit herself to her first love, live theatre. I can imagine why. Having seen Daniel J. Travanti, Judi Dench, Anthony Hopkins and many other TV and film actors on stage when I lived in London (and Ian McKellen, Marlo Thomas, and Yul Brynner when I lived in Washington DC), I remember the thrill of being in the same room as someone whose characters I had admired on the small screen many times.

If my dad were alive today at age 90, he would remember the eight plays he took my brother Oliver and me to when we spent Thanksgiving week of 1984 in London and Stratford. I remember Starlight Express, The Hired Man, and this production of Henry V. I’m frustrated that my mind is fuzzy about that theatrical experience. Future Oscar-winner Kenneth Branagh was not yet famous in 1984, but you think the Star Wars fan in me would have noticed and remembered that both Ian McDiarmid (The Emperor) and Sebastian Shaw (Darth Vader without the mask) appeared in this production. For some reason, I do remember the Duke of Exeter, played by larger-than-life Brian Blessed, who later would become the oldest man to have reached the North Magnetic Pole on foot. (Late addition: Oliver says we also saw Passion Play.)

Covid- and crowd-averse, Kate and I will not be seeing a play tonight. Outdoor holiday weekend time spent with fellow Davisites is always welcome, but we feel disinclined to celebrate when the Supreme Court is making America into a crueler, more autocratic, and less safe place (as Kate told our gardener friend). Who knows if we will see some of you on the Fourth of July; we definitely won’t be seeing that Cure tribute band. 

All that said, I have been listening to some Cure songs while writing this newsletter. Here’s a favorite, one that reminds me of Kate, and one that also includes dancing, but without the square imposition of rhymes – it’s from The Cure song “Doing the Unstuck”: “It’s a perfect day for doing the unstuck / For dancing like you can’t hear the beat and you don’t give a further thought to things like feet / Let’s get happy.”

I hope you are able to get both unstuck and happy this holiday weekend.

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I hope you get to see this week’s Pub Quiz. Expect questions on topics raised above, and on the following: southern states, famous caregivers, Hollywood reporters, magnolias, people named “Orel,” gloves, largely wordless characters, Davis people, music festivals, cellists, long naps, snakes, baseball greats, states and territories, poisons, butterflies, political memoirs, wars you should have learned about in school, funny nicknames in unfunny families, boulevards, secondary siblings, beans, cross-dressers, clothing stores, lakes, famous sculptures, comedic actors, current events, and Shakespeare.

Thanks to all the supporters on Patreon who make this weekly newsletter and the asynchronous pub quizzes happen. Special thanks to the Outside Agitators, the Original Vincibles, and Quizimodo. I’m always grateful to players who pledge for their entire team. Thanks also to Faith, a new subscriber, who gives me faith in humanity.

Dr. Andy

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

1. State Capitals. Originally settled in 1867, what state capital of more than a million people is majority-minority? 

2. College Endowments. Which ivy league private college has the third largest endowment? 

3. Pop Culture – Music. David St. Hibbins and Nigel Tufnel are the lead singers of what British band? 

P.P.S. “Humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit. Without doubt, these dreamers do not deserve wealth, because they do not desire it. Even so, a well-organized society should assure to such workers the efficient means of accomplishing their task, in a life freed from material care and freely consecrated to research.” Marie Curie

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

We are not used to losing rights and privileges. Throughout my lifetime, and throughout the life of our nation, we have always expanded the circle of people who have rights to self-determination, to agency, to privacy.

As was the case with Prohibition in 1920, soon wide swaths of the American public will be unable to act on opportunities previously available to them. While Chico, Berkeley, Folsom, and Placerville were once considered “sundown towns,” meaning that African-Americans were prohibited from spending the night in those place, this time it’ll be women who are singled out for diminished privileges depending on where they find themselves. Some residents of those towns were comfortable with the racist prohibitions, while other fought back.

This time, the fight is about medical privacy, topics that men and women should be able to discuss with their doctors without governmental interference. As an unlikely source of Billy Graham once commented, “Once you’ve lost your privacy, you realize you’ve lost an extremely valuable thing.” Certain categories of citizen, such as people who look like the late Billy Graham or myself, will now be granted medical privacy, but women will not have the same rights over decisions made about their own bodies that I do. As with sundown towns, the privileges women are granted will be determined by where they live.

As Kaly Soto wrote in the New York Times yesterday, “With the decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the United States joins a handful of countries, like Poland, Russia and Nicaragua, that have rolled back access to the procedure in the last few decades, while more of the world has gone in the other direction.” Is this the company we wish to keep?

Not surprisingly, our international allies have expressed concern about the regressive decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau tweeted, “My heart goes out to the millions of American women who are now set to lose their legal right to an abortion. I can’t imagine the fear and anger you are feeling right now.”

President Emmanuel Macron of France tweeted that “Abortion is a fundamental right for all women. It must be protected.” Macron expressed his “solidarity with the women whose liberties are being undermined by the Supreme Court of the United States.” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, more conservative than some of these other western world leaders, said this: “I’ve always believed in a woman’s right to choose, and I stick to that view, and that’s why the U.K. has the laws that it does.”

The majority of Americans agree with Johnson. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll finds 71% of respondents, including 60% of Republicans, said they believed the decision to terminate a pregnancy should be left to a woman and her doctor. According to this poll, a mere 15% opined that this decision should be regulated by the government.

Somehow, when it comes to gun control, abortion rights, or even the U.S. Presidential elections of 2000 and 2016, the direction of the country continues to diverge significantly from the expressed wishes of the majority. Will these trends continue? We will see to what extent these dire circumstances jolt progressive voters into action and activism. 

Meanwhile, I’m grateful to be a California resident. I hope blue state geographic privileges will last beyond November of 2022, when opponents of medical privacy and bodily autonomy for women are likely to take over both houses of Congress. We will see how many more of our personal rights and freedoms are challenged by our minority rulers then, and what we might be able to do to confront them.

Speaking of confrontations, and the non-violent actions we may be called to take, I will close with the now oft-quoted words of the activist and educator Mariame Kaba: “Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.”

---

Thanks to all my Patreon subscribers, including, this week, my new friend Faith from Dallas, Texas. Because of her, expect a few more trivia questions this year about knitting, ice hockey, and the TV show Jeopardy, of which Faith is a past champion. If you find anything in these newsletters valuable, and if you would like to see 31 new questions appear in your inbox weekly, please join the Pub Quiz teams Quizimodo, Outside Agitators, and Original Vincibles in subscribing to the Pub Quiz.

This week’s quiz includes questions on topic raised above, and on the following: Casper, iPhones, job titles, the year 1917, state capitals, ancient Greeks, people named Henry, sports lineages, new possibilities, faucets, kids, con jobs, dystopian geography, mobile phone calls, differentiations from Spain, common surnames, film ages, antiwar activists, caffeine intake, clothiers, Steve Wonder phenomena, smooth curves, yogis in Greece, army generals, Tennessee towns, friends and enemies, name changes, Canada, thorough blends, centenarians, wind speeds, playoff appearances, the differences in measurements, private colleges, current events, and Shakespeare.

Thanks for reading, everyone! Stay healthy!

Dr. Andy

P.S. Here are three questions from a Pub Quiz from June of 2015:

1. Four for Four. Which of the following Presidents of the United States, if any, attended the funeral of Eleanor Roosevelt? Calvin Coolidge, Dwight David Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman.

2. Science. Starting with the letter P, what term refers to all the normal functions that take place in a living organism?

3. Unusual Words. What monosyllabic L word as a verb means “to kick, hit, or throw (a ball or missile) high up”?

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

It’s Father’s Day weekend, so of course I am thinking about my dad. And while I was composing thoughts about Davey Marlin-Jones for my newsletter, including by sharing Patton Oswalt’s thoughts about my dad, my wife Kate pointed out that today was the coolest day of the entire summer, so we spent the entire day refilling our garage and accidentally going through my “effects,” meaning the thousands of letters that friends and Kate sent me in the 1980s and 1990s, when people still wrote letters.

And then 16 hours went by. Mission accomplished. Thanks, Kate.

So as I do once a year or so, today I am sharing the entire Pub Quiz as the newsletter! Paid Patreonsubscribers get the answers, my thanks, as well as the print and audio of a two-page poem I’ve recently written from the point of view of my beleaguered running shoes.

But for right now, here is this week’s Pub Quiz:

Pub Quiz for June 18, 2022

1. Mottos and Slogans. The second highest-revenue athletic shoe brand taught us that “Impossible is Nothing.” Name the brand. 

2. Internet Culture. Bill Gates jokes about the retirement of what Microsoft  product when he said this week, “I guess we finally ran out of microchips”? 

3. Newspaper Headlines. CNN reminded us yesterday that you can’t pump your own gas in two different U.S. states. Name one of them. 

4. Four for Four. Which of the following products, if any, were invented in the 19^th century: 7-Up, Coca Cola, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi? 

5. European Explorers. Did Vasco Da Gama become the first European to reach India by sea during the lifetime of Charlemagne, Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, or William Shakespeare. 

6. Cursive. A study of grade-school children in 2013 revealed what about the speed of their cursive writing when compared to their print writing, regardless of which handwriting the child had learned first? That the cursive was faster, that the print writing was faster, or that they were about the same. 

7. Pop Culture – Music. What world-famous musician turns 80 this weekend?

8. Sports. The Detroit Lions play their home games in what alliterative stadium? 

9. Science. Which of the following is likely the longest: a lion, a lion’s mane jellyfish, or a giraffe that is “lying” down for a nap? 

The Short Round

10. Great Americans. Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale was the running mate of what unsuccessful candidate for President of the United States? 

11. Unusual Words. Starting with the letter B and ending with the letter N, what verb am I thinking of that means “to begin to grow or increase rapidly; flourish”? 

12. Swahili Words. Again with the lions. Starting with the letter S, what is the Swahili word for “lion”? 

13. Pop Culture – Television. “Stewie” Griffin is a fictional character from what animated television series?

14. Another Music Question. What billionaire American rapper and record executive was born with the name Shawn Corey Carter? 

End of The Short Round

15. Anagram. The name of the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States is an anagram of the phrase Likeable Belch Waltz. Name her. 

And now five questions on the same topic. This week’s topic is Celebrity Dads.

16.     What EGOT-winner has two children with model Chrissy Teigen? 

17.     What Grammy award-winning Latin pop singer is raising four children with his husband Jwan Yosef? 

18.    Who is the father of Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor? 

19.   Who is the father of Nakoa-Wolf Manakauapo Namakaeha Momoa? 

20.  Born in 1947, who is the most famous of the two dads of Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John (10) and Elijah Joseph Daniel Furnish-John (8)? 

And thus end our round of questions on Celebrity Dads.

21. Books and Authors. The novel The Great Gatsby is set during what age? 

22. Film. As an actor in a leading role, only two of Tom Cruise’s top ten highest internationally grossing films were not sequels, remakes, or part of a series, such as a Mission Impossible film. Name just one of these two films. 

23. Jewish Culture. What is the Hebrew term for a good deed done out of a sense of religious duty? 

24. Cities of the World That Start with the Letter J.  Described in the Bible as the “city of palm trees,” what Palestinian city is claimed to be the oldest city in the world? 

25. Card Games. What is the triple-digit number of cards in a complete deck of UNO?

26. Science.  Do sponges have hearts? 

27. Books and Authors. Born just over 200 years ago, how many of the Brontë siblings were there (all were writers)? 

28. Current Events – Names in the News. Muhammad Ali International Airport hosts UPS’s worldwide hub and is the main commercial airport for what American city? 

29. Sports. Since Steve Kerr took over as the head coach of the Golden State Warriors in 2014, the Warriors have won how many of the 18 playoff games that they have played against Western Conference teams? It is 12, 15, or 18? 

30. Shakespeare. With a population approaching one million people, larger even than London or Constantinople, what was the most populous city in the world in 1603, the year that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet? 

Tie-breaker.  According to a 2012 study published in The Lancet, what percentage of people get migraines? 

I hope you enjoyed that. You can probably tell that a few of the questions are easier than usual. Special thanks to Patton Oswalt.

Happy Father’s Day, and happy Juneteenth. I get to meet a new bunch of student journalists on Wednesday, and even though doing so will mark the end of my current mini-vacation, I can’t wait!

Be well,

Dr. Andy

P.S. If you enjoy these newsletters with the weekly trivia attached, please consider supporting these efforts on Patreon. Thanks!