Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Welcome to November, the subject of one of my favorite nihilist Thomas Hood poems, titled “No!”:

        No sun—no moon!

        No morn—no noon—

No dawn—

        No sky—no earthly view—

        No distance looking blue—

No road—no street—no “t’other side the way”—

        No end to any Row—

        No indications where the Crescents go—

        No top to any steeple—

No recognitions of familiar people—

        No courtesies for showing ’em—

        No knowing ’em!

No traveling at all—no locomotion,

No inkling of the way—no notion—

        “No go”—by land or ocean—

        No mail—no post—

        No news from any foreign coast—

No park—no ring—no afternoon gentility—

        No company—no nobility—

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,

   No comfortable feel in any member—

No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,

No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,

        November!

Thomas Hood died in his birthplace of London about 150 years before I spent an entire November (and fall) in that same Sunday, so I remember what would have gotten him down. Despite the darkness, I’m grateful for everything that England and London in particular had to offer me when I lived there. All that rain meant that I got to spend even more time with Kate, my propitious London roommate, who to this day brightens even the shortest and gloomiest days that November has had in store for me.

Rain has a different meaning in drought-stricken California than it did during our London adventures. Ironically, our recent record one-day rainstorm brought many dry parts of Davis to life. Walking from south Davis towards the underpass to get to downtown Davis yesterday, my son Jukie and I noticed that the typically dry field – what in cities we call an “empty lot” – between West Chiles Road and Putah Creek, where local firefighters test their enormous hoses, had turned from brown to green. Imagine all those seedlings waiting for enough hydration to sprout, even though it is so late in the calendar year.

Yesterday I also saw a pair of California Towhees frolicking in our back yard, digging at something among the puddles and the tufts of new grass, as if they were snowy plovers or other shorebirds scouting the beach for morsels of marine worms and crustaceans. Such ornithological excitement and joy a rain shower brings!

We turn to the cycles of nature to bring us comfort when plagued by melancholy, as I am now, thinking of the recent deaths of friends and former students (Goodbye, Rasar. Goodbye, David Kim / DK). Sometimes we turn to poetry when we seek to make sense of the shocking, the unfair, or the unfathomable. The winter poems of Robert Frost leaned into the sort of melancholy that we imagine the poet felt. Consider, for example, the opening stanza of his poem for this time of year, titled “My November Guest”:

My sorrow, when she’s here with me,

     Thinks these dark days of autumn rain

Are beautiful as days can be;

She loves the bare, the withered tree;

     She walks the sodden pasture lane.

How strange not only to gender and to personify one’s sorrow, but also to imagine what she sees as beautiful, as if she were a companion who, like my constant walking buddy, points out with her upward gazes what beauty can be found in the trees after the leaves have parted.

The word “sodden” suggests that Frost’s New England Novembers were wetter than ours, while the word “pasture” suggests that denizens of that part of the world a century ago came home with muddy boots, while my son Jukie and I in our walking shoes enjoy the benefits of paved footpaths that ring our South Davis neighborhood.

In both cases, November is more inviting to the afternoon perambulator than the coming winter months, with their frigid temperatures and soaking rains. Normally I would look forward to autumnal gatherings with friends in local restaurants, and with Jukie in our neighborhood art galleries, bookstores, and movie theatres, but the virus will keep us outside, no matter the weather. Unhampered by the welcome rains, we will continue to walk Davis streets and greenbelts, as Hood or Frost once did, searching for images that reflect our November spirits.

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I hope you get to see this week’s pub quiz, an ongoing enterprise sustained by my patrons on Patreon, especially the teams Quizimodo, Original Vincibles, and Outside Agitators. Join their ranks to receive engaging trivia content – the address is https://www.patreon.com/yourquizmaster.

This week’s quiz may touch on topics raised above, as well as the following: running animals, European capitals, roller coasters, Meryl Streep accomplishments, oddly-named parents, aged competitors, the Bureau of Transportation, obduracy, colts, Nobel laureates, mechanisms, famous rebellions, genres of dance, mermaids, superheroes, French things, famous journals, restaurants that have not closed, Popeye, thugs in southern literature, Tuesday voices, time in space, aging bodies, Princeton graduates, tissues, pumpkins, baseball terms, current events, and Shakespeare.

Tomorrow night’s poetry reading at the Natsoulas Gallery with Miles Miniaci should be fun. I will have to miss it, as Kate and I will be celebrating her November birthday! Be well.

Dr. Andy

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

1. Famous Bankruptcies. What investment bank had almost $600 billion in assets when they declared bankruptcy on September 15, 2008?   

2. Pop Culture – Music. A duet sung by Freddie Mercury and Michael Jackson remained unfinished because Mercury walked out of the recording. He couldn’t tolerate Jackson bringing his grass-eating pet mammal into the studio. Name the species of animal.  

3. Sports. What former Cuban-American Oakland Athletic was the first foreign-born player to reach the four-hundred home runs plateau?  

P.P.S. “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.” Anatole France

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

I seem to have stumbled into Stoicism.

The most-consumed Stoicism-booster today is Ryan Holiday, author of the books with the titles The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, and, this year, Courage is Calling. Holiday must be working through the  holidays in order to publish a new book every year. This list of “don’ts” gives you a sense of what he means by Stoicism:

7 Stoic DON’Ts:

1. Don’t be overheard complaining…even to yourself

2. Don’t talk more than you listen

3. Don’t tie your identity to things you own

4. Don’t compare yourself to others

5. Don’t suffer imagined troubles

6. Don’t judge others

7. Don’t overindulge in food or drink

As perceptive readers will be able to track from what I write below, I attempt to follow these precepts, though with varying success. The first, about complaining, is my favorite. The poet Randall Jarrell once quipped, “The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.” This is how Doris Day put it: “Gratitude is riches. Complaint is poverty.” People who spend their time complaining that they have no friends need not ask why.

My newfound love of audiobooks, the end of my live Pub Quiz, and an extended Covid hiatus from my radio show have helped me adhere to the second precept: “Don’t talk more than you listen.” Just this morning, an absent colleague asked me to chair a meeting he was due to run not because I was the most qualified to do so, but because he knows that I love chairing things (though not departments).

We all have to prioritize. John Lennon said, “If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.” With this quotation in mind, I would love to think of myself only as a peace-loving anti-materialist, but I just noticed that there are items in my Amazon cart. With regard to Holiday’s third precept, I tie my identity in part to my “ownership” of our French bulldog. Her name is Margot, and strangers can’t get over how affectionate she is, and how expressive her face is. I figure that somehow these qualities reflect well on my wife Kate and myself, to have raised such a dog. It helps that French bulldogs come this way.

Although Margot almost never barks, lately as part of my son Truman’s bedtime routine, I have taught Margot how to vocalize. I ask her to “SPEAK,” she does, and then we shower her with affection as if she had just learned how to conjugate the French verb blablater. After playing this game for a few minutes, Margot is always proud of herself, and exhausted. Like a princess who refuses to give up all the trappings of her office, Margot proceeds through life from one nap, from one snuggle, to another. She is our domestic bodhisattva, compassionately privileging our happiness over any other concern.

Speaking of religious concerns, Aretha Franklin is singing the Marvin Gaye song “Wholy Holy” in my ears. Her voice is transcendent. I’m comfortable with the fact that I will never be able to sing like Aretha. Of course, I don’t know that she was particularly talented at writing trivia questions about Ukrainian pumpkin production trends. We all have our strengths.

Check out this paragraph from today’s New York Times: “Battered by a major storm, Sacramento on Sunday logged its wettest day since record-keeping began in the 1800s. Eight days prior, Sacramento broke a different record — the longest dry spell in the city’s history, with 212 days without rain. It’s a study in contrasts playing out across California.” 

When it comes to suffering imagined troubles, I have found that neither the extended drought nor the recent record-breaking deluge was as bad as we could have imagined. Of course, maybe it’s easy for the guy with the new (or “newish,” as the real estate listings sometimes put it) roof to be talking so complacently. This morning, beholding the new lake in our back yard, we turned off our sprinklers.

With my PhD in English, I was trained to judge words – and the sentences, paragraphs, and books that they constitute – but I’ve learned to excuse myself from departmental conversations in which people merely gossip about others. I’d rather sit down with a good book or take a long Arboretum walk with my wife Kate. Life’s too short to track others’ peccadillos, much less spend time faulting them for their various offenses and infringements. If you are willing to listen, Aretha is always calling.

With regard to food and drink, I’ve been tracking my macros and letting my phone count my steps. If I did any of this accurately, I would be losing at least a pound a week. The scale says I have been losing closer half an ounce a week, meaning that I will be reaching my target weight around the time that I drive my current Davis Senior High sophomore off to college. 

This season, this stoic dad won’t be stealing Halloween candy, but I may be eyeing a second piece of pumpkin pie. How about you?

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This week’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on topics raised above, as well as the following: American kings, reading experiences, places that start with the letter P, saints, twins, admirable sacrifices, Emperor Palpatine, colors in nature, the best actresses, rabbits, patience at the go-go, Canadians, ghosts, unacknowledged authors, anagrammatical yelps, love songs, BET talk shows, notable summits, ranks, space travel, Cubans, unwelcome mammals, precipitous losses, sunny coves, current events, and Shakspeare.

Thanks to the teams that offer sustaining support of the Pub Quiz and these weekly newsletters, including the Original Vincibles, Quizimodo, and The Outside Agitators. You should form / found / or find a team so that you have a reason to gather with your friends. Memberships that get you the weekly quiz start at just $10 a month. Don’t let only the lucky teams have all the fun! See Patreon for details.

Yours,

Dr. Andy

P.S. Locals will want to see the Davis Senior High production of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors that opens this Friday. The show opens Friday, October 29^th at 7:30. My son Truman plays Antipholus of Ephesus!

Here’s what I found in today’s Blue Devil Bulletin: “DHS theatre’s fall play, The Comedy of Errors, has performances from October 29-30 ,and on November

4-6th at 7:30p.m. **On the 31st there is a matinee at 2:30p.m. Visit the Blue Devil online store for tickets. Prices: Students $8 and Adults $12

* Proof of a negative Covid test in 72 hours before the show is needed in order to attend.”

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

1. Film. What actor appeared in Enemy at the Gates in 2001, Road to Perdition in 2002, Cold Mountain in 2003, and The Aviator in 2004?  

2. Countries of the World. The smallest Asian country is also the lowest-lying country in the world. What do we call this chain of islands?  

3. The Last Presidio. The last and only Presidio in California to have an active military installation is the home of the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center. About a three-hour drive from Davis, California, name the city where this Presidio is found.   

Happy Halloween! Slow down and stay safe.

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

The death of Rock and Roll has been lamented for most of my life, but this genre of music still fuels my many moments of lyrical reflection, and my midnight solo dance parties. As the blues cover band The Rolling Stones put in in 1974, “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (But I Like It).”

Yesterday I was holding Zoom office hours with a student who probably didn’t notice during our consultation that my eyes kept darting to the poster behind her. After I commented helpfully on the short feature article she was about to submit to my journalism class, she shook her head after I asked if she had any more questions for me. She was about to click the red END button when I told her that I had a question for her: Does she know the primary interpretations of the Beatles Abbey Road album cover poster on the wall behind her?

My student summoned her roommate, the owner of the poster in question, and then I regaled the two of them with stories about The Beatles, Abbey Road Studios, and the “Paul is Dead” conspiracy theory that so many of us entertained when the album was released in late September of 1969. The two students listened eagerly, or so I imagined; perhaps they were listening only “politely,” like someone who is stuck on a long flight next to a talkative blowhard who has many lessons to share about irrelevant topics. The roommate said that this fall she is taking “Music 116: Music of the Beatles.” I told her that there was a time when I could have taught that class. She responded, “I believe you. Bye!”

As I write this, my happy ears are filled with my favorite album from the entire 1980s: Graceland by Paul Simon. Back in the late 1980s, before I even knew that I would be moving to California, I enjoyed hearing this album (cassette, really) on perpetual repeat while driving in Washington D.C., Beavertown, Pennsylvania, and many other beloved places in my family’s 1977 Checker Marathon. (See my last mention of this beloved car in my 2004 newsletter, with a remarkable photograph, titled “The Checker Marathon as Status Symbol.”) But the magic of this musical compilation, including the musical stylings of zydeco and mbaqanga, South African street music, sounds all the more magical when every nuance and instrument – the pedal steel guitar, the tin whistle, the backing vocals of The Everly Brothers – come alive in all its “ULTRA HD” complexity and variety courtesy of the sort of headphones that I could never have afforded, or that perhaps didn’t exist, when the album came out in 1986.

I did lots of traveling back east before I moved to California, leaving behind the thick and humid deciduous forests of my youth for the arid scrub and greenbelts of Davis, but I never made it to Graceland. We might wonder, do any of us actually make it to “Graceland”? Paul Simon said that “Graceland” was originally conceived of as just a placeholder word until he thought of something better, the way that Paul McCartney wrote a catchy tune originally called “Scrambled Eggs” (using what in advanced poetry school we learned is an amphimacer, or a three-part rhythm of two strong / long beats sandwiching a weak / short beat). McCartney eventually renamed that song “Yesterday.”

I suspect that much of what I eagerly learned about Rock and Roll and other topics of youthful enthusiasm is fading. In many ways, the album Graceland reflects on that which is lost, or that which we are actively losing. The second verse emphasizes lost love:

She comes back to tell me she’s gone

As if I didn’t know that

As if I didn’t know my own bed

As if I’d never noticed

The way she brushed her hair from her forehead

And she said losing love

Is like a window in your heart

Everybody sees you’re blown apart

Everybody sees the wind blow

But the album also promises the possibility of (a place of) redemption. The idea is familiar to many of us who have read widely, for a “promised land” has inflamed the imaginations of travelers as varied as Moses, Woody Guthrie, or the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Although I have told many people that Jack Kerouac’s On the Road inspired my first trip to California, the end of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn likely also played a part in my leaving the east for the west. You remember that Huck opted at the end of that book (spoiler) to “light out for the territory ahead of the rest,” just as I moved out west before my dad, brother, and, in the last year, my mom did the same. We made the right decision, I think.

So I don’t regret never visiting Graceland. For me, the idea of Graceland drove me to reach for the horizon. As it was for Paul Simon, “Graceland” for me has been a placeholder, a welcome symbol for a place – for me, that place is my family home here in Davis – where we finally find our way. Although I never knew anyone who had “diamonds on the souls of her shoes,” I agree with Paul Simon when he says “I’ve reason to believe / We all will be received in Graceland.”

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I hope you get to read tonight’s pub quiz. It’s filled with creativity and discovery and whimsical joy. It will also contain questions about the following: delicacies, garages, musical instruments, transportation challenges, famous stages, the taking of power, snipers, clowns, global media conglomerates, engines, linguistic diversity, places for Roo, archipelagos, waning cow anagrams, women who change their names, total games, civilian offices, essential wisdom, Dodge City, gross leasable areas, low liars, aviators, countrymen, troublemakers, sunshine fish, Soul Train Awards, current events, and Shakespeare.

Thanks to all the sustaining patrons of the Pub Quiz including, as of this last week, Mercedes and Vincent. I love that we still get to connect this way even when we have no pub in which to congregate. Other terrific supporters of the Pub Quiz include Quizimodo, The Outside Agitators, and especially The Original Vincibles. I invite you to join them, especially now that I have lowered the cost of the monthly subscription to a mere 10 bucks. See you on Patreon!

Your Quizmaster, Dr. Andy

https://www.yourquizmaster.com

http://www.twitter.com/yourquizmaster

yourquizmaster@gmail.com

P.S. Did you know that five Pub Quiz questions appear every week in the Sunday Davis Enterprise? Here are three questions from last week’s quiz.

1. Food and Drink. What kind of salad includes ingredients which have been chopped to be uniform and then either composed or tossed?  

2. Pop Culture – Music. What American band had #1 multi-platinum hits this century with “Makes Me Wonder” and “One More Night”?  

3. Sports. In baseball, what do we call the accomplishment of one batter hitting a single, a double, a triple, and a home run in the same game?   

P.P.S. I acknowledge that Paul Simon’s album Graceland is controversial because of the use of musical traditions outside his own, including his employing Black South African musicians during the time of Apartheid. Nelson Mandela was still in prison as Paul Simon collected his Graceland Grammy Awards. Some have accused Simon of appropriation. For a brief exploration of this controversy by author Brian Kaufman, see his blog entry titled “Paul Simon and Cultural Appropriation.”

Would you like to see the notable Peter Coyote read from his new book in Davis on Thursday? Read to the end for that opportunity.

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Sometimes we wear a message T-shirt to proclaim who we are or what we want to say, while sometimes we wear such a shirt to invite others to tell us who they are.

Take my daughter Geneva, for example. She has a bunch of gay and witty T-shirts. One says, “NO ONE KNOWS I’M A LESBIAN,” which, I suppose, pits the wearer’s introversion against her extroversion, like a modern LGBT version of the logician’s enigma known as the “liar’s paradox” or the “antinomy of the liar.” As someone said to Geneva in a college dining commons one day, while she was trying to enjoy her egg breakfast before rushing off to class, “Actually, now we DO know that you’re a lesbian. Ha ha ha!” Nobody found that guy funny.

Geneva has another shirt that says, “SOUNDS GAY. I’M IN.” I love how this colorful shirt co-opts the standard ignoramus insult that I heard in high school in the early 1980s: That’s so gay. Almost everyone I knew back then wanted not to come off as gay. These days, by contrast, some of my UC Davis students use inclusive pronouns to show an ally’s solidarity with their LGBTQIA+ classmates, saying with love in their hearts that they are all in with anything that is gay.

Like my classmates, I myself was not allowed to wear T-shirts that depicted any images or words in the Washington Waldorf School that I attended in the 1970s. On the one day a year, Field Day, that we were allowed to wear colorful and representational shirts, I remember wearing a fancy shirt that was decked out across the front, back, and sides with panels from a comic book. Amazed at the sight, kids from school would gather around me as if I were a visiting alien, sometimes lifting my arms if I were inadvertently blocking one of the panels they wanted to read.

I’m sure my dad approved of the Waldorf policy on silly T-shirts, for he had high wardrobe standards for himself and, indirectly, for his sons. I believe there are no photographs of my father in a T-shirt. I don’t think he owned a pair of jeans. When everyone started dressing more casually at Antioch College in the early 1950s, my rebel dad made sure to wear a tie and collared shirt to every class. Arriving at my dad’s house on a late Saturday afternoon for some board games and dinner, I remember wanting to ask my dad why he was all dressed up. One thinks of exasperated Liz Lemon asking Jack Donaghy why her 30 Rock boss was wearing a tuxedo. His response, as you can see in this seven-second YouTube clip, is “It’s after six. What am I, a farmer?”

Careful what I advertise, even today I will typically still not wear just a T-shirt out of the house, even on a hot day, choosing instead a collared shirt. My son Truman follows the tradition established by his “Grand-Davey,” for he has also decided that a T-shirt is too informal to be seen in except at bedtime. An avid reader and a film buff with an encyclopedic mind, Truman agrees with Oscar Wilde: “You can never be overdressed or overeducated.” Once I teach him how to tie a tie, there will be no stopping him!

Despite my family’s formal wardrobe proclivities, I’m grateful for two notable times that I wore T-shirts out into the world. About a dozen years ago, I was wearing the well-preserved T-shirt that marked the sesquicentennial (150 years) celebration of Boston University, where I earned my undergraduate degree in English, and where I was studying (abroad) when I met my wife, Kate. Because our graduation speakers included the sitting president of the United States (George H.W. Bush) and the President of France (Francois Mitterrand), we graduates were all given special T-shirts to mark the occasion. (Senator Ted Kennedy, whose politics more closely resemble mine, was also on stage that day.) Anyway, because of that shirt, my favorite baker, Trudy Kalisky, reached out to me at the Davis Farmers Market for the first time to say that her son Lorin also went to BU, and did we know each other. The conversation that started that day has been continuing intermittently ever since, with highlights including my treating Trudy, Lorin, and their entire Pub Quiz team of six to a complimentary meal at our favorite former restaurant. During the time of our fruitful friendship, for Trudy is a great conversationalist, she and the Kalisky family have treated my kids and me to perhaps 1000 chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies from the Upper Crust Baking Company, which gets my vote for the best such bakery on the West Coast.

And then this past Saturday, a prominent Davisite and her mom were walking the UC Davis Arboretum when they noticed a familiar guy walking his French Bulldog with his red-headed wife and son while wearing a black T-shirt with three words written in the largest possible white letters: BLACK LIVES MATTER. That was me! The Davisite, who happened to be LeShelle May, probably resolved to strike up a conversation with the BLM supporter and ally and introduce him to his mom, now a resident at Atria Gardens in north Davis. What a delightful meeting that was – we covered topics such as grandchildren, poetry, and the joys of taking a walk on an October Saturday afternoon! Coincidentally, Kate and I had just talked to LeShelle and UC Davis Chancellor Gary May the night before at Thai Nakorn, one of several restaurants we are trying out as our new weekly haunt. LeShelle joked that she might just run into us the next day while out for her daily run.

Both Kate’s mom and my mom have moved to independent living facilities in recent years, so we have heard how disorienting it can be to be living in new digs after having grown used to living more independently for so many years. It turned out that LeShelle’s mom and I had a good friend (another Atria resident) in common, and that, as her daughter already knew, like Lorin Kalisky, LeShelle and I both attended Boston University at the same time (though we didn’t know each other). I helped to welcome LeShelle’s sharp and loquacious mom to her new hometown, and I was reminded how much I love walking the streets and paths of Davis. You never know who you might meet here, or who might feel compelled to meet you.

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This week’s Pub Quiz will feature questions raised above and on the following: Cars in California, iPhones, Evanston, Ottomen, Chinese food staples, three-word titles, rogues, Ethiopia, email histories, kitchen paychecks, cycles, nuclei, musical wonderous nights, people who quarreled with their stepfathers, furniture in art galleries, princesses, Oscar-winners, central parks, TV-MA examples, the gardens of Cordoba, Muppet Shows, European countries, Encyclopædia Britannica, pearls without swine, salads, menageries, cowgirls, hosts, statutes for wrenches, midpoint meetings, Saturday Night Live, current events, and Shakespeare.

I send special thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz, and thus subscribes to all the pub quizzes, including the one I finished today. I would love to add your name to this list as a new subscriber. Find out more on Patreon. My deep appreciation goes out to our sustaining patrons, including the Original Vincibles, Quizimodo, The Outside Agitators, and a number of teams that support the Quiz at the $20 monthly level. I can keep this up because of you.

Enjoy this blustery week and the cooler temperatures. Perhaps I will see you out there during one of our overlapping walks!

Best,

Dr. Andy

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

1. Mottos and Slogans and Taglines. What 1978 horror film used the tagline “The Night HE Came Home”? 

2. Newspaper Headlines. The United States recently expressed “concern” about China’s incursion into the defense zone of what country?  

3. California Islands. Avalon is the only incorporated city on what Southern California island found in the Bay of Santa Catalina?  

P.P.S. The great actor, voiceover artist and documentary narrator, activist and poet Peter Coyote is celebrating his 80^th birthday in Davis this coming Thursday night at 7 with a poetry book release party. Tickets are free, but reservations are required. Check out the details at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/peter-coyotes-80th-birthday-party-and-reading-tickets-179279930097 – it would be fun to see you there!

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Finding myself with a bit of extra time on my hands this Tuesday, I’ve decided to go on a nature walk.

All through this worldwide pandemic, I have found that the best way to keep a safe social distance while spending time with my nonverbal son Jukie has been to walk the greenbelts, streets, and arboretums (arboreta?) of Davis, California. Consistency has been our key to success. Whether or not I reach my goal of walking 2021 miles over the course of 2021 (I think I will), I have enjoyed setting aside part of every day to escape from the oversized office chair from which I am compelled to write essays, poems, and comments on students’ essays, and stepping outside to listen to an audiobook, talk through my ever-present headphones to my favorite new LA resident (my mom), or just notice the patterns of breezes, the sound of the laughter of our new neighbors’ children, or the distant plaintive croon of the Capitol Corridor train that is speeding towards the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. On these walks, moving much more patiently than the speedy bicycle of my onetime commute, Jukie and I have found many moments of quiet reflection.

Just yesterday, for example, as we were crossing a low footbridge across Putah Creek at the north end of Willowbank Road in unincorporated South Davis, Jukie stopped and stared up into the trees above us. Jukie has taught me how to slow down, or at least to double-back to give him a high five while gobbling up a few more steps towards my daily quota. Jukie’s pauses and serene observations determine our dawdling pace, turning every weekday afternoon into an unhurried Sunday. Down at ground-level, one finds ample evidence that this particular grove is populated at the treetops by turkey vultures, those huge foreboding birds that always reminded me of the malevolent Skeksis, the 18 vulture-dragon antagonists of the 1982 Jim Henson film The Dark Crystal.

Yesterday evening Jukie could tell that the turkey vultures were watching us from 40 or 50 feet above us, noting the slow and careful path we took through their territory. One could imagine the vultures making eye contact with Jukie and offering him a nod of recognition and of respect, for perhaps they know that Jukie will never yell at them, or aim a weapon in their direction. Because these creatures lack a syrinx, the equivalent of the voice box of birds, they can hiss or grunt, as Jukie does sometimes, but never sing. Both Jukie and the vultures must find atypical means to communicate.

Although not the best-smelling birds, those turkey vultures who watch us on our walks are gentle giants. This is not the case with all the birds overhead. The first week that our French bulldog puppy Margot joined us, one of our avian neighbors also came to visit to check out the addition to the family. This happened in the back yard in October of 2018. Margot stepped outside to frolic in our back yard, attracting the notice of a rather large red-tailed hawk who swooped down to land on our wooden play structure. In all the years that we had our 40-lb English bulldog, Dilly, no raptors came to watch her play in the back yard, but our 12-lb Margot made this hawk wonder if she were strong enough to carry away such a muscular little morsel. After taking the bird’s picture – no telephoto needed – I recommended that she go hunt elsewhere. She did.

Now weighing in at a hefty 20 lbs, Margot confidently patrols our neighborhood parks seeking to make friends with birds, squirrels, cats, dogs, and, her favorite species, humans. I get to walk her at various times of the week, and I appreciate all the locals whom she has “introduced” me to. With some extra time on my hands, now I can take her out to make friends (perhaps including you!) on Tuesday evenings, as well. I will keep one eye open for raptors.

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If you haven’t done so already, I invite you to subscribe to my pub quiz. A few dozen fans of the quiz receive weekly trivia in their mailboxes and find the 31 questions posted on Patreon. Now even those pledging but $10 a week will receive more than 120 new questions every month. Some even save 15% by buying a year’s subscription. Now that we can’t meet weekly, I invite you to enjoy the fun with friends remotely. I will post on Patreon those the top scores that people report to me. Thanks especially to Kari and another anonymous patron for being my newest subscribers. I hope to add your name to this list!

This week’s (I almost wrote “tonight’s”) pub quiz will feature questions on the following topics: film taglines, videogames, China, Gene Autry, notable islands, Goths, Ireland exports, strong seasons, patrilinear successions, space travel, obsessions, African placenames, unusual heroes, punctuality and responsibility, well-read trials, Christmas gifts, alcoholic beverages, typicality, recognizable flower colors, actors who do accents, popular lights emphasizing “touch,” sitcoms, Egyptian blinds, US Senators, flight behaviors, all stars, Detroit comparisons, current events, and Shakespeare. 

We have some great questions tonight, so I hope you get to see them. If you are wondering whether or not to subscribe to the weekly quiz, just send me an email expressing your interest, and I will send you tonight’s quiz as a generous sample.

If you want to hang out, I am hosting a poetry reading Thursday night. You are invited! Details below. Be well.

Dr. Andy

Here are three questions from our last Pub Quiz at de Vere’s Irish Pub:

1. Mottos and Slogans. The Japanese company that uses the slogan “Revs Your Heart” started making harmonicas in 1914, motorcycles in 1955, and today is the world’s largest piano manufacturing company. Name the company, which shares a name with its founder.  

2. Newspaper Headlines. The Attorney General of what state said he will continue the his 2020 election investigation even though the “official” audit in his state was widely considered a big flop?  

3. Four for Four. Which of the following, if any, lasted as long as the time that de Vere’s Irish Pub has been found at 217 E Street in Davis? The American Revolutionary War, The Chunnel Construction Time, Mayor McCheese, The Reign of King Tut.  

P.P.S. Poetry Night is Thursday.

Join us at 7 PM on Thursday, October 7th, at the John Natsoulas Gallery, 521 1^st Street in Davis. We will be joined by two standout Sacramento poets, Tom Goff and Aaron Bradford

Tom Goff is the winner of the 2021 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Poetry Prize. An instructional assistant in the Reading and Writing Center at Folsom Lake College, Goff has degrees in music performance from Sacramento State University and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He has written five chapbooks of poetry and one full-length collection, Twelve-Tone Row: Music in Words (I Street Press, 2018). He recently has been published in Spectral Realms #14 (Hippocampus Press, 2021), and is represented in Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Press, 2018). 

Opening for Tom Goff will be Aaron Bradford.

Aaron Bradford teaches creative writing, argument, and literature courses at American River College. Bradford writes about being a father of daughters during the era of global climate change and pandemic, including the anxiety and the slivers of hope that can embed into daily life. His poems have appeared in Tule Review, Pearl, Chiron Review, and Nerve Cowboy and the anthologies Incidental Buildings & Accidental Beauty, Burning the Little Candle, and Late Peaches. 

The Poetry Night Reading Series, taking place on the first and third Thursdays of the month at 7 PM, is generously supported by the people and poets of the Sacramento Valley, and by John Natsoulas and the staff at the John Natsoulas Gallery. Find the Facebook event page for this event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/197469059125790 .

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Today is the day of the last de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz. As one friend texted me yesterday, it was a good run.

I’m so grateful to have had de Vere’s Irish Pub as a “third place” for the last decade. The pre-launch remodeling took so long in 2012 because of the craftsmanship of the interiors, including intricate ceilings, the overlay of faux-distressed hardwood floors, the highest-quality workmanship of the bar, and the authentic furnishings throughout. Entering the finished pub for the first time, I was reminded of the bars in Georgetown or Capitol Hill where my parents used to take me in the 1970s, or the restaurants where my wife Kate and I would occasionally dine when we lived in London together in 1987. Davis didn’t have any 100-year-old pubs, but when de Vere’s Irish Pub came to town, we could pretend that we did.

For running the quiz, I proposed being paid in credit rather than in cash, so Kate and I ate an average of two dinners a week at the pub for most of its long run. The staff kept our favorite booth available for us Friday afternoons at five, a booth from which I could scan the pub for friends, and one that would help to keep my excitable son Jukie contained. At this booth, I ate innumerable “Dr. Andy Salads,” concoctions that provided most of a day’s macronutrients, and that signaled to the kitchen staff that the pub’s most dependable heavy-tipper had arrived.

Because of all that pub credit, around here, I was more generous than I could afford to be. If I spotted a group of my former students dining together, or a group of young first-time quizzers, I would send over a bread pudding, compliments of Dr. Andy. If I spotted a couple colleagues sitting at the bar, I would sometimes secretly pay their tab on my way out the door. One time I encountered a university colleague on the quad a few days after one of these secret investments, and he joked that he and his friends had launched a stalking campaign so they could know when to accidentally encounter me in their favorite restaurant.

I got to be similarly generous at the Poetry Night after-party. After the poetry readings that I host on first and third Thursdays of the month, the diehard poetry-lovers and I would inevitably parade over to the Pub for salads, chips with mushroom gravy, and divided pitchers. Graduate students who were enticed by the absent entrance fee at Poetry Night were surprised (the first time) that they could keep their wallets in their pockets or purses if I were at the table. Especially generous friends (Hello Jim and Carol Lynn!) saw what I was doing and would leave a plentiful tip for the entire table. Servers such as Dani, Carlos, Paul, Jessica, and Tylor were always happy to see us fill the Snug on Thursday nights.

We made or strengthened many friendships at de Vere’s Irish Pub, including with two couples who met me (or Your Quizmaster) there for the first time, and later asked me to officiate their weddings. (It occurs to me that today is the birthday of my friend Natalie, half of the first couple I ever married, and a onetime pub quiz regular.) The pub gave my wife Kate and me a chance to be social. As people who don’t entertain often at home, we relished the opportunity to be placed in the care of de Vere’s staff, and then look forward to running into friends. Some of our closest friendships were made with the parents of our kids’ playmates at Davis Parent Nursery School or west Davis public schools. As a result, many of our closest friends live far from our south Davis home. As a result, the pub (and the farmers market) would be our socializing spaces, rather than our home. Every trip to the Pub reminded us how lucky we were to live in this community.

And this sort of love was returned to us 100-fold. Kate and I both held our 50^th birthday parties at the Pub. At mine, my friend Roy, an usher at our wedding almost 30 years ago, showed up to meet my friends from work and the community. Mayor Robb Davis, one of the most eloquent politicians I know (now an Impact and Innovation Officer at the Yolo Food Bank), spoke kindly about the work I had done for the city as Davis poet laureate. You can imagine how lucky I felt, to have so many of the Californians I know and love in one restaurant, some of them meeting each other for the first time, telling stories, and exchanging hugs. The next day I dined happily on leftover Dr. Andy salad and on the memories of some of my favorite people that were made possible because of a restaurant and family pub in Davis, California.

I send thanks and farewell to Simon and Henry de Vere White and to all the treasured staff they have hired and trained over the last decade. I feel lucky to have spent part of this last decade with you, and look forward to raising a glass with you in the future.

We poets, we traffic in images and memories. Years from now, when I reflect on my time at de Vere’s Irish Pub, I will surely recall the decade-long cascade of happy hours and family dinners, but I will especially remember the thrill of filling every seat inside and outside the pub, knowing that the microphone has fresh batteries and that my quizmasterly voice could be widely and clearly heard, gratefully accepting bonus swag from local authors such as Catriona McPherson, Eileen Rendahl, or John Lescroart, making eye contact with all my old and new trivia friends, and then finally yelling, as I will do one more time this evening, “Ladies and Gentlemen, It’s TIME for the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz!” 

After sharing almost 15,000 trivia questions in our pub, it has come to an end. I have treasured your company, so thank you for joining me. All the credit for our good, long run that we have enjoyed together goes to you.

—

I will continue to offer print quizzes remotely, so I hope you will consider joining me on Patreon for your weekly fix. I am lowering the subscription cost to $10 a month for the weekly quiz, so please do check that out if you are interested. I do so appreciate my supporters on Patreon. I will also be available to write and run a pub quiz for special one-off events for local business groups and nonprofits. Contact me for the details.

Tonight’s final de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz will feature questions on topics raised above, and on the following: alternatives to Lemmings, pianos, fractured leadership, your heart, cats and birds, country traces, team sports, morons, four-syllable foreign words, British sights, decibels, princes, unpleasant noodles, things that Stanley Kunitz would never explain, sleep and appetite, sterilized ceilings, allies, Irish laughter, Irish for a Miracle, birthplaces, drop-offs, California parks, unsuccessful cookbooks, successful Scots, fond farewells, baseball stadiums, current events, sweet sorrows, and Shakespeare.

Thanks to all of you. I shall keep in my heart the joy, intensity, and insight that you have brought to our every pub quiz.

Dr. Andy

P.S. Here are five questions from the penultimate Pub Qui at de Vere’s Irish Pub.

1. Newspaper Headlines. Sears has announced that it is closing its last store in the state where it was founded. Name that state.  

2. Long Walks to the Coast. The closest sea coast to the states of Minnesota and North Dakota is a bay whose name starts with the letter H. Name it.  

3. Know Your California Counties. The name of the most populous California county that approved the recall of Governor Gavin Newsom starts with the letter F. Name it.  

4. Pop Culture – Music. Born in 1969 to an Irish-American mother and an African-American and Afro-Venezuelan father, what diva singer sang 19 #1 songs on Billboard’s Hot 100, and has won five Grammys, 10 American Music Awards, and 19 World Music Awards?  

5. Science. Sometimes called a “failed star,” which planet in our solar system, like our Sun, consists primarily of hydrogen and helium?  

P.P.S. “They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.” Confucius

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Because I start teaching my fall class tomorrow, I suppose that today is my last day of summer. And as I start teaching in person tomorrow, today is arguably my last day of quarantine. My imagination has yet to catch up with our new reality.

Having read Shakti Gawain when her book Creative Visualization was first published in 1978, I’ve been visualizing success in this fall’s journalism class, but often I forget to update what my  imagination predicts for the face-to face era. Such visualization comes in two parts: Doing the research, and imagining the class activities. Because my journalism class concerns current events – we discuss and then decide what local stories are worth writing about – I’ve been conducting even more research than usual, considering what topics in politics, environmental law, social justice, technology, poverty, literacy, and economics are worth understanding thoroughly so that I can provide sufficient context for the articles that my students write this quarter. We will also focus on what filmmaker Ken Burns in an NPR interview earlier this year called the three viruses we face as a nation: Covid-19, white supremacy, and misinformation. 

So I am feeling increasingly ready when it comes to course content, but what about the act of teaching? I have to admit that when I’ve been imagining teaching this writing class, I’ve pictured myself sitting in my ergonomically-supportive office chair at our 19^th-century dining table at home, rather than standing in front of 25 students in a computer classroom in the basement of Olson Hall at UC Davis. Am I ready to make the transition back from abnormal to normal? Or will the new normal of perpetual mask-wearing and fortnightly testing soon seem automatic to us, with some sort of coronavirus mitigation protocol accompanying us throughout the rest of this decade?

One of my favorite colleagues, Distinguished Spanish and Portuguese Professor Emeritus Robert Blake, sent me this tweet from Spain this morning: “You may come to miss certain aspects of the Zoom culture.  :-).  Bob.” He has a pithy point. For example, I’ve enjoyed teaching barefoot for the last 18 months, as well as the other benefits of staying at home while working a 40+ hour a week job. During some of the classes I’ve taught, my French bulldog Margot remained in my lap, just off camera, leading one of my students to ask, during a lull in the conversation, “Do I hear snoring?” Feeling compelled to reveal the snorer to the class, I lifted my diminutive dog into the frame, at which point another student wrote this into the Zoom chat: “GREAT CONTENT.” That’ll never happen in Olson Hall (unless we buy Margot one of those GUIDE DOG vests, but the excitable pup will think that all the students have gathered merely to entertain her).

Even submitted student essays reveal how much what Professor Blake calls “Zoom culture” has permeated our lives: Students don’t bother to capitalize “Zoom.” From a professorial point of view, many of us will miss seeing names perpetually attached to our students’ faces, because we love to call on students by name, but we won’t miss seeing a white name on a black background instead of a student face. I taught a few students who, either because of insufficient hardware, unstable network connections, a chaotic or “embarrassing” learning environment, or perpetual shyness, never revealed their faces to me over a ten-week quarter. Teaching a room of such nametags is like hosting a call-in radio show (something I have also done).

On the other hand, some students were boldly familiar with their classmates and me, participating in class discussion in their pajamas, or even from bed. Some laughed uproariously with their roommates while eating breakfast cereal (only we could not hear the uproar because of the perpetual mute button), while others seemed to be arguing with their younger siblings about who got to take which synchronous classes from the best locations at home.

Speaking of familiarity, rather than emailing me, one journalism student would send me videos of herself explaining, in significant discursive detail, why this promised article would also be late. In one of these videos, the student’s three year-old nephew wanted to say goodbye to her before taking a long trip, so he climbed into her lap. My student “introduced” the toddler to Dr. Jones, even though he could see only himself being recorded on the screen of her laptop. I appreciated this child’s systematic narration of what he saw in the perpetual portal of Zoom, making me think that his aunt should have deployed similar use of detail in the body paragraphs of the articles she submitted that quarter.

Despite all these oddities of the era where we find ourselves, Professor Blake is right that I will miss some elements of teaching with Zoom. Calling on students when they unmute (a pandemic-era verb, if ever there was one) makes a professor feel like a mind-reader. The Zoom chat enabled students to share class resources with each other without interrupting the flow of a class. And the randomly-assigned breakout rooms gave students an opportunity to strengthen small communities of inquiry and support at a time when students felt isolated or even reclusive. 

Once this year, a student in our class showed us all the view across the Hangzhou Bay from his apartment balcony. Another time, during a break in a long summer class, a student played a song for us on her family’s grand piano. While I look forward to returning to the classroom tomorrow, to see if my students know how to properly wear a mask, or if I remember how to use a wall-length whiteboard, I will miss these opportunities to better know my students, their environments, and other aspects of their lives that are rarely shared in office hour visits. 

Although I will not see my students’ entire faces this quarter, I will hope to find clues in their expressive eyes. I hope to see in their eyes looks of comprehension, looks of realization, and perhaps even looks of gratification that they have come out of their homes and once again stepped bodily through a portal of connection and discovery.

Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on the topics raised above, as well as on the following: publications with alliterative nicknames, the Gombe National Park, photographic innovations, famous buildings, Anthropology professors named Henry, California counties, efficiencies, world capitals, the color silver in nature, little darlings, small countries, cheeses, Oscar winners, acronyms and anagrams, elemental failures, local treasures, divisible numbers, vaccination leaps, Christopher Lee movies, bipedalism, UK bands, rough terrain pioneers, unusual occupations, astral resemblances, former titans, divas, sea coasts, closed stores, action heroes, flowers, current events, and Shakespeare.

Thanks to all the teams that support this enterprise on Patreon, especially the Original Vincibles, Quasimodo, and the Outside Agitators for their ongoing extra support. Another regular newsletter reader, Lori, joined us for all the fun last Tuesday. I visualize these teams and the other regulars having a good time at Pub Quiz when I write questions on a Sunday afternoon. I hope to see you this evening.

Dr. Andy

P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s quiz, with some bonus commentary:

1. Energy. According to the International System of Units, what SI unit do we use to measure energy? I measure my own energy by miles covered in my walks. I covered 10.5 miles yesterday. I will miss being unhurried!

2. Books and Authors. First name Gustave, who wrote Madame Bovary? Many teams guessed “Gustave Bovary.” That’s incorrect.

3. Film. In what year was the film 1917 the second-highest grossing film of the year, domestically? Think this through before you guess the first answer that comes to mind. Only a few teams got this question right.

P.S. In honor of my friend Bobby Nord, to whom I have often gone for the answers, I offer a quotation by this newsletter’s now third Bob, Bob Dylan: “If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.” Happy birthday, Bobby!

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Sometimes we tell ourselves stories that cycle through our own disappointments or even that portray imagined worse-case scenarios. Suffering awaits the traveler down that path. It’s the luckier storyteller who can use stories to make his beloved departed come back to life, thus relishing their presence one more time, and sharing their lives with others who never had the pleasure their company. 

In a recent Smartless podcast interview, the actress and comedian Tiffany Haddish said that she uses mind-mapping techniques to figure out how she will attach her amusing thoughts and outrageous punchlines to stories, for everyone loves to hear a story. She herself has powerful stories to tell about homelessness, faith, and persistence, the last being a requisite for any sort of sustained accomplishment. As a friend told me at a conference this past Friday, the “P” in PhD stands for “Persistence.”

Yesterday evening, after I returned home from my daily walk with Jukie, I sat down with my son Truman to talk about movies and to tell stories. When I asked him about his day at school, he told me that reading (and reading about) The Code of Hammurabi in his World Civilization class reminded him of a Mel Brooks interpretation of laws. I smiled at his reference, and told him that, speaking of Mel Brooks and world civilizations, my friends and I thought Brooks’ History of the World, Part I was hilarious when it was released in 1981 (when I was Truman’s age), even though it earned only a 47% Metacritic score.

Truman reminded me that we still have yet to watch the Brooks classic Blazing Saddles, which we own on DVD, so I reminded him that my late godfather, John Hillerman, appears in that film. Truman looked up Hillerman and then remarked with surprise that he also had fifth billing in the film Chinatown, and that he had early 1970s roles in films with Clint Eastwood, Sidney Poitier, Jeff Bridges, and Barbra Streisand.

Because John’s film and TV career took off soon after I was born, I saw him rarely. John never had to step in to perform any godfatherly duties, so I didn’t have many stories about him to share with Truman. But my brother Oliver’s godfather, Marvin Himmelfarb, came to the house all the time. In response to Truman’s questions, soon I was regaling my son with stories of Marvin and my dad getting louder and louder over the course of an evening as they would talk about writing, theatre, sports, and, rarely, politics. I even did my Marvin impersonation, filling our little Davis home with his voice the way he used to do for my even smaller DC home in the mid-1970s. While films make characters come alive, stories do the same for the people behind the camera, or, in the case of my godfather, behind the characters.

I’ll never be able to introduce Truman to my father, or to John or to Marvin, two of his best friends, but as we reflect on those whom we have lost (and we have all had additional occasions to do so over this last week’s September 11^th remembrances), we can delight in the opportunity to reanimate such vibrant, funny, and generous people with the stories that they have left behind. Doing so reminds the storyteller and the listener alike of the joy that inhabiting and reanimating such connections can hold for all of us.

Such familial narratives are rich with meaning, but do they console us, or remind us of our losses? Well, as Orson Welles, the narrator of the aforementioned History of the World, Part I, once said, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” The actors in our life’s stories are necessarily ephemeral, but the stories they continue to participate in may never stop as long as someone is there to keep telling them.

Tonight’s Pub Quiz will test your knowledge of stories, of esteemed musicians, and of supervillains. Tonight also expect questions on physics, Star Wars, rules that are broken, stunning victories, Apple products, The Wall Street Journal, the Mississippi River, American heroes, unusual rabbits, Siberia, acts of seclusion, identical five letters, alcoholic drinks, caves, hypotheticals, films that won two Oscars, dynamite sticks, SI units, classic novels, bicycles, recent cinematic history, fruits and wines, U.S. states, local victories, helmets, fathers, current events, and Shakespeare.

Special thanks to all the teams that support the Pub Quiz on Patreon. If you would like to join the Pub Quiz in person, perhaps I will see you this evening at 7 at de Vere’s Irish Pub.

Dr. Andy

Your Quizmaster

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

1. Books and Authors. What Russian master of the short story worked his entire short life as a doctor and as a playwright, penning Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard?  

2. Current Events – Trending Names in the News. What notable American in 1777 implemented the first mass military inoculation (in this case, of Smallpox)?  

3. Sports. What football team recently signed cornerback Josh Norman and released cornerback Dontae Johnson?   

P.P.S. Happy birthday to the Sacramento writer, professor, and musician David Merson, the man responsible for getting me hooked on Pub Quizzes about 20 years ago. He and I were texting about Dungeons and Dragons this morning, and this is what he said:

“Oh, I wrote a silly Dungeons and Dragons song for the Judge John Hodgman podcast. He challenged listeners to write a song about [Dungeons and Dragons creator] Gary Gygax entitled “Gygax Departed” that mentioned “an infestation of Bigfoot” and the Greyhawk planet Oerth, which no one knows how to pronounce:  https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/6AWrKkuowxzVn9Aj8 Happy birthday, David!

P.P.P.S. With the recent 20th anniversary of September 11th, we are thinking of you, Melissa Skorka!

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

After hearing the story of how my wife Kate and I met, Oprah said it was “written in the stars.” We’ve had that going for us ever since we appeared on her TV show in November of 1992, just two months after we got married.

Today, September 7^th, 2021, is our 29^th wedding anniversary. 29 years seems almost a lifetime. Two of my favorite authors, Percy Shelley and Christopher Marlowe, died at age 29, as did Astrid of Sweden, the queen who died in a car accident when her husband, King Leopold III, looked away from the road for a moment, and drove himself and his wife over an embankment. Since reading the story of Astrid’s death, and thinking on Leopold’s guilt and grief, I’ve always driven with determined focus whenever Kate or the kids were in the car.

So many things have to go right for a happy marriage to last as many years as we’ve enjoyed so far. I give most of the credit to Kate, repaying her kindness minimally here and there with affectionate letters, texts, and, especially on important occasions, poems. I’ve been given permission to share this one publicly:

Doctor, Doctor, Give Me the News: 

On the Occasion of Kate and Andy’s 29^th Wedding Anniversary

The spicy love of your elegant constancy 

has vaccinated me against the world’s ills.

You co-shoulder our life’s weight, 

emanating love for me the way the sun 

emanates the light, the heat, for all of us. 

Your hand in mine, I squeeze, beholding 

you and our smoky and uneasy world 

through a rosy lens of gratitude. 

You are a balm, my personal miracle drug.

With affection, humor, style, and beauty, 

this Kate concoction, a welcome injection,

inoculates the two us against incompatibility.

The holistic medicine of your hug 

has provided me my daily ounce 

of prevention that staves off perturbation.

You advised against the word “chemoprophylaxis”

appearing in this poem, but that’s what your kiss is:

a vaccination against the week’s virulence. 

Each decade of our marriage boon

has profited from a dose of your love, 

and, hooked, I keep returning for more, 

like the dental patient intent on deeply 

breathing in the offered nitrous oxide, 

even on the occasion of a simple cleaning. 

My shoes are off: tilt me back in your chair.

I am the wrong sort of doctor to describe 

the physiological change in me 

instigated by your glance, my heart 

beating beckoning a reckless rhythm 

that syncopates with your slow smile.

Only this: what you bring to our marriage sustains us. 

Physician Kate, your favorite patient requests 

a house call, so warm up your stethoscope,

and heal both our needful selves once again 

with the salve of your affection. 

I benefit from your constant care.

Even in the refuge of our moonlit room, 

moments before sleep, you can read my hands: 

I sign YES. I sign PLEASE. I sign MORE. 

I look at you, my ageless bride of quietness,

eyes deeper than all wells,

and write only one name in my appointment book.

Let’s continue. I am ready for my booster.

That’s enough spicy oversharing for one newsletter. Happy anniversary, Kate! I look forward to spending the next 29 years (or 58 years, medical science-willing) with you.

—

Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on films, romantic scenes form plays, famous doctors, prized gemstones, tofu egg scrambles, corners, internet shopping, stars, newspapers, selective muggers, media personalities, pool sharks, European countries, technology centers, Swedes not named Astrid, explorers, habits, people with long memories, Sherman Oaks, prime numbers, cats in the know, team nicknames, diseases, spooky robots, long drives from Kiev, superheroes, African adventures, heartfelt lands, current events, and Shakespeare.

Please, no gifts. If you would like to help us commemorate this special day, please consider making a donation to the Smith-Lemli-Opitz Foundation, a shoestring organization that funds medical research into our son Jukie’s rare genetic syndrome. Because the organization depends entirely on volunteers (including Kate) to run it, every dollar donated goes directly to support the people who need it by funding research, holding conferences, and keeping the relevant world-scattered families connected as they face challenging decisions. I invite you to find out more about Smith-Lemli-Opitz Syndrome.

Speaking of support, thanks especially to the sustaining supporters of these weekly newsletters and the weekly quiz on Patreon. Your kindness has allowed me to keep a virtual version of the Pub Quiz continuing through the pandemic, and I continue to send print versions of the Pub Quiz to supporters today (well, on Wednesdays). The Outside Agitators, The Original Vincibles, Quizimodo and others help us keep the virtual light on. Thanks!

The Pub Quiz starts at 7, though it is a good idea to arrive by 6:30 if you want a table inside, or 5:45 if you want a table outside. I hope to see you tonight! 

Dr. Andy

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

1. Science. Starting with the letter R, what are the macromolecular machines found within all living cells that perform biological protein synthesis?  

2. Sports. What football team recently released quarterback Cam Newton?  

3. Shakespeare. What Shakespeare romantic comedy centers on the twins Viola and Sebastian, who are separated in a shipwreck?  

P.S. “And we will sit upon the rocks, / Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks, / By shallow rivers to whose falls / Melodious birds sing madrigals.” Christopher Marlowe