Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

            I enjoyed an interesting Halloween conversation yesterday about the integrity of the Pub Quiz. Regular attendees know that when my lovely wife attends the Quiz, I remove from the quiz any questions to which I know she knows the answer. Because she is so smart and well read, and because we have consumed much of the same media together, this makes writing the Pub Quiz particularly challenging when she joins us, and perhaps even more challenging to complete. As a result, when she plays, Kate feels a bit flummoxed on her team, as she is forced to reach back further and deeper into her personal databases of knowledge than most players have to. I bring this up because one of my favorite local politicians and Pub Quiz irregulars offered to have the number of lawn signs she distributed this election cycle be a topic for the tiebreaker question tonight, the night before she’ll be elected to another term on the Davis School Board (I expect). It was a great idea, and the question would be highly topical, but I didn’t want to seem to be giving endorsements to one of the hardest-working and most responsive public servants in Davis, and I didn’t want one of the Quiz participants to have unearned foreknowledge about the answer to even a single Pub Quiz question. As Chinua Achebe once said, “One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.”

            I tend not to be blunt except when I bluntly request that my students vote in elections, as I was in class today. Of course, I don’t indicate my own voting intentions, or record. Meg Whitman neglected to vote for many an election cycle, and I imagine that she’ll regret that (expensive) missed opportunity for many moons. On the Democratic side, satirists have compared incumbent California Senator Barbara Boxer to Colonel Jessup for insisting that she “has earned” her title of Senator, though I wasn’t sure why that was such a faux pas. Regrets, Boxer has not had a few. And I’m sure Jerry Brown has no regrets over not speaking from prepared remarks as he barnstorms up and down California. He keeps the California press corps on their toes with juicy quotations. Republicans are due to make great gains, the pollsters say, in Congress, governorships and state legislatures, but here in California, it looks like the Democrats will hold their ground, and perhaps take over the Governor’s office. If you have spent time outside of California, then you probably know if your former Senator is as endangered as Democrats will be during tomorrow’s midterm elections.

            Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on cell phone safety, mice and men, salt, New Jersey, horror film quotations, Canadian musicians, ‘foolish” politicians, leftover Halloween concerns, paper airplanes, the city of Davis, the alphabet, ravishing arks, the last states to join the Union, California museums, South America, Pat Sajak, Kentucky, genes, flying without a license, cowardice and death, Shakespeare, and Gina Daleiden’s lawn signs (a joke).

            As I mentioned recently on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/yourquizmaster), We do have room for more teams at tonight’s Pub Quiz. If you recruit a new team (that is, a team of newbies), or if you are a team of newbies, you get either a bottle of wine or an order of sweet potato fries on the house! This is a standing offer. Details at (530) 756-4556

            See you tonight. Should I wear my cape?

Your Quizmaster

Five questions from last week:

6.            The Monterey Bay Aquarium. The Monterey Bay Aquarium is the same age as which of the following people? Mark Zuckerberg, Derek Jeter, Keanu Reeves, or Denzel Washington? Hint: these people are listed in chronological order by decade.  

7.            Pop Culture – Music (Karaoke Question).      What multi-Grammy winning Delta blues guitarist wrote the songs “Boogie Chillen” and “Boom Boom”? 

Now for the Karaoke Bonus Round, I would like you to perform a Blues song.

8.            Sports.   I remember the 1989 World Series because of the Loma Prieta Earthquake. What is the only year between 1989 and 2010 that the San Francisco Giants appeared in the World Series? 

9.            Science – Meteorology. What three-syllable word do we use to name an intense columnar vortex (usually appearing as a funnel-shaped cloud) that occurs over a body of water and is connected to a cumuliform cloud? 

10.            Great Brits. What is the last name of the man whose statue lords over London’s Trafalgar Square?  

P.S. A.D. Winans reads from some of his 51 books on Wednesday night at 8. See http://www.poetryindavis.com for details.

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Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

            When I lived on the east coast as a child, I would attend the local Waldorf school’s Harvest Festival every year, so it was bizarrely familiar to return to the Sacramento Waldorf School Saturday to attend another such festival, or “vegetable” as my five-year-old calls them. Many of the harvest themes and the classroom art projects were just I remembered them at the Washington Waldorf School, but here in California we hardly have a defined “fall” as our eastern autumn promised us every year. The restaurants and shops in downtown Davis must adorn their window displays with artificial red and yellow leaves, for none can be found locally in the wild. Now that the rain has stopped, and the late afternoon sunlight fills the day so diffusely, it almost feels like earthquake weather, as if some sort of meteorological suspense hangs in the air.

            The last earthquake that I remember experiencing intensely was the Loma Prieta Earthquake, the one that interrupted the Bay Area World Series back in 1989, just a few months after I moved to the East Bay. That Halloween one boy came to my Berkeley doorstep dressed as a tremor, a concept that was still frightening to us who tried to sleep through those evening’s aftershocks. Many people are thinking anew about Giants baseball, and about earthquakes, in part because of the new challenges facing the earthquake-stricken people of Haiti, this time in the form of cholera. If you are wondering how you might find out more about, and renew your support for, the most destitute people on our continent, consider visiting the website for Partners in Health: http://www.pih.org/haiti/news-entry/cholera-in-haiti-in-the-media/.

            Tonight’s Pub Quiz will ask an unexpected series of Halloween questions, as well as questions about the creators of popular and essential websites, celebrity criminals, Pierce Brosnan’s past side-gigs, two people with recognizable last names (Zuckerberg and Jeeter) as well as two with more recognizable first names (Keanu and Denzel), aquaria, early hominids, the Blues (can you sing the blues?), the Giants, meteorology, London tourist traps (such as Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum), Glee, David Cronenberg,  Pulitzer Prize-winning books published in your lifetime, money, spices, vampires, spookiness, Louisiana, fairies, architecture, travel overseas, some of my favorite poets, celebrities, Shakespeare “in” Love, and Hawaii.

            I hope you can join us tonight! We expect a few new faces, but we will still have plenty of room for you at tonight’s Pub Quiz!

Your Quizmaster

Five Questions from Last Week’s Quiz:

9.            Science.   The largest living rodent in the world has a scientific name of Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris. By what four-syllable name do we know this South American animal? 

10.            Great Americans.  What was the highest government office achieved by Abraham Lincoln before becoming President of the United States? 

12.            Another Music Question.   What musician is the only girl in the world to appear on two of the top 10 hits at the top of Billboard’s pop music charts this week? 

13.            Pop Culture – Television.     What seeming remake of The Brady Bunch was a part of ABC’s TGIF lineup from 1991 until 1997? 

14.            The Language of Love. According to scholars, what language did Antony and Cleopatra use to talk to one another? 

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

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Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

I hope you can join us this evening, for we have a number of tables unclaimed for the Quiz.

Often as a Quizmaster I’ve reflected on ways to make the Pub Quiz fair, that is, equally challenging for all the different segments of our Pub Quiz audience, without regard to age, geographic region, and socio-cultural background. This is difficult, of course, because although I read widely, I am still somewhat limited by my own background. Luckily I know and appreciate friends and mentors who are older than me, and surround myself as part of my profession with students who are half my age. As a result, I often find myself engaged with inquisitive conversations with people who are equally curious about the world and with knowledge that is relevant to their lives, their classes, the books they read and the news that they follow.

Some of my Facebook friends and I have been discussing the phenomenon of The Brady Bunch, of all things, lines of which were quoted in conversations I enjoyed from my childhood, but which I had assumed were largely irrelevant today. It turns out that my family invested in cable TV only about five years ago, so I also wasn’t aware of the great wasteland of television repeats that young viewers have been exposed to for many years. Although I regret the hours and potential lost to television, I have on occasion enjoyed encountering there actors I knew as a child, such as John Hillerman and John Putch on One Day at a Time, and Georgia Engel and Jean Stapleton on CBS hits from the 1970s, repeating witty lines with their young 1970s voices. I know and remember all these actors and these shows well, but is it fair for me to ask questions about programs that had ceased production a decade or more before the births of your typical UC Davis sophomore? After all, the Pub Quiz is an all-ages show (which means that we have alternate prizes ready for young teams who win wine), and I always wish to be fair to everyone.

Speaking of fair (?), here are some hints. Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions about drummers, potentials and passions, Australians, divisions, Wyoming, television mothers, baseballs, recent music, baseball teams that made it to the post-season, rodents (we liberated another mouse last week, releasing him into a field teeming with jackrabbits!), Yeats quotations, beloved Presidents, cynicism, Eminem, Friday television, famous lovers of antiquity, late-night television, Muppets (because they are so popular with the tables that have requested easier questions), time travel, the inimitable Dom DeLuise, the US Navy, poets who were born before your great-great-great grandparents, Las Vegas, Latino culture, UC Davis sports, unsympathetic characters in Shakespeare and really big sharks.

Thanks for reading this far, and of your support of the Pub Quiz. Have you been telling your friends about what you do, or wish you could do, on Monday nights? You should invite them along. What sort of referral bonus do you think would be appropriate for regulars who inspire new teams?

See you soon,

Your Quizmaster

Find out about following Your Quizmaster on Facebook and Twitter at https://www.yourquizmaster.com.

Five Questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:

25.Actresses and Pop Singers. What American actress and pop singer began her foray into film by providing the voice of “Penny” in the animated film Bolt, and earned a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song for her performance of Bolt’s theme song, “I Thought I Lost You”?

26.Science – Apples.The country that produced the largest percentage of the 55 million tonnes of apples that were grown worldwide in 2005 is found on the continent where apple trees first originated. Name the continent.

27.Books and Authors.The 19th best-selling book in English, Angels and Demons, sold 39 million copies. Name its author.

28.Current Events – Names in the News.Who is Nicky Diaz’s lawyer?

29.Sports.During most of his playing career, what was Michael Jordan’s jersey number?

P.S. The Second Annual Confluence College Poetry Tour is coming to the John Natsoulas Gallery in Davis Thursday night at 8pm. See http://www.poetryindavis.com for details.

P.P.S. Have you seen the one-woman show Tilly No-Body at the Mondavi Center? Tickets are still available, but the run lasts only until October 24.

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

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Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

One of my favorite Native American friends (outside the family) was born on Columbus Day, she once pointed out sardonically. When she was my student, she affirmed to me that she would never leave her California roots, and now she is a happily married academic and accomplished musician living not far from Little Italy on the Near West Side of Chicago, home of The World Columbian Exposition of 1893. She has escaped familial restrictions (and, she tells me, limitations), but will she ever be able to shake Columbus and his admirers? Really, will any of us be able to shake the legacy of Columbus, and would we want to? It’s hard to imagine a modern Columbus. As Justice Arthur Goldberg once said, “If Columbus had an advisory committee, he would probably still be at the dock.”

Two great cultural resources came to my attention this last week, and I bet one of them would interest you. The first is the movie Howl, showing until Thursday at the Varsity Theatre on 2^nd Street in Davis. You know from past newsletters that I am a fan of Allen Ginsberg. I also respect James Franco (playing Ginsberg in this film) as an artist, mostly because of how much time he spends in MFA in writing classes with my heroes, poets such as Alan Williamson and Frank Bidart. And the reviews are pretty good for this film, too. A. O. Scott of The New York Times said “Not quite a biopic, not really a documentary and only loosely an adaptation, Howl does something that sounds simple until you consider how rarely it occurs in films of any kind. It takes a familiar, celebrated piece of writing and makes it come alive.” Now that the downtown Davis Jazz and Beat Festival has concluded, I am going to try to see this film before it leaves town.

The other resource is The Davis Dirt, a new monthly culture calendar that has appeared in bookstores and cafes all over town. It’s bright orange for October – have you seen a copy? I interviewed two of the editors on my radio show Wednesday, and they seem like they are deeply committed to the spirit of our city and to informing us all about the rich array of cultural opportunities available to all of us, from artsy movies to poetry readings to musical performances all over town. Find The Davis Dirt at http://www.thedavisdirt.com/, http://www.dirtyindavis.blogspot.com/, and, on the Davis Wiki at http://daviswiki.org/The_Davis_Dirt .

Tonight on the Pub Quiz you’ll hear questions about frog capitals, websites, ancient kings, African countries, single ladies, David Letterman and his guests, show tunes (you should prepare yours), post-season baseball, elements, short vocabulary words that begin with the letter T, pendula, Prokoviev, diaries, Japan, American universities, zany earmarks, roses, holy cows, Captain John Miller’s only defeat, ninjas, ball bearings, children’s picture books, Star Wars, phobias, the Alps, people named Penny, demons, apples, lawyers, basketball and Shakespeare the familiar.

We will have a full house tonight. I hope you are planning to join us for the Pub Quiz!

Your Quizmaster

Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:

2.Internet Culture. Pew Research recently unveiled a study concluding that two tech companies most written about by the press are what?

3.Newspaper Headlines.Connections to the office of US Solicitor General has forced one US Supreme Court Justice into a recusal for 25 upcoming cases. Name the Justice.

4.Four for Four.Which of the following musicians or bands have had top-40 hits on Billboard’s US charts? Bob Marley, Metallica, The Ramones, Tenacious D.

5.Capital Cities that are Fun to Say. Montevideo and its metropolitan area, home to 1.4 million of its country’s total of 3.5 million people, is the capital of what South American country?

6.Film Quotations. Name the 1997 Paul Verhoven film in which the central character of Johnny Rico says “These are the rules. Everybody fights, nobody quits. If you don’t do your job I’ll kill you myself. Welcome to the Roughnecks.”

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

Do we have unclaimed tables left for tonight? Yes we do!

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

Did you see the Bike Parade yesterday? From what I saw, hundreds of Davisites pedaled Downtown to show off for the photographers and officials from the Guinness Book of World Records. The last time I wanted to participate in such a record-breaking event, it was March of 1986 and Hands Across America, a chain of seven million Americans that crisscrossed much of the country with the exception of the Pacific Northwest and of New England, where I was attending college. Celebrities that participated included Emmanuel Lewis, Tip O’Neill, Tony Danza and R2D2 (all my favorites), and millions of dollars was raised for charities addressing hunger and poverty in the US and in Africa. Soon after the event, The Ramones parodied the event with their music video for the song “Something to Believe in” with an event titled “Hands Across Your Face.” Needless to say, it wasn’t a number one hit. Of course, Phish and Harry Connick Jr. never had number one hits, either.

ABBA struck rock gold with “Dancing Queen,” and you can still the played in my house. Repeatedly. Other topics that you might hear discussed in my house (and which will appear in some form on tonight’s Pub Quiz) include Shakespeare plays, our favorite tech companies, Bob Marley, the Supreme Court, South American cities and culture, action movies, the Olympics, onetime starlets whom you can’t believe are still alive, Billy Joel, muppets, world religions, young adult fiction, Abraham Lincoln, songbirds, US states, Athens, and Arlington Cemetery. We actually don’t discuss fuel additives, the SF Giants, or Christine O’Donnell (for we are kind). Sometimes we discuss deep-sea fish, such as the ones you can find in this Dorine Jennette poem:

To The Rescue Crew

Open me up

with the jaws of life,

you’ll find I’m full

of fish: the deep-

sea kind, whose

dewlaps dredge a trench.

Minding their veils 

of milk silt and slime,

my bulge-eyed denizens

sound their scales.

It’s the pressure

does it, and the dark. 

Dorine will be performing her work at Wednesday night at 8. Details at http://www.poetryindavis.com.

I hope you can join us tonight at the Pub Quiz. We start at 8!

Your Quizmaster

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

21.             Books and Authors.   What was the name of the Woodland realm elf played by Orlando Bloom in Peter Jackson’s live-action version of the book The Lord of the Rings? 

22.            Film.   What 1970s film that won three Oscars includes this line of dialogue? “I think we make a real sharp couple of coconuts – I’m dumb, you’re shy, whaddaya think, huh?” 

23.            Musical Theatre. What is the most successful Broadway musical to take place in a shtetl?  

24.            Countries of the World. The country with the largest number of troops per capita (418.9 per 1,000) has more total troops (about 9.5 million) than every other country in the world but Russia’s 21 million. Name the country.   

26.            Science – Astronomy.  Triton and Nereid are the names of two of the 13 moons orbiting what planet? 

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

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Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

We still have tables available for tonight’s Quiz. Phone (530) 756-4556 to reserve yours.

Some regular Pub Quiz participant have joked about hacking into my computer to see what sort of research I do each week to research, write and wordsmith new Pub Quiz questions. Because I like to inspire research, if not illegal activity such as black-hat hacking, I’ll share with you a resource that I discovered this week, and which has already inspired a number of Pub Quiz questions. It’s the Phrontistery, which is a noun meaning “thinking place.” Winnie the Pooh had a thinking place (he actually called it a “thinking spot”), and now, so do I, at least when I want to think about obscure adjectives, such as the long list of “Adjectives of Relation” found at http://phrontistery.info/genitive.html. Expect to see at least one of those words on tonight’s Pub Quiz.

This coming Thursday people who love poetry, Japanese culture, and travel stories are in for a treat, for Alan Botsford, Professor of American Literature at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan, will be giving a public reading at the John Natsoulas Gallery. Botsford’s new book, Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore (Sage Hill Press, 2010), is filled with stories, essays, poems and even dialogues about everyone’s favorite grey-bearded poet, Walt Whitman. One of Allen Ginsberg’s most famous poems, “A Supermarket in California,” imagines running into the great poet down 1-80 in Berkeley. Here’s a short excerpt:

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?What price bananas?Are you my Angel?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.

We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

If you would like to overhear a fuller conversation about Whitman, or the many other topics that might come up during Professor Botsford’s talk and reading this Thursday, please visit http://www.poetryindavis.com to find out some of the specifics. We start at 8pm at 521 First Street.

Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on ebook readers, inebriation, John Thune and other Republicans who might challenge President Obama in 2012, Alfred Hitchcock, edible animals, the medieval history of the Iberian peninsula, investment acronyms, the police and other law-enforcers, famous baseball players, really old tree parts, the legacy of Herbert Hoover, architecture, unusual words (of course!), really popular music, dancing Aggies, Welsh gorgons, fruits and vegetables, swords, plows, crop-dusting, countries of the world, popular characters, those who are named Garfield, organs, Monty Python, economists and Shakespeare.

See you tonight for the Pub Quiz!

Your Quizmaster

P.S. I’ve heard that participating in a spelling bee is much more harrowing that participating in a Pub Quiz. If you would like to see a local celebrity on stage this weekend or next as she or he is grilled by judges on the spelling of difficult and obscure words, then you should check out The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, the play that opens this weekend t the Main Theatre on the UC Davis campus. The Washington Post (my former hometown newspaper) called the show “Funniest Thing on Seven Consonants.” Also this weekend, Pub Quiz irregular Gia Batista will be starring in a production of Romeo and Juliet in the Arboretum. To find out more about both productions, see http://dateline.ucdavis.edu/dl_detail.lasso?id=12913.

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