Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
My university colleague Karma writes year-end blog entries that probably lead people who read her lists to believe that they are wasting their time. As you can see from her essay titled “2018 by the Numbers,” this Simpsons scholar submitted two book manuscripts, attended six professional conferences, including one in London, and saw her son graduate from college, all while maintaining her sense of humor. Karma’s office is next to mine in Voorhies Hall, so I often hear her laughter permeating the wall we share. She inspires her friends, as well as her students, with her accomplishments and cleverness.
The year-end lists of most other people are less impressive, but their function should not be to dispirit us – Mark Twain said that “Comparison is the death of joy” – but instead to remind us to take stock and decide on how we might live our own lives more purposefully. This is why people make new year’s resolutions, and why athletic clubs are so much more crowded in January than in November.
As it is January, I need to reread a recent book that has helped me with goal setting: Michael Hyatt’s Your Best Year Ever: A 5-Step Plan to Achieving Your Most Important Goals. In it, Hyatt shows us how to focus on our ambitious goals at the expense of our everyday distractions, and reminds us of the strategies that help us rediscover our momentum after we get “stuck.” As I often find myself explaining to my students, often a large project, such as a writing project, can be more fruitfully approached by writing down the necessary incremental steps in the process, and then executing those steps systematically. Any of us can get overwhelmed. As Atul Gawande says in his book The Checklist Manifesto, “The volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.” As Jon Stewart point out, “even Han and Chewie use a checklist.”
So, I hope you can take steps towards achieving your goals in 2019, as I already have. Since our last Pub Quiz, I have seen my son Jukie turn 18, an event that my wife Kate covered poignantly in her blog, one with its own Star Wars references. Also, I may have broken one of the 27 bones in my right hand (not on any of my lists), which makes shaking hands a gripping experience. Finally, I have begun outlining my first novel, a political satire. I need to keep making progress on that book project, lest the people it satirizes leave power – one can hope – before the book is published.
Three weeks is the longest break between Pub Quizzes that I have taken in the last ten years or so. I hope you have enjoyed your Mondays with family or at celebrations of various sort. Now, though, it’s time to contact your teammates, mark your 6 PM pub arrival on your action item list, and prepare for the first Pub Quiz of the new year. I hope you can join us!
Tonight expect questions about some of the topics I raised above, as well as the following: technology advancements, the world of publishing, Dutch women, a poet’s heart, sincere pledges, fictional scientists, Iran policies, long-distance accuracy, royalty, moons, names in the news, quotations by women, the aging process, the advantages of hosting immigrants, big and small islands, advice for girls, pessimistic places, secretaries, books and comic books, big adventures, first ladies, Netflix, one-hit wonders, Disney, sons, Italians, California heroes, big-city singers, U.S. Senators, independent writing, Las Vegas, and Shakespeare.
Happy New Year. I hope to see you and your friends this evening.
Your Quizmaster
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Here are three questions from a previous quiz:
- Internet Culture. How many bits are in a byte?
- The Princess Bride. Who played Fezzik in the 1987 film The Princess Pride?
- Science. What G word do we use to refer to a mature haploid reproductive cell? A gamete
P.S. Maybe you want to be an eventual millionaire? James Altucher has some advice for you.