As many of you know, my day job (well, one of my day jobs – I acquired a new one last month) is that of writing teacher. This past quarter I got to teach an advanced poetry writing workshop – one of my favorite classes to teach at UC Davis – but most of the time I teach students how to write effective and seamless prose. Not only the newspaper, but also Hollywood reminds how important good writing is. Recently the actor Tom Hanks was confronted in a gas station by two patrons who love him but didn’t care for the writing in his movie Larry Crowne. As Hanks was also the author of that screenplay, he apologized for disappointing the couple, and refunded the $25 that they spent on the film. I attribute Hanks’ attitude to the influence of his Sacramento schooling.
Nobody can refund the time I spent fast-forwarding through The Last Airbender, the film whose poor acting was surpassed only by the poor writing. Someone determined that if M. Night Shyamalan continues to make movies, soon a film of his will break the Rotten Tomatoes evaluation rubric by being the first with a negative score. See
to see his slumping career plotted graphically. Remind me never to ask a Pub Quiz question about The Last Airbender (even though it was a popular film when it showed last summer in Davis’s best theatre, The Varsity). Shyamalan would do well to hire one of my students to go over his future scripts.
By contrast, check out the excellent lyrical work of actor and musician Ricky Gervais as he offers the red monster Elmo a celebrity lullaby. (See .) That’s fine writing, I think – everyone loves a surprise. In honor of almost 42 years of Sesame Street, tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature at least two questions whose correct answers will start with the letter N.
We will also have questions about toys, presidential politics, birth control, billionaires, Charles Dickens, local jobs, lizards, people named John (if you had to sing a song by a guy named John, what song would you pick? Go ahead and start practicing), Greek words, the recent history of baseball, car safety, Alessandro Bolta, megachurches, sheep, butterfly puddles and other invented silliness, sitcoms, musicians with just one name, food and drink, lowered matinees, dumb jokes involving cringe-worthy puns, novels you should have read in college, Asia, world capitals, extinct empires, Buddhism, bears, accepted apologies, Native Americans, rams, comedians, passerines, best-selling books, country music singers (again?), record-holding quarterbacks, and the effect of Kings on the plays of William Shakespeare.
August and September are turnover months in Davis, so why don’t you turn over a new leaf and resolve to join us tonight at the Pub Quiz? I bet we will have room for you tonight.
Your Quizmaster
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
21.
Books and Authors. Jean Jacques Rousseau, author of The Social Contract, lived and died in the same century. Name the century.
22. Film. Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds star in a new film that opened this past Friday. Name the film.
23. Games. What is the fewest number of moves that a player playing with black chess pieces can move to checkmate his opponent? Is it 2, 4, 6, or 8?
24. Countries of the World. Until the year 1600, St. Basil’s Cathedral was the tallest building in what world capital?
25. Numbers. The number of countries in Africa is the same as the number of milligrams of caffeine in a can of Mountain Dew. Both numbers are divisible by 18. What is the number?
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/.