Dear Friends of the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz,
This past weekend, after a long hiatus, I held a meeting of the Manly Man’s Movie Club of Davis. At Regal Holiday Theatres at 101 F Street we saw the new Gina Carano film Haywire, a Bourne-like action thriller with a number of realistic mixed-martial arts-style fight scenes. The film also featured a number of past and future Oscar nominees, including Antonia Banderas, Michael Fassbender, and Michael Douglas. According to Metacritic, it’s the best-reviewed widely-released feature film released this year, but of course that’s not yet saying much. As six of us gathered at de Vere’s Saturday night to discuss the film and other matters, I fondly recalled the foundational Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation that helped to inspire the group when it was formed a dozen years ago: “Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.” And I was left wondering if large groups of men gathering together in the absence of women can be construed somehow as being more sexist or exclusionary than a large group of women meeting in the explicit absence of men, as my wife does with her many book groups and GNOs (“girls’ night out”) several times a month.
Speaking of my wife, she and I support a number of charities, and chief among these are organizations such as Autism Speaks that, as its website says, is “dedicated to increasing awareness of the growing autism epidemic and to raising money to fund scientists who are searching for a cure.” Every January I participate in the Sacramento Poetry Center’s Reading for Autism, an event that raises funds and awareness for this important cause. This year’s event takes place at 1719 25th Street (25th and R Streets) next Monday beginning at 7:30. As a result, next week’s Pub Quiz will start about 90 minutes later than usual, but I hope you will still join us on January 30th for some raucous and noisy fun at our favorite Irish pub. If you’d like to learn more about the event in Sacramento, please visit the website for the Sacramento Poetry Center, or the event page on Facebook.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will start at 7pm, as always, and cover a mix of the sort of subjects that you have come to expect. Tonight we will review air travel, intellectual properties, Bruce Willis, elderly women, Baltimore, doctors, fun facts about Republicans, globes, French verbs, London, no apologies, inaugurations, baseball, West Virginia, numbers instead of letters, faddish musicians, monkeys, storm clouds, trees, libraries, relinquishments, sword fights, crime, art and art history, France, British pseudohistory, Pennsylvania, nude toes, drama, welfare reform, multiple sclerosis, laughter and forgetting, American novels, classic films, Irish culture, universities, the Mesozoic Era, 40-book authors, football, foodies, Asia, and Shakespeare.
See you tonight! Don’t let the possibility of rain dissuade you!
Your Quizmaster
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
5. Muppets. Who starred in the documentary Being Elmo?
6. Architecture. Rounded off to the nearest 200 feet, how tall is the Washington Monument?
7. Pop Culture – Music. “The Queen of Gospel” sang at the 1963 March on Washington, and had a name that is an anagram of the common phrase KOALAS JAM CHINA. What is her name?
8. Sports. The Boston Bruins are the current reigning Stanley Cup champions, and have been hockey champions six different times. Only one American team has more Stanley Cups, at eleven. Name the city and team.
9. Science – Ornithology. Which of the following numbers is closest to the number of cervical vertebrae found in the neck of an owl? Is it 7, 14, 21, or 28?
P.S. My mentor Alan Williamson will be giving a poetry reading at the Natsoulas Gallery on February 2nd. Mark your calendar now!
P.P.S. If you know a Pub Quiz participant who hasn’t yet signed up for this newsletter, tell that person to sign up at https://www.yourquizmaster.com.