Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Last Friday I got to visit San Francisco for a conference. Sometimes I wonder if I have a skewed view of that city, for I’m usually there to attend a conference in one of the city’s swankier hotels, such as the Mark Hopkins (every February for the San Francisco Writers Conference), and the Palace Hotel (for a UC-wide conference called UC Engage). The entryways, ballrooms and dining rooms of these five-star hotels are breathtakingly large for someone who has grown used to biking from a modest home to a 25-person classroom or a familiar conference room. As a city boy, I am still taken aback at the majesty and affluence represented by The City’s great halls.
I remember also being amazed at the size of the lobby of the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, where my parents attended opening night to see the 1971 premier performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. Bernstein was there that night, as was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who commissioned the work to celebrate her late husband’s stewardship of the Arts as President. Although he was invited, then-president Richard Nixon did not attend. He said that he didn’t want to compete with Onassis for the attention of the press that night, but we have learned subsequently that Nixon’s paranoid advisors had other concerns. Bernstein’s FBI file revealed that he was a leftist and that he opposed the war in Vietnam. G. Gordon Liddy and others expected Bernstein to sneak progressive messages into the Latin sung during the performance, and that therefore Nixon, not known as a student of ancient languages, would not know what choruses to applaud politely, and which ones would warrant sitting on his hands, as some members of Congress do during the State of the Union Address. Imagine the embarrassment!
Tomorrow is Election Day (remember to vote), and I’m sure the pundits, who haven’t enough to talk about, will conduct some dimestore analyses of the current partisan deadlock, wondering if it started before, after, or during the time of Richard Nixon. Whatever the outcome, we can continue to smile at the composers and poets, such as myself, who sneak anti-authoritarian messages into their performed works, as I plan to do at the Davis City Council meeting Wednesday night. I plan also to sneak some such messages into the questions at tonight’s Pub Quiz, as I hope you will discover.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on lions, video games, Marvel superheroes, California counties, seasonal festivals, princes whose names start with F, Arizona, a mobilized White House, dead poets in London, cells with energy, Chinese exports, comedians, Asia, electricity, fiber, past colleges, bread, expired job titles, car slogans, the New York Stock Exchange, tennis vapors, Japan, animals, the last name of the fox, U.S. Presidents, representations of motion, mishaps in Toronto, beautiful women, film sequels, automobiles, and Shakespeare.
Speaking of beautiful women, tomorrow is my wife Kate’s birthday. What does such a bride deserve as a present? It’s too bad that the Pub Quiz doesn’t allow karaoke, or we might find out. Because it doesn’t, perhaps I will see you this evening!
Your Quizmaster
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
- Mottos and Slogans and Logos. What rock & roll band’s logo with a “tongue and lips” motif in 1970 was inspired in part by the Hindu goddess Kali?
- Internet Culture. According to CNET, what I-word is Google using as the name of its “new killer email app”?
- Newspaper Headlines. Revealed last week, what five-letter word completes the name of the most profitable company in the world (with 2013 income of $42.7 billion)? Industrial and Commercial Bank of BLANK.
- Four for Four. Subcategory: Flatworms. Which of the following, if any, are characteristic of flatworms? They are bilaterian, they are invertebrates, they are segmented, they are trophoblasts.
- Ebola. The Ebola Virus was named after what? A country, a doctor, a people, a river.
P.S. Bill Gainer will be performing at the Natsoulas Gallery this coming Thursday night at 8. Bill Gainer contributes to the California literary scene as a writer, editor, promoter, publicist and poet. Gainer is a past winner of the San Francisco Beat Museum’s Poetry Contest and the Sacramento News and Review’s Flash Fiction Contest. He continues to edit for the PEN Award-winning R.L. Crow Publications, is a founding and current board member of the Nevada County Poetry Series, and serves as the longtime host of Sacramento’s popular Red Alice’s Poetry Emporium. Widely published, Bill Gainer remains a nationally sought-after reader. His latest book is Lipstick and Bullet Holes, from Epic Rites Press of Canada. Visit him at billgainer.com.
You should join us at that event, and / or at the after-party at 10 at de Vere’s Irish Pub!