Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
I don’t drink coffee (never have), but I do get plenty of exercise, and I’m sure the invigorating six miles a day that I spend on my bike more than makes up for my freedom from caffeine. Don’t you feel better all week when you get enough exercise? The National Institutes of Health tells us that “People who are active live longer and feel better. Exercise can help you maintain a healthy weight. It can delay or prevent diabetes, some cancers and heart problems.” Some of us who work with our heads instead of our bodies need to compensate for all that physical inactivity. These are some of the reasons why I host the Pub Quiz on the move, and even stand while hosting and engineering my radio show on KDVS. All our screen-time requires sitting, so we should stand and stretch whenever we can, remembering that we are physical creatures, too. 300 years ago this summer the essayist and journalists Joseph Addison said, “Exercise ferments the humors, casts them into their proper channels, throws off redundancies, and helps nature in those secret distributions, without which the body cannot subsist in its vigor, nor the soul act with cheerfulness.” We have learned a lot about the body’s secret distributions in the last few centuries, but as viewers of the TV show Hoarders, we still have a lot to learn about throwing off redundancies. My favorite hoarding quotation is by Tolkein, whom we heard from in last week’s Quiz: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” I guess we prove that quotation to be true every Monday night at the Pub Quiz.
But back to my topic of exercise. When I was 13, the indoor arena we visited for exercise was Jelleff’s Boys’ And Girls’ Club on “S” Street in Georgetown, Washington DC. That’s where I learned to swim, to play bumper pool, to play softball, and especially to roller skate. Every Saturday night I could be found circling the huge darkened basketball court with all the other tweens and teens, enjoying the music of The Commodores and Air Supply. That’s where Amy Carter famously picked me out of a crowd for three minutes of skating to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Although it got pretty hot in that place, we were having too much fun to realize that we were exercising.
The same could be said for the House of Air that my family and I visited in San Francisco this past Saturday morning. Imagine a multi-level warehouse filled with wall-to-wall trampolines. One room offered a matrix of 24 trampolines. A second featured a dodgeball arena made of trampolines. Bouncing around maniacally, one could see dozens of children and their parents sporting special trampoline boots to keep the jumpers from spraining ankles or crushing toes. After almost an hour of bouncing with my three kids, I felt at least as winded as I did after three hours of roller-skating with my friends to all that disco. I also felt about half an inch shorter. For some of us, trampolining is as close as we will come to flying.
Speaking of flying, expect an FAA question on tonight’s Pub Quiz, as well as questions about famous Poles, British musicians, Facebook likes, restaurants and their implicit claims, UB40, David Letterman, Greek heroes, Scotland, video games, fish, famous musicians who have never had number one hits, Kentucky, X-Men, whiskers, Japanese animation, country music (really), dumb TV shows that I don’t watch, famous people who happen to be gay, time travel fiction, Irish history, crowds, lines of poetry that inspire book titles, baseball, Nevada, Shakespeare, and my favorite new sport: trampolining!
You might have seen an advertisement for the Pub Quiz on Facebook recently. Many others saw it, as well, so most of the tables for tonight have already been claimed; you should call now to claim yours. See you soon!
Your Quizmaster
https://www.yourquizmaster.com
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
1. Mottos and Slogans. What car company’s slogan is “Zoom Zoom”?
2. Internet Culture. Beginning with the letter Q, what is the name of the online knowledge market, made available to the public in the summer of 2010, that aggregates questions and answers to many topics and allows users to collaborate on them?
3. Newspaper Headlines. According to what we learned in a recent interview, who is special because he has “tiger blood” and “Adonis DNA”? (This was fresh news last Monday – sadly, there will be no Charlie Sheen questions on the March 7 Pub Quiz.)
4. Four for Four. To which of the following celebrities has the musician Prince been romantically linked? Kim Basinger, Paris Hilton, Courtney Love, Madonna.
5. Capital Punishment. What country executes more of its people than any other?
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/.