Celebrate the nation's independence the way the Founding Fathers would - with trivia and beer!
Multi-league quizzo champs Sofa Kingdom managed to edge Group W by less than a single question, 142-140, on Wednesday night in a difficult quiz that jumped all over the place subject-wise.
teams to correctly identify the home nations of 10 different brews. They could only manage 2 correct. They shone, however, in the Unreasonably Difficult round with 6 correct answers, but this was too little too late, and the mighty Kingdom held on to their thin lead. The visitors were helped along by a football-centric Speed round in which their 7 correct topped the rest of the field and put them in the lead for good.
wide margin and therefore earned a used copy of the book 101 Uses for a Dead Cat.
Crackaritaville a.k.a. Crackburgers in Camdendise, a team named in honor of Jimmy Buffet's Tuesday-night Tweeter Center concert, edged out the crowded field of regulars at Ray's to take the top position. You can see from the photo that these guys came out to kick a little butt.
As always, answer the two sets of 10 questions, then try and figure out what the themes are to each bar's round of 10 answers. Naturally you can work your way back to individual answers to questions if you figure out either theme. Answers will be posted in a few days; I was a bit slow to do that this week owing to illness. I feel much better now, thank you.
FYI, I just had an email inquiry from a quiz host elsewhere in PA to swap questions, and I turned it down. He said he was having trouble coming up with new questions himself, as he hosts 4 of them per week (how this would work to my advantage if he's running a deficit already was left unstated...).
Our game is free to play and the prizes are better. None of those long streams of tickets to count, either.
Call Us the Lightning, a somewhat awkward reference to the great Who song "Call Me Lightning," edged out Group W at Frank's last week, 167-162 (both scores make the All-Time Top Ten list). Their most impressive round was the Subject round, in which they answered 10 of 10 questions about Central America correctly. Yowsa. Call them the winners!
Ray's:
That fantastic score of 186 by Group W at Frank's last week bumped a few 159s from the 10th position on the All-Time Top Ten Scores list. Jet Czech was among those sent to obscurity, just two weeks ago the first and only team to crack the Top Ten from Ray's.
I've admittedly been a bit slow on the draw doing my quiz blog duties this week. Been busy. The most traumatic part of the week by far was getting my passport renewed, which essentially required me to put in a work day, about 9:30am- nearly 5pm at the US Customs House at 2nd & Chestnut, last Friday. This doesn't include the time it took to do the paperwork and get all of what I needed together. The US government, seeking to keep us safe from The Terrorists changed the law regarding travel to Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean and Bermuda; basically starting January 1 tens of millions of Americans who never needed a passport before in their lives suddenly needed one for their usual business or vacation, and the agency just wasn't prepared to deal with the logjam.
I supposedly had an 11:30am appointment at the agency, but this was a joke. Even with two separate lines I was customer #155 for the day for my group, and was "lucky" to actually get my documents back about $150 and 7 hours later. This is lunacy.
In case you've guessed that this means I'm leaving the country shortly, for the first time in almost two years, you are correct. Arrangements have been made to have my additional pre-written quizzes administered by Deputy Quizmasters of the highest rank and training status while I'm away for a brief research sojourn. Details forthcoming.
I think working the day job plus running two quizzes/week consecutive nights is catching up with me; for the first time I made an outright error in the quiz. The answer to the question itself was correct, however I shouldn't have asked that question in the Frank's Secret Theme round as I somehow miscounted the order of the planets in our solar system. Apparently a couple of days into my weekly cycle of sleep deprivation I have trouble counting to single-digit numbers, and therefore should have all of my quizzes written by Monday night when I'm still fairly fresh.
This is the place to post or discuss anything that doesn't fit anywhere else. Comments? Questions? Concerns..?
The first announcement is that there will be no special guest appearance by Col. Sanders, who is dead.
Group W won for the 10th time in 15 attempts at Frank's on Wednesday. They scored a 186, one point off of the all-time highest score in my format (also theirs), depicted on the right-hand column of the site. This is two people doing this, week in and week out. If you're not impressed you darn well should be.
The last place prize went to a team called 9-11 Was an Inside Job, Osama bin Laden Is Innocent. Note that these guys weren't right about much of anything in the quiz, either... as always, "consider the source."
some sightseeing in the United Arab Emirates. Upon arrival at Abu Dhabi, the Emirati government put me up gratis in a swank hotel with free meals and free transport. Why? "There are people here who are not your friend, sir." Thus they wanted me to be OK, put me somewhere where people could keep an eye on my well-being. The Emirati government knew that a few of its own citizens helped perpetrate the attacks, why should that be hard for the rest of us? (After proofreading it occurs to me that this sequence of events seems to anyone who doesn't know me about as likely as the Scooter Libby tale, but trust me that's what my 2001 was all about...)
I hate mafia media. Always have, always will. This stems in part from hating to see any group of people clumsily live down to ethnic stereotypes. ("Gangsta" anyone? Who'd have thought that 40 years after the Black Panthers you could sell prison clothes to black kids voluntarily? We have, collectively as a nation, learned nothing over the past few decades.)
This was the Italian-American experience for the most part, typical of just about any immigrant group; an honest, hard-working life with small rewards when you were fortunate. This is not the way the group is portrayed in the media. More than anyone other group of "whites" (a group Italians were excluded from in the early 20th century), it's more than OK for Italian-Americans to be portrayed as brutal, ignorant, criminal apes. Worse, most of the people doing the writing and acting are Italian-Americans, at least genetically if not culturally, which lets everyone feel good about the venture in the way that having a handful of tapdancing watermelon-munching darkies and pancake-griddlin' Mammy characters in the movies at one time made the average American feel pretty secure in their anti-African racism. Note that I didn't say that The Sopranos is the precise same thing as Al Jolson... it is, however, a lot closer than most would like to admit.
Imagine a TV series called Those Eternal Jews!, in which we track the fortunes of Morty Schwarz and his ever-kvetching wife and princess daughter, all trying to schlep their way through the day in the family pay-day money-lending business in a redlined neighborhood. Naturally there are two sets of books, oy vey is mir. But don't worry, folks, these are really intricate characters and intriguing plotlines, thus the show "transcends cliches."
Another weird sideline that came to mind when putting together the Secret Theme last week was Thor. I asked about the comic book character, based obviously upon the Norse god, but I have to chuckle when I think Thor owing to the "Legendary Rock Warrior." (Link to the band's site; they're still active!)
The shirtless, leather-clad Thor performed on TV for the ladies (?) in the '70s and possibly early '80s, but never took off commercially. He just didn't have the chops of the likes of the Starland Vocal Band. His performance on Merv Griffin's show in 1976 was jaw-dropping; a little song (with the house band, who don't do rock well), a little striptease, a little turn on the catwalk, a little comedy, a little Festivus-style Feats of Strength. You should also enjoy the video of "Keep the Dogs Away" from 1977 (title track of what's considered his best LP), or the similar "Sleeping Giant." Wow.
While doing some research for last week's Secret Theme round I came across this awesome site, the sort of thing that the internet was invented for: The Periodic Table of Comic Books! This pastiche of the use of elements and chemistry in comics was put together by a couple of supergeeks in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Kentucky.
The answers to this set of Qs follow, the theme was chemical elements. Almost every team figured this out at both bars; expect this week's themes (there will be two different ones) to be a bit less easy.
Here are the artists and titles of the paintings in this post, covering Ray's last week and Frank's the week before. I awarded 2 points for the artist and 2 points for the correct title in English or in the original language. Titles that were suitably close received partial credit.
Who knew that making the choice between abandoning your infant in a bathroom stall or handing it over to the proper authorities could be so catchy?
This post is the weekly posting forum for any questions, comments, etc. that don't fit elsewhere. All of the posts on this blog are open for comment by the by, and this is welcome.
In another rare instance of repeating a round, I used the same Secret Theme round this week at both venues. My original Frank's round had a similar level of questions but a harder theme to figure out, and after a horrible Speed round for almost everyone I figured I should let most people get the extra 8 points else the crowd begin to turn on me. I read about unhappy boisterous wine-drinkers going ugly really quickly in the Bible, with rather negative results for the protagonist, and thus work toward pleasing a crowd whenever possible.
The dynamic duo known as Group W won at Frank's for the 9th time in 13 attempts this week, defeating two-time champs Lil' Roy Screams Again 150-136 and topping 9 other teams in a heavy turnout, high-energy game. As always my attempt to photograph them went awry, and although I snapped a shot of the pair enjoying their winnings at a booth, when I developed the negative I ended up with what appears to be a promo photo of America's most favorite '70s mime couple, Shields & Yarnell.
