Chris from Necessity of Ruins won at Ray's last week

For the first time ever I misplaced some scores, last week at Ray's. There was light turnout in the return of the quiz; hope to get back tonight to where we were before the holiday break. Skipping two weeks after building that momentum is a real buzzkill, but what can you do when Tuesday hits a holiday twice consecutively?
No one broke any records, let's put it that way! Our one-man-team winner was Chris Dougherty of The Necessity of Ruins: an exploration of the built environment blog fame. Smart dude. If you have any interest at all in Philadelphia, city planning, ruins, all that good stuff, you need to visit the blog regular-like. In fact I'm adding it to my own blogroll on the righthand side of this blog.

In addition to the liquid prize which went home in his belly, Mr. Ruins also selected as an additional prize a vintage, hardback copy of John Gunther's fascinating pre-war (1939) book Inside Asia, part of his "Inside..." series of books meant to give the reader the lowdown on street level politics in various parts of the world. Here we see a fold-out map which helps us locate colonials and fascists alike. We have something much like that today in the excellent series of Robert Young Pelton's World's Most Dangerous Places books, which I like to use as a vacation checklist.

Why would I give something cool like that away? I already own what I believe to be a full set of Gunther books in that series, and snap up additional ones I see as quiz prizes because I know my audience. You'll completely geek out for this stuff, won't ya? It's OK; we'll form a support group, and meet on Tuesdays at 9pm at Ray's Happy Birthday Bar.