Your holiday quiz schedule

Hey folks. Sorry I missed doing this post last week. Between the holidays, continued reverberations from the move and other projects things really caught up with me. Hope your Xmas was great and have a happy and safe new year!

Tuesday, December 29, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: MOVIES WITH NUMBERS IN THEIR TITLES

Wednesday, December 30, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: GEOGRAPHY

Thursday, December 31
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
**NO QUIZ**

See you again third week in January 2010! Thanks to The Draught Horse, Victory Brewing and the Temple U. community for another great term.

The "Courage" of Michael Vick

A reprint, I rather doubt the authors would mind. The team unanimously gave this guy a freakin' award for courage?! Christ they need to be humiliated in the playoffs...

Dog Hanger as Model Citizen?

The Courage of Michael Vick
By WALTER BRASCH and ROSEMARY BRASCH

The Philadelphia Eagles honored reserve quarterback and admitted dog-killer Michael Vick with an award for courage. Yes, you read that right. "Michael Vick" and "courage" are in the same sentence.

Each of the 32 NFL teams annually honors one of its own with an Ed Block award, named for the Baltimore Colts head trainer who was an advocate for improving the lives of neglected and abused children; the Foundation says it celebrates "players of inspiration in the NFL." Unfortunately, there is no stipulation that football players who abuse animals are ineligible receivers.

Eagles Quarterback Donovan McNabb told the Philadelphia Inquirer the award was "well deserved." Vick, his team, and what appears to be a loyal foundation of fans who believe Vick will help lead the Eagles into a SuperBowl, all believe the man who ran Bad Newz Kennels has "seen the light," has reformed, and is now a model citizen.

However, Vick's own words show the humility and humbleness that he should have are still missing from his egocentric world of sweating multi-millionaires.

"It means a great deal to me," Vick told the media, gloating that he "was voted unanimously by my teammates. They know what I've been through. I've been through a lot. It's been great to come back and have an opportunity to play and be with a great group of guys. I'm just ecstatic about that, and I enjoy every day." He further justified the honor by explaining, "I've overcome a lot, more than probably one single individual can handle or bear." Elaborating, he declared, "You ask certain people to walk through my shoes, they probably couldn't do. Probably 95 percent of the people in this world because nobody had to endure what I've been through, situations I've been put in, situations I put myself in and decisions I have made, whether they have been good or bad." He said, "There's always consequences behind certain things and repercussions behind them, too. And then you have to wake up every day and face the world, whether they perceive you in the right perspective, it's a totally different outlook on you. You have to be strong, believe in yourself, be optimistic. That's what I've been able to do. That's what I display."

Not once in his statements to the media did Michael Vick apologize for what he did, or for the deals he cut in order to be restored to the status of a millionaire athlete. Everything he said was focused upon his own "courage," with "I" being the prevalent word.

Perhaps Michael Vick isn't aware that courage is not being so vacuous as to believe it was acceptable to breed and arrange for dogs to fight to the death, to allow equally malevolent "fans" to bet on the matches, and by the cruelest means possible to kill dogs who didn't perform as well as he thought they should. Going to prison for 18 months, losing two seasons of multimillion dollar income, having to work out to get into fighting condition, and then earning about $1.6 in his first year back into the NFL, with a second year option for about $5 million, isn't courage.

In case Michael Vick doesn't know what courage is, here are just a few examples. There are thousands of others.

Courage is the soldier who is on 100 percent disability from combat wounds who is now working almost every hour of every day with physical therapists, social workers, and other medical personnel to try to regain even the most remote possibility of being able to walk again.

Courage is the firefighters who risk their lives to rescue people and their pets from burning buildings.

Courage is law enforcement personnel who put their lives on the line to serve and protect the people.

Courage is the "whistle blower" who risks a job and family stability to point out greed and corruption within a business, educational institution, or governmental agency.

Courage is the lone dissenter who fights for social and economic justice in a society that is determined to continue the "me generation."

Courage is the recent graduate who delays entry into the job market, the mid-career executive who gives up the fast track, or the senior citizen who decides there is more to life than retirement, and volunteers for AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, or any of hundreds of non-profit organizations that have taken on the burden of helping those who society has made invisible.

Courage is the parents who work two low-income service jobs, support their families, and still donate time and money to charities that help those less fortunate than they.

Courage is the family who last year had a home and job, and this year has neither but survives day to day.

Courage is the animal rights advocates who risk their lives to fight against governments that allow the killing of whales, bears, seals, wolves, and hundreds of other animals; and to humane society staff and innumerable volunteers who rescue abandoned and abused animals, and who work with them to try to give them a better life.

But most important, courage is all the people who know no matter what obstacles they overcome today, tomorrow will present the same challenges, and that they will never have any hope to be a millionaire or to receive an award for surviving against tremendous odds.

In his comments after being notified of the award, Michael Vick proved himself to be an unworthy spokesman for anything or anyone other than himself.

Walter Brasch is an award-winning social issues columnist, former newspaper investigative reporter and editor, and journalism professor. His latest book is Sinking the Ship of State: The Presidency of George W. Bush.

Rosemary Brasch is a former secretary, Red Cross national disaster family services specialist, labor activist, and university instructor of labor studies.

Fight seasonal affective disorder with a quiz... or vodka and pistol, whatever... I've got my own damn problems

Tuesday, December 15, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: HISTORIC STUFF THAT HAPPENED IN DECEMBER

Wednesday, December 16, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: FAMOUS NON-FICTION AUTHORS

Thursday, December 17, 9:00pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
Subject Round: WINTER HOLIDAYS

Final quiz for this term - see you again third week in January 2010! Thanks to The Draught Horse, Victory Brewing and the Temple U. community for another great term.

How a quiz question is written

People often ask me if I write the questions, and how. "Where'dya get the questions?" they demand, mouth-breathing faces filled with wonder.

"D'ya write 'em yerself?" they ask credulously. "Is a bear Catholic?" I respond. "Does the Pope shit in the woods?" I continue, unnecessarily.

But it's all a lie... all a terrible, monstrous lie.

Let us take ourselves behind the scenes of the operation, and finally reveal all. Let this be Quizmasterchris Industries' holiday treat to you! Think of it as your Golden Ticket to get a once in a lifetime peek inside Quizmasterchris Industries' Obfuscation Factory and Smoke'n'Mirror Works!

Pictured above left find our receptionist, Samantha, who answers all calls at the American HQ on our new iDialPhone system provided as a promotional consideration by Comcast. It's Comcastic! We maintain this largely depopulated, benefits-free office with a 215 area code to retain the facade of a local, mom and pop operation, the one thing we are assuredly not.

Lining the wall note her laptop, powered by Windows Vista. Samantha has a lot of lap; she isn't well-paid and thrifts a lot of skirts from 1972.

First off, I couldn't possibly create the quizzes myself; this much is obvious, as I am barely literate and unusually lazy, even by quiz host standards.

Questions are developed by a desperate team of poor but bright teenagers who have been trained in Wikipedia usage - and have been assigned fake Anglo-Saxon names to no particular end - at our Question Outsourcing Center in Bangalore, India. We find this to be a cost-effective solution as the workers have few formal legal rights and union activity is essentially illegal. This is pretty much a lateral move on that front from our former New Jersey facility, but we found that fewer and fewer American workers could handle the grammar of shifting statements into questions. Little consideration is given to quality but much to quantity, as the managers tend to come from the our nation's poultry industry and have little or no direct trivia experience.

I like to think of the program as Slumdog Hundredaire.

These questions are transferred to microfilm and shipped home in swallowed condoms by homeless folks we pass off as vacationing well-to-do New Agers visiting the subcontinent, searching for inner peace.

After the questions are sifted stateside by our unpaid, abused high school interns in preparation for an American audience (to remove international cricket test scores, all reference to spices and other such things that would bewilder a Yank audience), we test the remaining questions for allergic properties on orphans, as pictured at right.

I am a mere figurehead, and the questions and their answers are printed for me phonetically (and, sometimes in the case of big words, in rebus form) on a series of coloful index cards specially designed to hold my attention. There is a small mic surgically implanted in my skull. If resultantly Quality Control (staffed by widow women out of Jogjakarta, Indonesia) can hear that I readed the questions real good at the quiz I get extra mealloaf ration that upcoming weekend at the halfway facility where I was originally recruited, and where the conditions of my parole still require I live, and continue to introduce myself to and review my transgressions with any new neighbors.

We hope that this clears up any lingering confusion about the origin of the quizzes and the nature of their preparation. Next week we'll take a look at how many of your favorite cookies really were baked by elves. Happy Holidays to you and yours from the people of Quizmasterchris Industries, its parent company Dow Chemical and our outsourced/externalized labor pool, both in and out of the reserve army of the unemployed!

Peace prize?

Chris Hedges hits the nail on the head: Liberals are useless

Last night I almost wrote an extremely similar piece to what Chris Hedges published yesterday for this blog. Like Hedges I voted for America's most honest and effective citizen, Ralph Nader, for president in 2008 (in my case for the fourth consecutive election; following the Clinton betrayals on everything from NAFTA to logging to Iraq to Jocelyn Elders I wrote Nader in back in '96). I took a deep breath and realized that it'd take hours, and punted.

Very fortunately Hedges beat me to the punch, so I just linked to the excellent piece above.

It begins like this, then gets better:

"Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.

I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered. "

The Democrats in general and Obama in particular have transparently been corporate sell-outs since the 1980s at least... provided you pay a modicum of attention and don't throw all your memories of what they do down an Orwellian memory hole. The only two campaign promises Obama has kept have been to ramp up the unconstitutional AfPak war and to give a trillion dollars to his criminal bankster buddies. These were the concrete things he told you he was going to do, and as he is a bought handmaiden of power I believed him. That's why I wouldn't vote for him. America's pseudo-liberals have their panties in a twist because he actually kept these promises.

As for the empty "Change" and "Hope" slogans, the snips and snails and rainbow fucking puppy dog tails ... this was Madison Avenue at its worst; I was hoping any non-tard 12 year old would notice that these aren't even full thoughts let alone action plans. These are just Rorshach keywords that likely tested well in focus groups; you can fill them with whatever you'd like them to mean, which is the same as filling them with no meaning at all.

"Exxon-Mobil: Change!"
"Enron - Hope!"
"Benito Mussolini - Change!"
"Alka-Seltzer - Hope!"

Obama is a walking corporate sell-out and America's pathetic "liberals" did a lot of his marketing for free. Heck, many even ponied up little donations to pile on the Goldman Sachs money, in the vain hope that your $10 would buy you similar access. Did you save the receipt? Are people finally going to wise up and vote for non-major party candidates next time 'round? Am I going to to see people at marches for a change, like before the liberals lined up behind John "Surge" Kerry to kill the anti-war movement five long fucking years ago?

Sigghhhh...

For months now I've been trying to gird myself for a painful post on Obama-as-not-an-African-American, which will eventually be forthcoming.

Your weekly schedule

Tuesday, December 8, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: HEAVY METAL

Wednesday, December 9, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: TALKING HEADS

Thursday, December 10, 9:00pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)

Subject Round: WINTER SPORTS

Your snowboarding-truncated schedule

Tuesday, December 1, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: FAMOUS CATS

Wednesday, December 2, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: FAMOUS DOGS

Thursday, December 3, 9:00pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
THE QUIZ IS ALSO CANCELLED THIS WEEK TO MAKE ROOM FOR A SNOWBOARDING SEASON EVENT (?!), AND WILL RETURN DECEMBER 10.

Your Thanksgiving-truncated schedule

I'm still dealing with the aftershocks of the move, so there hasn't been much time to update the ol' blog. As things normalize expect a greater frequency of more interesting posts.

It looks as if Sunday nights might be shifting soon from Lyon's Den, where the quiz has pretty much been killed by low turnout/Sunday Night Football, to a location up on Girard Ave. More detail on that as things develop.

Tuesday, November 24, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: TBA unfortunately, still unpacking and normalizing

Wednesday, November 25, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: TBA; note the return to 7:30 start

Thursday, November 26, 9:00pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
THANKSGIVING; NO QUIZ. QUIZ IS ALSO CANCELLED THE FOLLOWING WEEK TO MAKE ROOM FOR A SNOWBOARDING SEASON EVENT (?!), AND WILL RETURN DECEMBER 10.

Uncertain what the Subject Rounds will be this week as my Hell Move prep continues

It's shaping up something like the image at left.

I'm continuing to pack several thousand books, records and CDs, as well as all the other stuff one accumulates, for my big cross-South Philly move this weekend.

Thus I'm not quite sure what rounds will be done where, there will be a lot of pulling very old rounds from the archive at the last minute for audiences that weren't playing my games a couple of years ago, and hopefully next week we'll be back to all-new material.

Tuesday, November 17, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: TBA

Wednesday, November 18, 7:00pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: TBA

Thursday, Novemeber 19, 9:00pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
Subject Round: TBA
Note: This is the last Draught Horse quiz in the next 3 weeks. After this we have Thanksgiving and, the first week of December, some "X-treme" sports promotion that'll bump the quiz.

"Solidarity" wasn't just a tough word to spell in Poland

Blaming the Workers

By DAVE LINDORFF

As the strike by transit workers in Philadelphia entered its fifth day, it is clear why unions have such a tough time in the United States, where fewer than one in eight workers is covered by a union contract.

Although the average pay of transit workers is just $50,000 a year (that represents take-home pay of less than $35,000 take-home after taxes or about $3,000 a month to live on for a typical family of four), the suburbanites who feel put out because they have to brave huge traffic jams to get to and from work in the city are grousing that the transit workers are greedy for holding out for a slightly-less-than 4% per year pay increase over the three years of their contract.

I just got into a debate at the local YMCA gym with an older guy who probably makes over $100,000 a year and whose children are already grown, who was incensed that the "greedy bus and subway drivers" were asking for a raise at this time "with the economy in such a mess."

But I also noticed, as I drove my son into school this week in the traffic crush, that these same suburbanites are, for the most part, continuing to drive to work one to a car. What a lack of creativity!

My wife, who frequently travels to Rome to do research, has on several occasions landed in that city during one of its frequent transit strikes. She reports that the people of this ancient city take these job actions in stride, getting out their bicycles, taking leisurely walks to school, or simply going on holiday for the duration. People don't get mad at the workers. In Italy, it's understood that when one group of workers fights for better pay or working conditions, everyone benefits in the end.

This fellow I was arguing with about the Philly transit strike, said, "It's not like this is the 1920s or '30s, when unions were really needed because people were being exploited."

"Oh really?" I said. "You don't think the workers at Wal-Mart or in your local supermarket are being exploited?" The truth is that working conditions for American workers have been getting progressively worse in recent years, while pay has actually been falling in real dollars, because union representation has been falling for several decades from a high of over 35% back in the early 1950s. Those unions, like the transit workers union in Philadelphia, which are still fighting the good fight, are really all that stands between ordinary American workers and a truly nightmarish return to a Dickensian era.

Does anyone believe that the type of manager that we have seen pillaging the economy on Wall Street, or stealing jobs and already earned pay from workers at Republic Window & Door in Chicago, is an exception to the rule? Hell no. American managers are congenitally ruthless exploiters of human beings constrained only by unions or their fear of unions, and by the protective legislation, such as minimum wage laws, occupational safety and health laws, etc., which Congress has grudgingly passed because of the pressure from unions and their workers.

We should all be cheering the workers of the Transport Workers Union Local 234 in Philadelphia for their grit and determination in standing up to the management of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority. Their fight is our fight. They like us are struggling to pay rent or mortgage bills, to buy food for their families, and to pay their medical bills.

Workers all around the Philadelphia area should be organizing car-pools, getting their bikes out of the garage, and collectively telling their own bosses to cut them some slack if they're late to work or have to stay home for the day because of the strike.

We should also all be writing letters condemning the bias of the local media in Philadelphia, which have as a group focused entirely on the hardship to commuters caused by the strike, and not at all on the issues confronted by the transit workers themselves.

Furthermore, it is not the fault of the SEPTA workers in Philadelphia that bus and subway fares are too high. Nor is it their responsibility to accept low wages to subsidize lower fares. It is the responsibility of the state of Pennsylvania to keep those fares affordable. Mass transit cannot and should not be self-financing. It is a social good. It helps protect the environment by reducing air pollution from cars, reduces wear and tear on roadways, and helps reduce the nation's dependence upon oil imports.

Instead of complaining about the union for calling a strike, we should all be cheering them on. America needs more labor militancy, not less.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com

This week's quiz schedule

With the baseball playoffs ended we're back to a pretty normal quiz schedule.

I'm moving out of my place in two weeks after 11 years, 3 months. Currently I'm in the throes of packing for Hell Move '09, therefore it looks like I'll be dipping into the quiz archive at the couple of venues I don't have people who've been playing my games for the past couple of years and might recall rounds. Thus I'm not yet sure what tonight's Subject Round is, but I assure you it'll be quiztacular.

The next two weeks the book prizes will get better as well as I dip into my book doubles and things that were too cool to toss but which I'm not motivated to haul to the new place.

The Institute quiz was pretty much a turnout disaster and we parted ways amicably. There's not much point in paying me to expand your clientele from 3 people to 7 people, or just replacing 4 people who'd rather leave than hear (let alone answer) trivia questions with 4 people who came to answer trivia questions. Part of the problem with trying to get a quiz off the ground at a new venue is that an established clientele that wants to drink and stare forward blankly on a weeknight tends to be composed of people with antipathy toward doin' stuff in general and thinkin' 'bout stuff specifically, thus the seed of a new quiz seems to require bringing people into a place they hadn't previously considered drinking at... probably because the usual clientele stares forward blankly while drinking. Getting new people up to 12th & Green in the dark was beyond my capacity.

Tuesday, November 10, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: TBA

Wednesday, November 11, 7:00pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: WORLD WAR I (in which the Kaiser gets rolled)

Thursday, October 1, 9:00pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
Subject Round: WORLD WAR II: THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL

Wall in Berlin erected to celebrate, er... Berlin Wall coming down

As always, I am not making this crap up.

In other Berlin Wall news, the Swedish woman who "married" the Wall still mourns, and this interesting piece points out that the Wall complex (which was partially constructed by the West incidentally) was erected because of what amount to terrorist attacks on the East German population. Not something that usually makes the history books.

I spent a chunk of 1996 working in Germany. I had a week to blow in Berlin, which is (or was) exactly the stereotypical Cold War/Krautrock/Sprockets pre-apocalyptic/post-modern decadent nightmare city of the retro-future one might expect. I had a rough time even then finding remaining chunks of the Wall in situ while looking for them using a map of where it once stood - never saw so many construction cranes in my life- and eventually stumbled across a chunk coming up from an U-Bahn stop while going somewhere else.

It was one of those moments when one feels like an idiot for a moment. The internal dialogue ran something like "Geez, I'd like to able to walk right over to that museum, but this big damn wall here in Berlin is in the way and I have to walk around it. Who in their right mind would stick a big wall in the middle of Ber- ... ohhhhhhhh.... cool!"

Knocked off a couple little flecks I still have somewhere, and had a photo snapped by a couple of Japanese tourists. No matter how bad the history, within a generation there's a stand selling batteries and Coke on the very spot.

Thanks to the Evil Empire, there will be a quiz tonight at The Draught Horse

Thursday, November 5, 9:00pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
Subject Round: U.S. GEOGRAPHY

Comcast gains 1 million subscribers, thanks employees by laying them off

No longer a Comcast customer, I haven't had call for many Comcast Sucks posts of late. This news item, however, is of interest.

Comcast saw profits rise 22.5% in the third quarter of this year and gained nearly 1 million new subscribers (digital conversion must have helped). In order to deal with the additional customers, and seeing as how they do such a great job with existing ones, they've decided to lay people off! This is an out of control business that keeps growing even though they are completely unable to do basic things like bill correctly, answer a phone call or send a trained tech out to a location to fix their frequent outtages within 8 hours of an appointment.

Keep this in mind the next time they want some tax break. So much for "trickle down" benefits to the community; money in, people out.

Comcast, you suck.

OK... so... as of the end of Game 5, there's only this El Camino quiz this week

Tuesday, November 3, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: THE 1930's

Your World Series soundtrack

The Randoms "Let's Get Rid of New York"


Fear "New York's Alright (If You Like Saxophones)"

More harmful bullshit from the so-called "National Trivia Association"

... which is in reality precisely one douchebag named Andrew Weilgus. Long-time blog readers might recall this particular turd from this post or this one, in which we learned that Andy W. makes a series of farcical and questionably legal claims to other quizmasters in an attempt to extract money from them in exchange for, in effect, nothing.

Last week I received a call from local magician and quizmaster Michael W., who works in Andy's backyard, the Jersey Shore. You should check out his cool magic and quiz site here. Michael reads the blog and was aware of my previous run-ins with the so-called NTA, and wanted to share his tale and ask me what was up with this fruitcake.

Michael took Andy at his (sometimes) claim that the NTA is just there to help promote the game across the board, and sent a nice little email asking if it would be possible to list his games on the site. The response was two emails from Andy containing his unique brand of semi-literate insult, abuse, idle threat and fiction-based braggadocio.

Exhibit the First:

"Sorry i'm not advertising competing games, many people have been confused thinking you were working for us and have relayed their disappointment when they found out it was not NTA. Good luck with your en devours."

I seriously doubt that any one person at any time has ever even noticed that a quiz was or wasn't affililiated with the NTA, let alone "many" people, and the idea that this spelling- and grammar-challenged douche is writing better quizzes than most of us is laughable.

Of particular amusement to me is the pseudo-French phrase en devours, no doubt intended to mean the English word endeavours. There isn't a French word "devours." This from the man who writes a far superior quiz to the rest of us according to his website!

Not content with this display of ignorance, Andy W., clearly worried that someone is doing a better job of running quizzes than him in his own backyard, sent a second email attempting to threaten Michael with ruin and entice him with fictional employment via the NTA:

Exhibit the Second:

"We cant work with you on Laguna because we have a no compete in that town but if you wanted to consider switching to our game for the Fridays show i could talk to you about taking a role with us and training you as an alternate in the region, you would have to not use the game in brigantine though. I can tell you since we ve been running quizzo since 2000 down here we've seen a ton of independent games come and go because they can't offer the level of game we can nor can they match the nation wide tournament aspect of our game which includes our nation finals in atlantic city. Depending on what you were getting from Fridays i'd be willing to discuss a deal."

Michael is effectively telling Andy to stuff it through ignoring him, as is appropriate. I doubt that Andrew with his shaky grasp both of the English language and reality could "train" a working stage magician and actually bright fellow on how to do a better quiz than he does now. "Nation finals" ? Not "National Finals"? I've taught many an ESL student who knew better than that.

Let the quizmaster and quiz player beware; this is how the "NTA"/ Andrew Weilgus, with no legal right to even the name quizzo and as a relative latecomer to the quiz biz, does business. A "no-compete" for quizzo? Seriously?! That's like having a no-compete for darts or pool... or beer.

Incidentally I recently re-cleaned up the Wikipedia entry for Quizzo, which frequently morphs into a semi-literate, inappropriate series of ads for various quizzes in the rules section if we let it. I keep having to repost a link at the bottom of the entry in the more appropriate Links section to this site, which is the only link serially removed, likely by Andrew, who has done so in the past. This fucktard is clearly so insecure in his ability to do this job that he needs to attempt to ham-fistedly censor and threaten anyone else doing it within 100 miles.