Tuesday, April 28, 2009

El Camino quiz moving on over to Tuesday nights

Sooo... I get to El Camino Real (1040 N. 2nd St.) for the first-ever quiz on Sunday and it turns out that none of the staff were expecting me, or any quiz, beyond the fact that some customers showed up 90 minutes early (from my perspective) and started asking why I was "late."

The co-manager who hired me weeks ago either was fired or quit and neglected to inform anyone I'd be there on April 26th. She did apparently advertise the event, but not at the time I understood we agreed on.

The good news: the new manager is amenable to the quiz, and agreed with me that Tuesday nights at 9pm make a lot more sense, which will begin the first week of May.

We're starting with a $25 prize for first and add certificates if/when people show up. I'll be entering upcoming quizzes in the schedule posts as normal, beginning with the last one.


We had a quiz by the by, four teams and a winning score of 108.
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Revised revised quiz schedule, all for real this time 'n' stuff

Wednesday, April 29, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: 1980s TV


Wednesday, April 29, ~10 pm

Ray's Happy Birthday Bar

1200 E. Passyunk Ave.
(near 9th & Federal Sts.)
Subject Round: 1970s TV

Thursday, April 30, 7:30pm
Independence Brew Pub, 2nd Floor

Reading Terminal Market

Subject Round: BEERS OF THE WORLD

This is the periodic University of Maryland alumni event; graduates of accredited institutions not welcome.

Thursday, April 30, ~9:30pm

The Draught Horse
1431 Cecil B. Moore Ave.

(Temple University campus, near Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.)

Subject Round: GEOGRAPHY
Note delay.


Tuesday, May 4, 9pm

El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St. (2nd St. below Girard Ave.)

Subject Round: BRITISH COMEDY

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Monday, April 20, 2009

First-ever El Camino Real quiz this week

Wednesday, April 22, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: COLORS


Wednesday, April 22, ~10 pm

Ray's Happy Birthday Bar

1200 E. Passyunk Ave.

(near 9th & Federal Sts.)
Subject Round: BRITISH COMEDY


Thursday, April 23, 8:30pm

The Draught Horse

1431 Cecil B. Moore Ave.

(Temple University campus, near Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.)
Subject Round: CANDY


Sunday, April 26, 7:30pm

El Camino Real

1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: TEX-MEX
First-ever game at El Camino! Tube tops optional.
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Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Philadelphia casinos redux

If you haven't already done so, I suggest checking out my long casino piece from months ago. [Some additional comments appended to this original post in brackets.]

While in line at the post office late last week, an apparent leader of the anti-casino "movement" was going off in a theater voice to the clerk about how the proposed former Strawbridge & Clothier site (a hulking empty building with no other tenant offers on a non-residential multi-lane street) is the latest threat to public decency

Douchebag, who was holding up the line, complained that since the new site was located at a mass transit hub this amounted to some sort of human trafficking. [Note that the Delaware Avenue site was supposedly opposed for traffic concerns. We see what a crock of crap that is not only on its own merit, but because the site is now over a mass transit hub and that's unacceptable too...]

He went on to state that the anti-casino struggle would continue as "this is a free country" and then linked the anti-casino thing in some vague way to the election of Obama, which seemed pandering to the clerk, who is black. All of this was in an Ira Glass-on-estrogen voice, more than enough to send my blood pressure to near infarction levels.

[I forgot to mention that this rocket scientist also moaned that the site would be open 24 hours, adding that he thought people should be forced to go home at 2am. So much for Dr. Freedom. This is the opinion of non-working class people who've never worked a nightshift, nor work as bar or kitchen staff. I also thought by now anyone with two neurons to rub together realized that a large hub destination open 24/7 makes its immediate area far safer than, say, an empty Market St. dead zone.]

I let the guy have it, noting that he was more a right wing jackass than a "liberal" (which is not to say that the Obama Adminstration is in any way liberal if you're sane, a topic for another time), and asking what his plan for creating thousands of jobs, raising millions for the public schools and funding our libraries and firehouses was. Of course these people have none and don't feel a responsibility to do so.

Naturally these are not liberals. The word is derived from the Latin for "free", and if there's one thing these people hate it's freedom for anyone else. Brown people should be kept out of the neighborhood, working class people shouldn't have the right to decide how to spend an entertainment dollar and someone like me has no right to post on their neighbors forum, depsite my living a stone's throw from the first Foxwoods site. You certainly have no right to a job if you work construction, janitorial/maid service, hotel management, bartending, theater crew...

No, these are not liberals. These are risk-averse fiscal conservatives trying to protect (ironically not even doing that well in all likelihood!) their personal property values and taking a moralist behavioral stance to provide cover. These are Reagan's children.

I asked how the "free country" bit applied to blocking people from making a living, and from gambling where and when the state has already said is legal. I also asked why all of my polite, non-cussin' posts on his website have always been censored/removed within a day of posting.

I asked him how blocking a business venture in which local African-Americans were majority partners and Native Americans the minority partners fit in with his Rainbow Happy Time pseudo-liberal view of the world.

He mumbled something and walked out, which is what most bullies do when smacked on the nose. These people never encounter an opposition thought in their little Borg world of upper class white Center City prim and properness, and the guy looked quite stunned that I would challenge him, like a clubbed tuna.

This came on the heels of another long anti-casino (anti-freedom, anti-job and anti-tax revenue) screed from one of the weeklies. Let's get something sparkling clear about the Philadelphia Weekly and the City Paper - if you took the hooker ads out of them the papers wouldn't be able to make payroll in a month and would disappear in two, tops. These are ads for men to have sex with imported sex slaves and people strung out on coke, dope and lord knows what. These are the same papers which bang a constant drum that slot machines - slot machines for fuck's sake - are going to cause a wave of crime, lower property values and somehow, oh the irony, spur prostitution.

If I wrote this crap for a fiction book no one would buy it as believable.

On my hierarchy of morality, directly supporting the sex slave and narcotics trade is a tad bit worse than letting grandma gamble $40 away once a week [or even win money, which happens sometimes]. I have nothing against voluntary sex trade per se (it happens to be illegal here), but make no mistake that the weeklies are printing ads for guys to pay to serially rape organized crime-imported girls and for cokeheads to trick themselves out. [In a secondary fashion, the weeklies therefore support the international drug trade. Good job, guys! Way to fight the moral fight!]

And oh the tremendous irony of people who have overextended themselves on $400,000 rowhouses with crazy variable mortgages fighting legal commerce in the city because 25 cents in a slot machine is - gasp - gambling, and gambling would ruin the economy!

Cut me a friggin' break. I honestly and truly hope that the anti-casino people come out in person to protest casino job fairs, so that Philadelphia's working class jobless might meet them up close and personal.
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Monday, April 13, 2009

Do you know how to add? I don't.

Since the beginning of the quiz, I've claimed that a perfect score would be 212 points, amended to 213 when I added a point for the first team to hand in a paper in the Speed round.

No one has ever challenged me on this that I can recall.

Yesterday I had an epiphany. 10 + 20 + 31 + 40 + 58 + 60 = 219. Two hundred nineteen, not two hundred thirteen, which is in fact a different number.

The all-time Top Ten Scores List at right has been adjusted accordingly. The scores look slightly less impressive as a result, but we all already knew this was no quiz for punters.

I take a tiny amount of solace in arriving at this on my own, even if it took a couple of years.
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Pirates and Emporers

Those Somalis with outboard motors and AK-47s are really the scum of the planet, eh?

This brilliant Schoolhouse Rock parody reminds us of what St. Augustine had to say on the subject of pirates.



Some interesting commentary on Somali piracy is also ongoing over at The Independent.
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WFMU nails NPR

Enough alphabet soup in the headline?

America's best radio station WFMU rips National Public Radio a new one on the best music blog in the nation, their own. Read the post here, which includes an appended comment from yours truly.

Reader Mike F. really nails NPR in the comments:

"Here in Washington, DC, we have two major outlets for NPR -- or, as I call them, National Petroleum Radio: WETA, the fat, old, corporate dick-sucking NPR station featuring your standard NPR fare for geezing old liberals; and WAMU (out of American University), the slightly-less annoying NPR station, featuring more goddamn' bluegrass and early-60s folkies than you can stand, for the Volvos-with-Free-Tibet-stickers crowd.

To tell the truth, I don't listen to NPR if I can help it -- hell, I hardly listen to the radio at all anymore, except for WPFW (Washington, DC Pacifica outlet) or the WFMU mp3 stream. Still, from time to time, when spending any amount of time in the car with my wife, she insists on assaulting me with either NPR station -- delivering pro-Democratic Party spin, bland quiz shows, and NPR News, all delivered in a smooth, well-modulated, imperious, pompous liberal intellectual tone -- so that she can "stay informed" and, needless to say, when I groan and roll my eyes at yet another steaming heap of pro-Israel or pro-DP spin from All Things Considered and ask her to switch over to the CD player, she gets all huffy and grumps, "oh, be quiet, take a chance, maybe you'll learn something". Well, I've already learned something: NPR is a big, fat, fake; NPR is a corporate tool; NPR is culturally hidebound and insular; NPR bores the living piss out of me. I actually find myself feeling jealous of the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News -- not because I agree with them at all, but because they remind me of how boring and humorless Liberal/Leftie radio is, how irrelevant it is to those of us of a Left persuasion who are really concerned about real issues and want real news about them, and how it just can't quit taking itself so goddamn' seriously. For me, the last thing NPR did that was worth a damn' was their last live broadcast of the Grateful Dead's New Year's Eve show from San Francisco, carried locally on WETA; they broadcast them every year from 1983 through '91, and it really shocked the hell out of me, considering NPR's usual insufferable cultural chauvanism (Holy shit! Rock'nRoll on NPR??).

That said... good lawdamighty, Henry, how could you do a slag on NPR without mentioning Ira Glass or Diane Rehm?

I think that if truth-in-labeling laws applied to radio shows, they'd have to change that name of This American Life to This White Upper-Middle Class Liberal American Life. The last one I remember featured some college girl with some brain-numbing essay about growing up lesbian -- a white upper-middle-class, university-educated, cushy-living lesbian, no doubt. I can't think of a single segment of TIL that didn't feature some boring-assed, inconsequential, irrelevant story from some boring-assed, inconsequential, irrelevant person.

As far as Diane Rehm goes, I can't think of a more irksome, tedious excuse-maker for the Democratic Party anywhere on the air today, let alone just NPR. It's not just her matronly, quavering voice that makes her sound as if she's going to have a stroke any second, it's the fact that she never misses an opportunity to defend the Democratic Party, no matter how craven their behavior. The last Diane Rehm show I sat through, in the late '90s -- trapped in a car with my wife and one of her folk-musician friends -- she spent the better part of the program defending Bill Clinton's decisions to bomb the living piss out of Iraq and Serbia, and his threats to invade Haiti and Somalia. Jeezus, what a goddamn' tool that woman is.

But, aaaaaanyway, I've got a item or two or three that may not fit into the top ten, but which stand out in my own mind nonetheless:


Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me: I don't know what it is that bugs the shit out of me about this program -- the host's smug tone of voice, the stylistic throwback to a '50s radio quiz show, the bland musical segments, or maybe it's just this vibe I get from it, a vibe that says we're so much smarter than you that it hurts.

Pretty much any of the folkie/bluegrass programming on WAMU: Yeah, yeah; I know, I know, forgive me, Liberal Amerika -- I know this music is supposed to be historic, and part of the fabric of the rich cultural heritage of America, and all that crap, but I'm sorry: I just can't get into it. It drives me up the friggin' wall. I feel my forehead beginning to protrude and my IQ dropping with every bluegrass tune. With every goddamn' old folkie tune I hear, I feel more and more like Bluto in Animal House, in that scene where he breaks a guitar over some guy's head. Despite the evolution of cultures, societies and technologies and the way they've changed the nature of "peoples' music", the folkie DJs on WAMU have an image of folk music frozen in the form of a romanticized idea of American folk music as it was in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and in their minds are still back at that good old 1962 campus chapel basement "Ban The Bomb" hootenanny, still singing about what they'd do if only they had a goddamn' hammer, Still, my wife -- about ten years my senior -- is an old folkie from back in the day, so I tolerate it, even though my own favorite protest music is stuff like CSNY's Four Dead In Ohio, Jefferson Airplane's Volunteers and The Clash's London's Burnin'.

All Things Considered -- or, as I like to call it, All Things Censored, your one-stop shop for pro-Israel, pro-Democratic Party, pro-Corporatist spin. When the IDF bombs the living piss out of a Palestinian village, bulldozes a Palestinian village, shoots at ambulances trying to rescue the wounded from a Palestinian village the IDF has bombed the piss out of, or shoots Palestinian children for throwing stones at them, without incurring any casualties of their own, this is reported by ATC as "a lull in the violence in Palestine". I also love how ATC's idea of "economic news" is reporting on the problems of investors, or passing along investment tips, with little or no attention paid to the millions of people who've lost their jobs and pensions and homes and are forced to work at starvation-wage jobs while living in their cars, or in motels or tent cities. ATC's segment-reporting style always sets my teeth on edge as well -- the smooth, detached, dispassionate voices droning over sonic atmospherics that seems to be the style for radio reporting today. Sometimes, when my wife and I are visiting one of her friends, and they're listening to a "news" segment on ATC, it almost sounds as if there's a TV set on in the next room.

American Roots: I've heard so many episodes that I ought to be able to remember the host's name, but somehow, I can't. What I do remember, though, is how he sounds like some college kid working on his thesis in anthropology or something. Sometimes, American Roots, like most NPR reporting on popular music -- especially black popular music -- seems just this side of safari journalism. It doesn't matter what genre of popular music he's reporting on, he seems to be treating it as if it were a million-year-old fly preserved in amber, and manages to come across like a perfect square while he's doing it. I'll never forget an interview he did with Chuck Berry; I'm no clairvoyant, but I found it easy to imagine Berry at the other end of the phone line thinking God damn, man, what kinda' bullshit questions is this square-assed white boy asking me? Shame, too; I've gotten to hear a lot of my favorite old music by my favorite performers, and heard a lot of interesting stories from said favorite performers, but in the context of American Roots, I can't shake the feeling that I'm sitting through a goddamn' anthropology lecture. Not to mention that listening to American Roots reminds me of just how deeply into the toilet American popular music has sunk since about the late 1970s."

Best ... post... ever.

One of these days I'll have to share some of my pirate radio DJ days stories with you folks, along with my work-study experience at WXPN's early post-"professionalization" days, which was partial motivation for seeing the necessity to go pirate. American public radio is just so terrible for so many reasons...
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This week's taxing quiz schedule

Wednesday, April 15, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: DEATH & TAXES

Wednesday, April 15, ~10 pm
Ray's Happy Birthday Bar

1200 E. Passyunk Ave.
(near 9th & Federal Sts.)

Subject Round:
BRITISH COMEDY

Thursday, April 16, 8:30pm
The Draught Horse

1431 Cecil B. Moore Ave.

(Temple University campus, near Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.)

Subject Round: HEAVEN & HELL
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Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Philadelphia Cinema Alliance now frontrunners as Local Jackasses of the Year 2009

As the death toll climbed into the hundreds from this week's earthquake and aftershocks in central Italy, the folks at the film fest apparently thought it'd be a great idea to piggyback some spam-style marketing on the disaster.

Those of us on the Philadelphia Cinema Alliance mailing list received an email today titled "Newsline: Aftershocks!" which was sent a few hours after the news of the deadly wave of aftershocks hit the same region and made digging possible survivors out of rubble more dangerous and, in at least one case, fatal. It's one thing not to wait until the bodies are cool, but can we at least wait until everyone dies?

Clicking on said email, the reader could learn the vitally important information that winners of the film fest jury prizes had been chosen. Also, in case you wished to navel-gaze, there were some photos of the event (yes, that would be photos of people going to watch movies, a sort of... meta-boredom) posted.

No actual mention of the earthquakes and aftershocks was made in the body of the email. No, I don't think this was an accident, or a coincidence. How many of us would have clicked on said email with an accurate title?

Non-assholes wishing to contribute to relief efforts for the injured and homeless can do so at this link. People, man, they're the fuckin' worst.

As a side note, having seen another couple of festival films this year, and having seen dozens of them over the past several years, I'm struck by how unnecessary and even counterproductive most of what they have the volunteers do is.

People know how to go to the movies. People know how to stand in line and how to find an empty seat. We're talking about movie theaters that are about as crowded, or less so, than any multiplex on a Friday evening. We're talking about an audience comprised mostly of a bunch of geeky tofu-fed Obama voters who majored in Gender Studies or Sociology and with an average age of 40. I don't expect these people to get overly rowdy in the lobby or to try and stampede or, y'know, bum rush the proverbial show. If the Riverview hasn't burned down by now, the Ritz East will probably do OK without a Head Boy and the buddy system when you show 12 movies on two screens there in a day. Do we really need to be kept outside in micromanaged lines? Do we need a movie proctor screeching into a microphone to hold our hands up to indicate empty seats (hint: if I can see a hand, I can see an empty seat near that hand...)? Next year will you pin the tix to our coats?

Way to sap the fun out of a damn movie, cine-nannies!
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Tuesday, April 7, 2009

VH1's One Hit Wonders of the '80s was completely inaccurate

This is news that only quizmasters and quizzo addicts would conceivably care about.

When you say "one-hit wonder" to an American trivia geek, that invariably means an act that had one song and one song only hit at or above the #40 position on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart for at least one week. It's a pretty specific designation, and a handy trivia standby as it allows for definitive answers to specific questions.

VH1 just ran a week-long series called 100 Greatest One Hit Wonders of the '80s which was just flat-out wrong multiple times in designating what acts met the criteria... not once or twice, but I'm guessing maybe half of the time. "Greatest" is of course subjective, but it seemed act after act got burned when the folks at VH1 couldn't recall, or didn't have good video for, more than one hit per act, and therefore that "made" them one-hit wonders. Often the narration made the claim that so-and-so "never charted again," so there's no ambiguity that they meant a casual interpretation of the term to mean "acts with one song we generally remember."

It'd be like claiming that the Phils have still only won one World Series, because you figure that a lot of your audience wouldn't be old enough to notice, because you don't have enough good video of the '80 series, and because you couldn't get a Larry Bowa interview. Lazy!

For those of us who were in high school in the '80s, this was a little upsetting. I'm used to the Orwellian Memory Hole for serious news, but must we sully even the damn pop chart history?!

Playing some hunches on bands I was pretty darn sure had a gaggle of hits in the '80s, and consulting my trusty copy of Whitburn, I went 4-for-4 on checking out potentially false one-hitters depicted as such on the VH1 special. I'm sure someone with even more free time than me could find dozens more.

The worst and weirdest slight of the four was Twisted Sister, who had five Top 40 songs in the '80s. Few bands manage that many Top 40 hits in a career, let alone a decade. The weird part is that VH1 claimed that "We're Not Gonna Take It" (highest chart position #20) was their only Top 40 hit, whereas they actually had a song chart #19 ("The Price").

A Flock of Seagulls were claimed to be a one-hitter with "I Ran (So Far Away)", although they had three Top 40s in the '80s.

Men Without Hats are best remembered for "Safety Dance" (#9), but also hit #20 with "Pop Goes the World." Thus when Twisted Sister hits #20, it's "their only hit," and when Men Without Hats does the same... it didn't happen.

A-Ha is well-remembered for "Take On Me", a #1 song, but also hit #20 in the US with "The Sun Always Shines on TV."

Those are just the four I checked out. Sloppy, VH1, sloppy!

Last year I went to an "'80s Party" on the Moshulu, and noticed about half the songs played that night were from the late '70s or early '90s. Is this all really that hard? If we need help, folks, contact info for me is available on this page and I can be hired at reasonable rates to consult upon what decade your music is from and how popular it was at the time.

Next thing you know, the Discovery Channel will be telling us there are only eight planets.
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Saturday, April 4, 2009

Sunday evening quizzes to begin at El Camino Real on April 26!

Quizzes begin at 7pm Sundays at El Camino Real in Northern Liberties on April 26th. There will be the usual mix of drink specials and prizes available, and the quiz will be in my usual format. The place serves Tex-Mex food so you can sustain your trivia brain's requirements while also meeting your alcohol requirements.

El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.

(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Philadelphia

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This week's quiz schedule; Second Annual All-Baseball Quiz at Ray's!

Wednesday, April 1, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: SPRING

Wednesday, April 8, ~10 pm

Ray's Happy Birthday Bar
1200 E. Passyunk Ave.(near 9th & Federal Sts.)
Subject Round: SECOND ANNUAL ALL-BASEBALL SPECTACULAR

Six rounds of baseball questions, the sport and references in pop culture. Baseball prizes available as well!


Thursday, April 2, 8:30pm
The Draught Horse
1431 Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus, near Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.)
Subject Round: METAL
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