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