Tuesday, December 29, 2009

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.
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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.

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Tuesday, December 15, 2009

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.
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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!
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Tuesday, December 8, 2009

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.
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Monday, December 7, 2009

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
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