Ray's Bar now a stable Tuesday night venue!

I'm pleased to announce that Ray's Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly is now our new stable Tuesday night venue! I'm shooting for an 8:30pm start. I have to add the "pm" because Ray's opens at 7am, and trust me those folks don't want no pub quiz.

Ray's is a link to South Philly's past, having been owned by the same family at the same location since 1938. A new crop of cool kids has recently discovered its under-bar pee trough (no longer connected to plumbing, please use the bathrooms) and Ladies' Entrance, but it's still a great place to watch the locals. I grew up (assuming I have grown up!) with bartender Paul E., and I think we'll make a fine team. I'm looking forward to this. Come on out! The more support we get, the longer the bar keeps the event going.

Those pesky 78s

This week at Frank's I asked a Before/After Round question about when 78 rpm discs were "discontinued from mass production." I maintained that in the American market they were basically done in 1958-9, almost exactly 10 years after the introduction of the LP format. My target year that round was 1960, thus the answer I was looking for was "Before."

One member of the team that frequently changes their name but is basically Lil Roy Screamed argued the answer, claiming that he was a 78 collector and had Elvis and other records on 78 that were released well into the 1960s. I appealed to a member of this week's winning team, Group W, who makes a living as a record dealer and owns tens of thousands of records, to sort out the issue. He agreed with me that the 78 was basically done in the US by 1959.

I let the scores of that round stand as is, and told the plaintiff that he if produces a 78 of a song that came out after 1960 I'll credit his team with 2 points this coming quiz at Frank's. Well, he likely will produce such an article and I'm more than happy to credit the team as I said I would. Why do I now think he has late '60s 78s? I did some internet research.

There was a foreign market for 78s long after the market in the US died off in favor of the 33 1/3 and 45 market. Record players were far more expensive for people in many economies and you couldn't just dash out and buy a new one. Apparently in India this extended as far as hand-cranked models in places where electricity was touch and go. Thus we have such apparent anachronisms as Indian 78s of Beatles songs into 1968. Some of these records were also favored by US servicemen who needed to adapt to the local standard. These are now very rare and in certain quarters are highly collectible.

Thus Lil Roy will get their 2 point boost next week as a gesture of goodwill on my part; I said "mass produced," I didn't specify US market or that sort of thing. The letter of my question was flawed in a technical sense but the spirit was correct. You simply won't see many American 78s for an American market after 1959 at the latest, I'll stand by that statement. Seeing as Group W scored 62 more points than Lil Roy this past week I'm not sure that this will affect standings much either.

NEW VENUE - Ray's Happy Birthday Bar

In light of the last-minute cancellation of the Tuesday night quiz by Finn McCool's, I've managed to secure a replacement venue at Ray's Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly, tonight at 8:30.

Ray's Bar - "The Happy Birthday Bar"
South Philly
1200 East Passyunk Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19147
Telephone: (215) 365-1169

Be especially nice to the bartender, Paul E. We grew up in close proximity in the lower NE. Obviously there's something bad in the water pipes up there.

Although the technical address of Ray's is 1200 E. Passyunk, the bar is located between 8th & 9th Sts. on Federal, on the same block as the tasty La Lupe Mexican restaurant.

This will be a normally formatted quiz, and we'll figure out prizes as we go. At the very least I can promise a couple of cool board games. I have no idea yet if this will be a weekly event; I now have the night open and we'll see what interest there is.

Worst shooting incident in US history? Hardly!

Much coverage of the unfortunate killings at Virginia Tech is using the phrase "worst shooting incident in U.S. history" or something similar (link to CNN.com, which is currently displaying the wholly inaccurate sentence "It is the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history.") This isn't true unless we do some major modification, and throw some of our less fortunate national incidents down the memory hole. What's the point of this post? Simply that if I can recall these incidents and link to them on a quiz blog, the people who make a living writing the news should be able to recall them as well.

We appear to have an accurate claim for "greatest one-day spree killing total by a lone American civilian on an American school campus." This isn't nearly as good a headline, and it avoids the multiple-hundred-year-long context of mass violence as a means of "solving" problems. Clearly and obviously there have been much worse shooting sprees in our history. Note that we also have to modify the phrase to include "American," seeing as at least one other sick individual did worse in Australia, and that the worst a civilian American did in one day to this point was in a mosque in Israel. Those are just off the top of my head.

If we look to American "shooting rampages" against civilians abroad, we can of course point to My Lai...

As the "search and destroy" mission unfolded, it soon degenerated into the massacre of over 300 apparently unarmed civilians including women, children, and the elderly. Calley ordered his men to enter the village firing, though there had been no report of opposing fire. According to eyewitness reports offered after the event, several old men were bayoneted, praying women and children were shot in the back of the head, and at least one girl was raped and then killed. For his part, Calley was said to have rounded up a group of the villagers, ordered them into a ditch, and mowed them down in a fury of machine gun fire.

This is, of course, just what we know about. There was also the American shooting rampage in the Philippines:

For its part, the U.S. Army was determined to crush further resistance in Samar by sending a veteran of the savage Plains Wars against the American Indians, General "Roaring Jake" Smith

Arriving on Samar, Smith, 66, tells his men: "I want no prisoners. I want you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn, the more it will please me."

Asked the age limit, the general replies: "Ten years and older. The interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness."

In the ensuing months, hundreds of villages are burned, all crops and livestock destroyed. Thousands of Filipinos are shot as suspected rebels. Other civilians are rounded up and put in "concentration camps" -- so called because they are "concentrated" into a small area making it easier to guard. ... Exact figures of how many Filipinos were killed in Samar were never made public. But it is estimated that 10,000 were killed or starved to death over a two-year period following the massacre, the majority women and children.

Other notable American rampages by those not in uniform would include the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which about 120 non-Mormon white settlers were killed by Mormons who blamed "Injuns," with about a third of them merely bashed with rocks instead of shot, which should please those not wild about the 2nd Amendment. We could note the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, in which it is claimed as many as 301 people were killed, mostly African-Americans shot by whites, although some non-gun lynching and burning occurred as well, and thousands of African-Americans were driven from their homes.

For domestic extermination of "subhuman" tribals we could point to the 1863 Bear River Massacre ... in fact, let's do just that:

Approximately 250 Shoshoni were slain, including 90 women and children. After the slaughter ended, some of the undisciplined soldiers went through the Indian village raping women and using axes to bash in the heads of women and children who were already dying of wounds.

It'd do us well to review the long record of mass killing sprees on both sides of the conflict; here's a list of some major Indian massacres, both against and by the Native population. Note that over 300 people were killed at Wounded Knee alone.

More recently we could review the 1992 L.A. riot, in which more than 50 people were killed. Could we forget that already? This sort of thing has happened frequently enough that there's a two-volume Encyclopedia of American Race Riots. Some of them had hundreds of deaths, such as the Wilmington (NC) riot of 1898.

Even limiting ourselves to individual killers, we must categorize this outburst with spree killers and not serial or mass killers, many of whom claimed far more victims as a cursory examination of the facts displays.

Finn McCool's unceremoniously pulls the plug

SCREW YOU GUYS, I'M GOING HOME...

... on less than 30 hours' notice. Thanks a lot, guys. Thanks for nothin'. Don't let me know before I send out an email, post things online or write the damn quiz. It's best to wait until the last minute, right? I mean, it's only my labor, right? There will be no quiz at Finn McCool's, neither this Tuesday nor evermore. The good news is that I'm already talking with a bar in South Philly (basically Bella Vista) about replacing FM's as soon as tomorrow night.

The bar never did a damn thing on their end to promote the quiz, I had to call and badger them even to get the event on their own sandwich chalkboard outside on the sidewalk. They never advertised having the quiz. I'd put a sign up in the day, they'd take it down by evening. I came to them with a proposal to get the Fergie's cast-aways, they pussyfooted around but ultimately did nothing. I'd come in with fliers for the regulars, they wouldn't give them out. The last few weeks I was also the sole prize provider, which obviously does nothing to draw a crowd. That leaves us with the "regulars," not that there are many there on a Tuesday, who approached the possibility of winning free booze via answering trivia questions the way a person might approach a free offer of alien anal probing. Not a bright group, really, but at least polite for the most part.

These guys couldn't even talk with me directly, they had the bartender give me a ring. Nice touch.

I'll let people know ASAP what the status of the Tuesday night quiz is via this site and email. Thanks for your continued patience.

FAQ

Welcome to the FAQ page. This was actually posted in November 2007, once I realized I'd not yet posted one, but I put an artificial date on here to prevent the post from appearing chronologically when that wasn't necessary.

I'm going to abandon the tradition of doing the Q&A format for all but one question, as there's really only one true frequently asked question I get to be perfectly honest. Everything else gets a declarative title.

How to get me to run a quiz at your party or bar

Just contact me using the info on the upper right-hand portion of this page; call or email. We can work out a very reasonable payment, or I'd consider doing your event pro bono or at cost if you have a darn good cause.

"Where do you get the questions?"

... is the only genuine FAQ. More commonly this is rendered Where'dya get the questions from? I have an extraordinary collection of a few hundred reference books, and most questions are drawn from those. A minority are things I check up upon on the internet, but as we all know that becomes dodgy and often takes more time than a book as I feel the need to double-verify almost everything. More often than not the reference book has things correct, what with editorial procedures and such. Even then books sometimes get things wrong. Even with two or more sources, they can all be flat out wrong or technically incorrect, although this is extremely rare. When in doubt I drop it and write another question.

Some sources I only trust for surface information and others for more detailed or technical information. I'd trust Wikipedia to tell me how old Ted Danson is, but I'll stick with with a college biology textbook for the biology (unfortunately high school texts are sometimes shady). Just about anything that raises your eyebrows in The Book of Lists series or The People's Almanac series needs verifying. Trivia question books that ask for the "only" someone or something to do or be something else are usually wrong or outdated. Anything statistical usually needs to come from a trusted source on the web (for currency) that also publishes stats on paper (for reliability). You get to know these things after a while; you can also read about my research-oriented day job life below.

Just about everything I ask has roots in a need I feel to include a certain amount of questions from a particular topic. I'll say to myself, "I need an easy TV question," or "I need a hard 6-point science question," and then I go find it. Rarely I read something cool in a magazine or see a particular movie on TV and figure that'd be good fodder for a game, but this doesn't happen often. Of course I have to "work backward" from Secret Theme rounds, and need to find questions with at the very least 12 correct answers for the Speed rounds. Sometimes I go after info on Speed round ideas only to find that there aren't even 10 items on the list and I drop it. Most of the time I generate a Subject round subject almost randomly, with no preconceived notion of what its questions will be. Some weeks of course they are holiday-related and that's just automatic.

I believe I've made outright errors in questions 3 or 4 times in thousands of opportunities, and most of those were in not accepting enough answers to questions which have multiple correct answers.

The main reason I don't do as many visual identification rounds is that usually those end up being poor photocopies of half-toned images in an already dark room. No fun at all. When I have done this, it was with sizable icons or when having unfettered use of someone else's photo-quality color printer.

How I became a quiz host

The simple answer is "from being a quiz player." I've been playing Philadelphia pub quizzes for 12 of the 14 or so years they've existed, with regularity for various periods of time in 6 different venues. I now run the quizzes in two of those, in one case because the old quizmaster got lazy and got fired, and in the other case because I resurrected the quiz in a venue that had one on and off for years but never had a firm commitment to a particular day, time or strong promotion effort.

I played the first quiz ever at Dirty Frank's in 2000, played there over 200 times over the next 6 years, and dropped out of playing when I no longer found it enjoyable. I was a natural replacement when they made the switch. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say I've played other people's games over 500 times. I've even played quizzes in California, Guatemala and Estonia; one gets to know what one likes.

My qualifications as a researcher and quizmaster, such as they are

The primary qualification, to be honest, is the pathological interest in trivia/facts and the will to do the prep work regularly. Most people could do this job, most people aren't driven enough by the material itself to do it well consistently. I also lack a fear of public speaking, which is half of the battle.

I'm a native Philadelphian and speaker of English who grew up here watching TV, following the local sports teams and so forth. I'm in my mid 30s, and attended Philadelphia public schools. Most of my audience is similar and therefore I can assume that the pop culture stuff I grew up with, much of which, especially on TV, was Baby Boomer hand-me-downs, is also what you were passively exposed to.

On the academic end, I attended a science magnet program in high school and ended up with a Poli Sci degree from Penn. I'm the kid who always tested well without having to work too hard, as facts stick in my head easily. I grew up with the self-generated notion that all adults knew much of the content of any given reference book, and set about reading all the ones I could from a very early age. My lower-middle class upbringing included sets of Time-Life and Reader's Digest reference volumes that lower-middle class people bought for Christmas and stuck on shelves in hopes that their progeny would therefore eventually drop the "lower-." Unlike most of those kids, I actually read them, with the absurd belief that I'd eventually appear stupid if I didn't know the flag of Panama, atomic number of oxygen and year Alaska joined the union. What's more, I enjoyed it.

It wasn't long into my formal education that it became apparent that I'd read more than I'd need to get into (and even through part of) college. In fact most of what I'd read never even came up. Not until I found the pub quizzes in my mid 20s did much of that darn work pay off.

I've held several jobs as a professional researcher. Setting aside the time spent autoclaving pipette tips in a botanical physiology lab, the first was as a fact-checker for Dr. Ed Herman's defunct magazine Lies of Our Times. I was hired a year out of college as the Research Manager for the now-defunct NGO the World Game Institute, the all-encompassing, "Dymaxion" mother of all generalist information clearinghouses. There I put together the world's largest database of economic, environmental, military, energy, food, industrial and other data which was used in Microsoft's CD-ROM atlas product and was later released as a WGI CD-ROM. I also annually updated and later conducted dozens of the Institute's global simulation games. These featured 200 people simulating humanity on a laminated world map the size of a basketball court. I ran probably about 80 of these, mostly throughout the US, but also in 5 or 6 other countries.

When WGI went under I worked as an educational video writer for Fabian-Baber Productions, writing video series about worldwide cultural differences, the Bill of Rights and contributing to a series on "History Through Literature." When they laid me off, twice (the second time they were furiously busy making duplicates of thousands of video tapes they didn't own the rights to!), I became research manager for MuseumNetwork.com (the site appears to be getting squatted upon by a weird hybrid of the actual site content and a spamming email address collector's drug ads), a for-profit spin-off of ICOM (still with us), heading a team of 40 putting together a database of information on about 40,000 cultural institutions. When they laid us all off, I became a trolley tour guide in Philadelphia, a job from which I was eventually fired after the seventh written complaint about my sense of humor. These thing happen. I spent one and a fraction seasons as a tour guide at Eastern State Penitentiary, where sense of humor was a better fit. ESP eventually replaced us all with near minimum wage earners handing out digital listening wands that didn't work well. Progress marches on.

I also worked on gathering social sciences links and content for BeyondBooks.com (now the property of some Christian homeschooling people), which sought to replace textbooks. You'll note textbooks are still with us, as is evolution. Shortly before they laid everyone off, which they did, I wised up, quit before I could get canned, and went to work as an English teacher in the Arabian Gulf. By sheer coincidence my contract there ran out September 12, 2001.

Sometimes I do research and writing work for the Center for Cultural Studies & Analysis, a Philadelphia based think tank/consulting firm which uses human culture and biology to help improve and sell products and services.

Somewhere in there I also worked as a pharmaceutical study translator (German and French to English), a dead boring job I left to do a stint as an election coordinator in Bosnia. In total I've visited almost 40 countries, few of them comfortable to poke around in, and can and will assault you with stories about the Sahara or the Andes or some monkey, llama or camel. Somewhere else in there I also badgered my friends into helping me collect over 3,000 signatures to attain ballot access for the 2004 US Congressional race as an independent, won a court battle with Pennsylvania over my right to be on the ballot, then got trounced at the polls.

In short, I've done a lot of different things, some of them well, and I think you need that sort of generalist to write some heap good trivia. I also own a practice guitar amp and a microphone.


How well I would do on my own quiz

Let's call this an infrequently asked question, as I have actually been asked it. Short answer: "Pretty well."

Long answer: I'd get a 10 every Easy round because it wouldn't be in there if I didn't already find it easy myself. I figure that, everyone having different interests than everyone else, a team comprised of a few reasonably intelligent people should get 7-10 of those right. Believe it or not that's the hardest round for me to write; what does "easy" mean in a room of 50 people? Obviously, at some level, anything is easy if you know it and hard if you don't. Perhaps the round should be called "Things I Think You Should Know."

I'd usually get a 9 or 10 in the 50/50 round because I likely wouldn't have chosen a category I know nothing about. The Speed round is usually something I have a hunch about, and sometimes is something I was just curious about and looked up, so I'd get 5-10 right depending on the week. The research on the answers to those always surprises me the most. The Subject round is dependent upon the subject in question. I try to stick one or two hard questions in there every week, and two creampuffs to balance that out and let people earn points. I'll say I'd get 7-8 right administering the quiz to an unprepared self, 9-10 if it's one of those subjects dear to my heart. Usually 2-4 of those questions are things I learned in writing the game.

I have no way of evaluating whether or not I'd figure out the Secret Themes. That's my mind at work in a non-linear fashion and I can't stick myself in someone else's. I do know that it's rare for no team to get that correct any night, and also more rare for all teams to get it correct, so I figure that I'm doing a decent job with the round based in that. The Unreasonably Difficult round? I'd probably average 4-6 correct if I played by myself. That's because it's a mixture of things I knew already, things I could give a decent educated guess for and things I just researched which I doubt are common knowledge to people without a deeper interest in subject area of the question. Usually 5-6 of those questions are things I learned in writing the game.

What's up with the hat

I live around the corner from a Mummers String Band HQ. They were going to toss a glittery top hat a few years ago and I asked to keep it, sensing it would someday become necessary. When I started doing quizzes I drew the question mark on it (blame Matthew Lesko and the Riddler) and the rest is history.

My favorite question

Thus far it's one from the Unreasonably Difficult round I asked recently. "What are the three huge words on the Wizard's hot air balloon in The Wizard of Oz?" I love that because we've all seen the movie many times, the words are massive, they're on screen for a few minutes so you won't miss it if you blink, yet no one even recalls them ever being there. I'm afraid you'll have to look that one up...

This week's most interesting questions

As a sample of what you might expect at one of the quizzes I host, here are a few questions from my final, 10-question Unreasonably Difficult Round at Dirty Frank's last week. Each question is worth 6 points, and this round comes last. Following that is the entirety of my Secret Theme Round, ten 5-point questions which are not directly connected, but with answers which form a non-linear theme which a team earns 8 extra points for figuring out. Good luck! Answers to all will be posted in a few days.

1) What Greek mathematician was the first to figure out that there are an infinite number of prime numbers?
2) For 2 points/@, what 3 American universities have dominated the NCAA wrestling championship since its inception over 40 years ago (few other schools have won championships)?
3) If you arranged the Periodic Table of the Elements alphabetically, which would be first?

There were seven other Qs of this calibre... moving on to the Secret Theme:

1) In the original (British) series The Office, what's the first name of Tim's love interest?
2) What famous Irishman was recently named a Knight of the British Empire?
3) What midwestern American city was named in honor of George Washington by way of a Roman emperor?
4) Who was convicted of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic bombings?
5) What planet in our solar system has the tallest mountain?
6) What 1965 Elvis Presley movie features the King having Arabian adventures?
7) Who was Josef Broz better known as?
8) What rotund Philadelphia Phillie outfielder was on the 1980 World Championship team?
9) What was Dr. Seuss' only vulpine book?
10) What variety of hat gets its name from a city in Morocco?

... and what's the theme that links all of these answers? Only one Frank's team managed to get the 8 bonus points last week!

Study hard for this week's upcoming quizzes

Another week, another two big quizzes here in the City That Never Stops Shooting. As usual I'm posting the weekly recitation of dates (stable), times (stable), locales (stable) and Subject Round subjects (wildly varied). Be sure to study up and bundle up, you'll be exposed to some cold, hard facts this harsh April.

Your mid-week evening social calendar looks like this:

Tuesday, April 17, 8:30pm
Ray's Happy Birthday Bar, 9th & Federal Sts.
Subject: INTERNET LINGO

Wednesday, April 18, 9pm
Dirty Frank's, 13th & Sansom Sts.
Subject: ONE-HIT WONDERS

It'd be great to see as many people as possible at one or both; there are two entirely different sets of questions. I'm planning on working with the staff at both bars to try and secure the normal quiz atmosphere one can expect at more established games in Center City. Thanks for your patience while the kinks are worked out.

There will be last place prizes for deserving teams (i.e. you must play the whole game and appear to me to be actually trying to do well) at both.

Now featured on MyQuizzo.com

Some positive news in an otherwise frustrating week quiz-wise for yours truly! I am now listed on MyQuizzo.com

Be sure to click on the link to add your ratings of my quizzes at both venues (go, do it now, the blog will still be here when you return!), and to check out a short bio of me which I assure you is accurate despite its apparent unlikely nature.

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Rest in peace, Mr. Vonnegut! I'm not a big fiction reader, but I have read most of his books. A World War II vet and decided secular humanist, Mr. Vonnegut belongs to a generation of peace-seeking public intellectuals who are now shouted down and disrespected by America's new ruling class of of chickenhawk pseudo-intellectual pseudo-patriots. We are diminished as a nation every time that someone of Vonnegut's stature dies and every day that someone like George W. Bush lives. "So it goes."

You should check out these posts of Vonnegut mp3s on the WFMU blog, or visit his official site.

Week in review

Group W edged out Moose & Squirrel at Frank's on Wednesday night in a low-scoring shoot-out, 143-141. I'm having the usual problem getting a photo of the winners, what with the rays of the visible spectrum wrapping around them, but so far as I know moose and squirrels are generally stymied by folks who look like the pair above. Moose & Squirrel is the Lil Roy Screamed a.k.a. Off the Wallers team, and I hope that one of these days they finally prevail. They play every week, they always contend and they're good sports & good customers.

I think the American Indian tribes Speed Round helped hold the scores down considerably. This marks the first week that no team changed the composition of the Top Ten All-Time Scores list. Also these scores were out of 211 instead of 212 because a weasel-faced alcoholic troll with a Napoleonic complex had to try to be a big man by screaming the answer to the first question of the Easy Round.

I gave out the first-ever last-place prize at Frank's this week. In order to be eligible you must play the whole game and appear to be genuinely trying to win. Before you get too excited, keep in mind that this week's prize was a VHS copy of Vanilla Ice's Ninja Rap. Unopened, mint condition. Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1991! Here's your winner/loser, I'd Pee in Her Butt:
The scores:

Champs: Group W 143
So-So Silver: Moose & Squirrel 141
Shameful, Shameful Bronze: Schuessels 124

Also-rans:

We Not Think About It 100
Jim South Philly 72
The Clap* 62
Big Baby Butt* 53
Alex, I'd Like to Buy a Vowel for $200 52
I'd Pee in Her Butt 46

* indicates team arrived late &/or quit

I'd love to see Big Baby Butt and The Clap again. Both teams were well-behaved, good natured and were scoring quite well until the general idiocy of a loud minority drove them away. Please come back! If there are enough of us who want to be there who stand our ground we can build a decent quiz.

Note that I'd Pee... satisfies Randolph's Law; sex-related name, last-place finish.

It was Sheila's b-day at Frank's, and a merry time was had by all in celebration. Happy birthday, and many more! When do you turn 28?


I'm working on better sound solutions at Frank's, as well as ejecting answer shouters and other jackasses. I don't know of any other host in Philadelphia who has to put up with the disruptions that we have to at Frank's, and I plan to end that crap one way or another. I haven't done a single quiz there yet in which I didn't have to trash one or more questions because of shouters. Decent, paying, tipping, well-behaved customers who bring their business into a bar shouldn't be chased out by a minority of idiots. You can all help things along by asking the people around you who aren't interested in playing to keep relatively quiet and by invoking some serious peer pressure if they do behave disruptively. Don't be shy about telling people to shut up, or lodging a complaint with your bartender or the bouncer. It's not a public space, it's a private one. People can and should be removed if not behaving like sane adults.

This past week we had Long Dick Johnson a.k.a. Switchblade Willie edge out Imballer by a score of - and I swear this isn't a typo - 46-33. This is the low-hanging fruit, folks. Show up and win. In theory this violates Randolph's Law, yet we had but two teams and both names are a touch risque, so I'm looking the other way on that one. Here members of both teams display their winnings from the Finn McCool's quiz:

Hope to see you all next week at one or both quizzes!

Send me your email addresses

Did I ask anyone to throw away my Frank's answers sheets tonight? No, no I did not. Did that happen? Yes. Why is this irritating beyond all reason? Because I made space on the answer sheet specifically for the collection of email addresses for the update list, and one lone person filled that out this evening. This was the only answer sheet I needed to take home tonight, and someone tossed it. In addition to never having learned to use indoor voices indoors as children, some Dirty Frank's patrons have also not learned anything about not screwing with other people's stuff. If you're that person who wanted updates, please contact me. I'm not ignoring you, I'm being stymied in my organization attempts by the aggressively dim.

If you want to be added to the mailing list or know someone who does, please send me email. We'll never be able to grow the quiz among the curious if I have no way of contacting people.

Answers to this week's toughest questions

1) What color are Mexico City's taxis..?
2) Lilongwe
3) Honshu, Kyushu, Hokkaido, Shikoku
4) Jack Bruce, the Manfred Mann bassist
5) 5A
6) Maputo
7) Yogi Berra (75)
8) Shang
9) South Africa
10) Phoenix, AZ

This week's hardest questions - a tall order!

I'm always as pleasantly surprised by what people get right in the most difficult rounds as I am amazed at what people don't know in the Easy Round. Sometimes the same team that doesn't know how many inches are in a foot will turn around and name the capital of some obscure nation 90 minutes later. When that happens I just scratch my prematurely balding head.

How well would you have done this past week? Here is a hybrid Unreasonably Difficult Round comprised of the toughest questions from both quizzes; I think between them only one went unanswered correctly. There wasn't a single question that no team nailed at Frank's this week, which tells me that it's not an impossible round, merely a highly improbable one. I'll post the answers in the coming week, or of course you can just look 'em up now...

1) What color are the VW bug taxis in Mexico City?
2) What is the capital of Malawi?
3) Name the 4 main islands of Japan.
4) Eric Clapton was Cream's guitarist and Ginger Baker played drums; who played bass?
5) On Seinfeld, what was Jerry's apartment number?
6) What is the capital of Mozambique?
7) What Hall of Fame baseball player played in more World Series games than any other?
8) What was the first Chinese dynasty (c. 1500 BC)?
9) What country produces more gold annually than any other?
10) In what American city did the sit-com Alice take place?

This week's upcoming quizzes

Peering into the future, we shall have two great quizzes this week. I'll be reprising the visual Theme Round that seemed to work so well at Frank's this past week with a new set of things to identify. I'll be giving you a sheet of 10 symbols of various sorts and about 8 minutes to figure them out. Otherwise we'll have the usual 5 other verbal rounds. All of the Finn McCool's questions will be verbal this week.

Tuesday, April 10th, 9pm
Finn McCool's, 12th & Sansom Sts.
Theme Round: INTERNET LINGO

Wednesday, April 11th, 9pm
Dirty Frank's, 13th & Pine Sts.
Theme Round: SYMBOLS

I'm serious about the 9pm start at Frank's this week too; it's about time to ween people off of the 10:30 thing. Hope to see you at one or both - there are two entirely different sets of questions!

Weekly sound-off

Taking a cue from other blogs where I've seen this work well, I'm providing this post as a place to stick any random comments, complaints, suggestions etc. which wouldn't fit elsewhere. Post away; I'll check in and respond if that makes sense. Or just send me email.

Sofa Kingdom conquers Frank's

In what could be regarded as interleague play, Johnny Goodtimes quizzo champs Sofa Kingdom (get it?! get it?!) handed all the usual Dirty Frank's contenders their heads this Wednesday, and notched the second-best effort in the history of this format. The team name is an old pun but I like my girlfriend's take on it better: a play off of Ottoman Empire. Here the lads are in all their glory:
It was a high-scoring affair and we had to overcome some audio troubles and three shouted answers by miscreants, but at the end of the day I believe this quiz is moving in the right direction. Stop, Drop & Roll finished in second by less than a single question with the second-highest non-winning score ever, and the frustration continues for Boris the Spider, who are perpetual contenders but have yet to win. Group W failed to place for the first time, and might even have to spend money on alcohol next week. Shocker!

Champs: Sofa Kingdom 164
So-So Silver: Stop Drop & Roll 158
Shameful, Shameful Bronze: Boris the Spider 157

Also-rans:

Group W 152
Cry Havoc 129
Too Dirty Teen Hunger Force 124
Honest Hard Work* 90
Benchwarmers* 78
Smart Ass Bastards* 64
Danger Danger* 57
Tom & Lance 55

* indicates team arrived late &/or quit

Hope to see you all next week at Frank's, Wednesday night at 9pm!

Soooo Meaty! is murder at Finn McCool's

The two-person entity known as Soooo Meaty! dominated at Finn McCool's this past Tuesday, knocking off Cosine of Four (-2) in an impressive fashion. They earned a fabulous trivia board game, the respect of their peers and even a place on the QuizMaster All-Time Ten Highest Scores list. Well done! I snapped this candid shot of the duo at Finn McCool's, and I'll be darned if they don't look like other people I've seen elsewhere... can't quite put my finger on it... similar problem to taking a photo of Group W at Frank's. Huh.

The scores follow.

Champs: Soooo Meaty! 158
So-So Silver: Cosine of 4 (-2) 141
Shameful, Shameful Bronze: Bam 95

Also-rans:

Are We There Yet? 80
Only the Lonely* 14

* indicates team arrived late &/or quit



Cosine of 4(-2), at right, put in another great second-place effort, but continue to be stymied in their attempt at a victory. They are seen here holding their fabulous bonus prize of not one but two decks of Coca-Cola themed playing cards. If they play a nice three-handed round of skat one of them will eventually win...

Bam is pictured below, holding an attractive assortment of Coca-Cola themed refrigerator magnets as a lagniappe for their third-place finish. Enjoy! Hope to see all these fine folks and you again next Tuesday at Finn McCool's, 9pm!

Two big quizzes again this week!

Win big! Be sure to drop by and play these fabulous, free quizzes with good times, good booze and hard questions:



Finn McCool's Pub Quiz

Tuesday nights at 9pm
12th & Sansom Sts., Philadelphia
This week's Subject Round: KIDDIE TV

Dirty Frank's Pub Quiz

Wednesday nights at 9pm
13th & Pine Sts., Philadelphia
This week's Subject Round: LANGUAGES

Be there or be equilaterally rectangular!

The answers to this week's tough questions

Obviously you'll want to skip down to the next post if you haven't seen the questions yet... I'll give you some space here...





Secret Theme, 5 points/question plus 8 for figuring out the logical thread that runs through the answers:

1) Good Morning Vietnam
2) Kites
3) Reprise Records
4) Peppers
5) Educating Rita
6) Sgt.
7) Hearts
8) 64
9) Diamond
10) "Ringo"

BONUS: What's the theme of these answers? Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; "The Beatles" wasn't specific enough, sorry.

Unreasonably Difficult Round, 6 points each correct answer:

1) Be put to death in the electric chair
2) "In the Year 2525" - Zager & Evans
3) Ouagadougou
4) 5
5) Brandenburg Gate (Brandenburger Tor)
6) Icelandic
7) Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
8) Untouchables
9) The Beatles' moptop haircuts - a protest against "the bourgeois horrors of Hamburg!"
10) Lithium