Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Biking past Voorhies Hall on my way to my office on the west side of the UC Davis campus, I just ran into two faculty friends of mine. One of them regretted spending so much time in high school lifting weights and wrestling, and not using better strategies to talk to women. The other one said that there’s a psychological phenomenon by which we always prefer the current era / week / moment over moments in the past, and that he suffers from this unnamed phenomenon. He also said that he resents his future self for downplaying the moment that he finds himself in right now, when he gets to encounter his faculty friends and colleagues on the streets of Davis, and engage them in witty banter about high school and our conceptions of time. Once I went all the way to London to watch a production of The Glass Menagerie. In that play, one of Tennessee Williams’s characters says, “Time is the longest distance between two places.”
Meanwhile, this morning both the instructional designers who report to me have added me as connections on LinkedIn. I love my team of professionals, so I really hope they are not refreshing their resumes because they are considering other job offers. In one of the three books I am reading right now, The Road to Character by conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, a distinction is made between our resume qualities and our eulogy qualities, and that, as Americans, we often emphasize the first over the second. Where do you invest your efforts, or spend your time? I think of Zig Ziglar: “There are no traffic jams on the extra mile.”
You know whose character totally impresses me? That of Katie Peterson. She’s an English Professor and, as of this year, a Chancellor’s Fellow, at UC Davis who ran an amazing workshop at the Sacramento Poetry Center’s yearly spring conference. Now the Director of the new MFA Program in Creative Writing at UC Davis, Peterson has always impressed me as a person and as a conversationalist, but now I see why our mutual students rave about her so. In the classroom, Professor Peterson is generous, witty, and notably insightful, especially when mapping out possible moments of discovery and wisdom with a varied audience of 30 workshop attendees. What’s more, I learned a lot about poetry, beginnings and endings, and narrative from Katie. If you attend another of her public forums, you will probably see me in the audience.
I couldn’t decide which of those three topics to make the subject of this week’s newsletter, so, instead, I offer you a sample of all three. You can just imagine where I would have gone with each had I left myself the time to do so.
In addition to topics possibly raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions about the following: what we know about America, farmland settings, women named Susanna, Irish-born paramours, Spanish words, Whoopi Goldberg roles, resonating soaks, cosmetics, platforms, Florida announcements, lifetime assists and such, home runs, cold openings, matrimony, National Poetry Month, WWI, delightful cavities, basketball, a connection to France, personal chauffeurs, DVD boxes with no human actors on them, maps, progress, lean toads in California, old cities, alphabetized lists, Canada, notable votes, Kentucky great-grandfathers (my kids have one), Kaisers, loud noises, nicknames, food and drink, apparel, and Shakespeare.
The spring KDVS fundraiser is coming up next week. If you plan to give, please time it for my 5 PM radio show on April 17th. I shall be trying to raise $1,000 in tax-deductible gifts during that hour, and I could use your help. You could tell your calendar to remind you to call 530 754-KDVS at that time, and then listen in as we reach our goal!
Meanwhile, see you tonight. We start at 7, but you and your team should arrive early to secure a table.
Your Quizmaster
https://www.yourquizmaster.com
http://www.facebook.com/yourquizmaster
yourquizmaster@gmail.com
Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
- Countries of the World. Hun Sen, the longest serving non-royal leader in Southeast Asia, has ruled what country since 1985?
- Science: Ornithology. Later eggs in a clutch are more spotted than early ones as the female bird’s store of WHAT is depleted?
- Books and Authors. An American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 was famous for her sonnets and her feminism, as well as for her short poem “First Fig”:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
Name the poet.
P.S. “Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love!” Sitting Bull