Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Happy Inauguration Day! Happy Martin Luther King Day! I wrote the entire Pub Quiz while watching this morning’s inauguration ceremonies, and that may have affected my question topics, as I hope you will see this evening.
It’s interesting watching such an event in the social media era, if only to enjoy the admiring and snarky remarks of all my friends on Twitter and Facebook. Some people were quoting favorite lines from President Obama’s speech, while others were quoting fifty year-old speeches by Reverend King. Some were comparing Beyoncé to Aretha, while others were remarking that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor hates poetry. My seven year-old had one of the best lines of the day: "Hey! Inauguration Day ended up on Martin Luther King Day! Wow – that's a really big day!"
A number of my friends attended the event in Washington DC, but not as many as last time, when my Mom had a great vantage point for the 2009 speech. I received a picture and note from two former Pub Quiz regulars, Kevin and Natalie, as they were all bundled up on the Mall, waiting for the action to happen. This year my Mom decided to watch the presidential inauguration on TV, like the rest of America. She enjoyed the inaugural poem by Richard Blanco, which you can find reprinted (without line endings) in the Los Angeles Times. I heard echoes of Walt Whitman and Robert Pinsky in the poem. Howabout you?
Tonight’s quiz will touch on today’s events and on related people, concepts and associations, including discussions of cars, governors, snakes, people born in Sacramento, Irish percentages, given first names, rotten eggs, comedies, the Guinness Book of World Records, notes to one’s self, really old buildings, people dressed so fancily, donkeys, New York, presidents of the US, basketball, megahits, salutes, big cities, fluid dynamics, medical terms, great Americans, chefs, people with Italian names, greatest American movies, powerful African-American women, Harry Potter, guns, and Shakespeare.
We had an absolutely full house last week, and I expect the same this evening, so please allow extra time for your team to claim a table and get settled. In my experience, every full team that arrives by 6 PM gets to play. See you tonight!
Your Quizmaster
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
- Hang Gliding Records. It took 11 hours for two men to beat the hang gliding distance record. The y glided from Zapata, Texas to the Texas panhandle, the equivalent of flying from Times Square to the outskirts of Detroit — or from Paris to Dublin. With a margin of error of 100 miles, how many miles did they glide?
- Expense Accounts. According to the New York Daily News, McDonalds, Subway, Panera Bread and Burger King were the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th most expensed eateries in the US last year. What was number one?
- Pop Culture – Music. What first great American songwriter wrote “O Susannah” and “My Old Kentucky Home”
- Sports. What single baseball player holds the career records for most stolen bases and the most runs scored?
- Science – Recognizable Dinosaurs. A distinctive double row of kite-shaped plates rose vertically along the rounded back of what kind of herbivore dinosaur?
P.S. Members of the UC Davis Office of Environmental Stewardship & Sustainability will be joining us at the Pub Quiz next week, and providing swag. In appreciation of their efforts, some of the questions next week will focus on Sustainability!