Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
One of my favorite passages from Jane Austen’s Persuasion is a single conflicted sentence from a love-letter written by Captain Frederick Wentworth: “I am half agony, half hope.” Persuasion was the last novel that Austen completed before her death, and it is considered by critics to reflect a more mature style, and a more mature heroine in Anne Elliot, than we found in her earlier books. Therefore, we find more room in Persuasion for paradox, contradiction, and radical ambivalence, exemplified by this phrase “half agony, half hope.”
Friday in Davis was blustery, even stormy. I came across standing water and downed trees on the bike path during my ride to work that morning, but almost no other bicyclists or dog-walkers. Was Davis deserted? Back in my hometown of Washington DC, people must have felt the same way, with fewer Metro riders than on a typical weekday. In both cities, as the clouds in the sky and in our moods darkened, people were choosing to stay away.
Saturday was different. At least in Sacramento, the sun came out, and so did more than 20,000 marchers, eager to read each other’s smiling and determined faces, our warm but outrageous outfits (with evidence of pink knitting and crocheting projects everywhere), and especially our signs. The wit! The candor! The puns! The insults! The outrage! The resolve! Some of the more flavorful signs signs included artwork, caricatures, double-entendres, and the faces of heroes such as Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Eleanor Roosevelt. My favorite read simply “YOU THOUGHT I WAS NASTY BEFORE? WELL BUCKLE UP, BUTTERCUP!”
While I was despondent on Friday, after Saturday, I felt like Captain Wentworth: half agony, half hope. After Saturday, the country I know and love looked more familiar to me, if only for the rampant kindness and politeness I saw on display on the Sacramento streets. One woman offered my wife her husband’s cloth handkerchief when she saw Kate struggling with our son Jukie’s runny nose. And a few dozen smiling people apologized and said “excuse me” for bumping into me at the march and, later, at the rally. Word on the street is that there were no arrests at any of the major rallies. Reading this, someone on Twitter said, “Well, yeah. Because women.” The cops must have loved the peaceful vibe despite the massive size of the crowds. An Atlanta TV station has been replaying footage of police officers giving high fives by the hundreds to protesters as they file by, everyone cheerful with their hands raised. Imagine by how much accident rates and crime rates would fall if 100,000 women would march through every big city every day of the week. The bonhomie was contagious, and lightened my mood from the day before.
And then yesterday we learned that a woman with an ice pick visited the Islamic Center of Davis to break windows and doors, slash tires of the bikes parked out front, and, most reprehensibly, leave bacon on the door handles of the center. Somehow I bet the perpetrator of these hate crimes did not participate in the peaceful and inclusive Women’s March the day before.
As I write this, the LaunchGood fundraising project website seeking to restore the Islamic Center has already surpassed its goal, meaning that Davis citizens and others have stepped forward to donate the funds necessary to repair the damage. I hope that further acts of goodwill and mutual understanding will result from this awful and ignorant act, just as I hope that malicious and threatening comments made by our new president have helped to spawn a new civil rights movement. Although citizens in our divided nation may feel a mix of agony and hope as we consider the Trump era, those who marched Saturday and who have been organizing since also know that anyone who would seek to trample the rights of the excluded and under-represented had better just buckle up. This is just the start.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on one or more of the issues raised above, as well as the following topics: Astronomy, western Massachusetts, interactions with the press, wins and losses, civil wars, DVDs, new doctors, biogeographies, motorcycles, polyglots who never learned Braille, civil rights, coastal cities with archbishops, famous conferences, undergraduate haunts, mealy justices in Los Angeles, hot Jamaican exports, Susan Lucci firsts, living biographies, angry words, the deep south, aviators with unexpected friends, historical dating, winning formations, women named Ingrid, Academy Awards, heroic librarians, inhabitants of Ireland, a Constitution worth defending, a ticking biological clock, numbers of titles, prominent artists, sounding better, and Shakespeare.
Two of the most prominent authors in Davis have books coming out soon. Pub Quiz irregular John Lescroart’s FATAL will be released tomorrow, January 24th – I’m really excited about this book, for it introduces a new female protagonist that will stir up further interest in Lescroart. Meanwhile, Kim Stanley Robinson’s new book, New York 2140, will be released in March. Let’s see if we can woo Stan to the Pub Quiz before he begins his book tour.
You should also consider yourself wooed. See you tonight at the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz!
Your Quizmaster
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Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
- Mottos and Slogans. The Motto of Raley’s Supermarkets is “to infuse life with health and happiness and to make shopping easier, better and more personal.” What Yolo County city is the home to the headquarters of Raley’s Supermarkets?
- Internet Culture. What did CNET recently call “our favorite phone, bar none”? Was it the Apple iPhone 7, the Blackberry Passport, the Google Pixel, or the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge?
- Newspaper Headlines. The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus is shutting down after many years of performances. Which of the following is closest to the length of the run of America’s most famous circus? 50, 100, 150, or 200 years?
P.S. Speaking of ups and downs, let’s remember what James Joyce said in a letter to a friend when the great Irish novelist himself was struggling with difficult challenges: “All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light.”