The Last-Minute Geckos Edition of the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz Newsletter

 

Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,

 

Sometimes when the temperature tops 100 degrees and I’m late in writing the Pub Quiz newsletter because of my morning-long trip with my son Jukie to the MIND Institute – the yearly review of his health, his demeanor, his medications – I just paste into the template a gecko poem, a love song to summer, such as this one:

 

Gecko at Noon

 

When it is hot –

when the ground sparks like the thought of lightning

and the air is so thin that the birds just wait it out –

that’s when I emerge

 

Hot hot hot hot hot

 

I sample the stunned insects –

big black beetles that scramble in my mouth –

green katydids that jumped too late –

the complacent moth

 

My neck twists like a rope –

my eyes are little suns

driven by absence, by lack, by

 

The sun, it is crushing, crushing

 

We are small and becoming smaller,

bug-eyed in the bush –

we are like mercury underfoot –

just as toxic.

 

Once it was cancer, the slow crab at the end –

Now we are becoming hormonal misfits –

each generation afraid of the next –

We dare not look into their faces

 

The land is like the original bush,

still burning after three thousand years –

still giving orders –

still blanching the locals

 

They are stuck in the book,

but they ache for a cycle

 

 

Tonight’s Pub Quiz might be the last for many UC Davis graduates. I heard that the youthful and enthusiastic team Roy Rogers, for instance, might be joining us for the last time this evening. We will miss them and the others whom shall never again enjoy a June day in Davis. Be well, succeed for all of us, stay subscribed to this newsletter, and send to the pub the friends who now must step up to replace you.

 

Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on the following: clubs that welcome everyone, detectives, aeronautics, Disney, Alpine climates, The Oxford Companion to Food, headlines, army pairs, villainous bosses, everyday electricity and chemistry, love songs, coinages, 2013 Gallup polls, children in peril, the Human Rights Campaign, lewd ogres with scalpels, people who are crazy for each other, castles, chartered planes, birds’ nests, agricultural bounty, Purdue University, drowsiness, banned words, Oscar winners, people named Mary, European exports, berries, bonus anagrams, floating syllables, Razzies, and Shakespeare.

 

Our next Poetry Night takes place on June 20^th and will feature Sacramento Poet Laureate Indigo Moor. Mark your calendar now so that there’ll be no chance that you inadvertently miss it.

 

See you tonight!

 

Your Quizmaster

 

P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:

 

1. Know Your Wars. What was the name of the military conflict that was fought from October 1853 to February 1856 in which the Russian Empire lost to an alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, Britain and Sardinia?  
2. Martial Arts. Starting with the letter K, what word or phrase refers to Chinese martial arts?
3. Pop Culture – Music. Who joins Ed Sheeran on the new hit “I Don’t Care”?

 

 

P.S. Richard Nixon  said that “The Cold War isn’t thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat. Communism isn’t sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting.” If not communism, what is burning you with a deadly heat?