Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
I wonder if a city such as Las Vegas will seem strange and irresponsible a decade, a half century, or a millennium from now, assuming there are still people in 3018 to take note of our obsessions and foibles. The 8,000 megawatts that Las Vegas uses daily, 20% of which comes from the city’s 40 large casinos, would power the entire state of Idaho. Do visitors consider such concerns when engaging with all those slot machine pixels, when strolling beneath blinding Strip lights, or when bundling up amid all that air conditioning?
Will we all someday live like this, separated from an environment that we have made unlivable, as foreseen by the dystopian science fiction worksThe Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritchby Philip K. Dick or Pixar’s WALL-E? Is it too late to make better choices? Perhaps in this coming century we will better understand and employ solar technology, so that Nevada and the rest of our desserts can bake solar panels, rather than our diminishing ice caps, and all our planet’s residents.
We can all make less wasteful choices. For example, this past weekend my family and I visited Stinson Beach, a place to commune with our nearby ocean. Despite the intense car traffic leading up to this fog-protected census-designated place with a population less than 1% that of Davis, and the illuminated road signs reminding tourists that one needs reservations to park at Muir Woods, a visit to Stinson Beach allows one to step away from the glowing “future” of Las Vegas, or even our busy present of our lives in Northern California, and instead spend some time in a never-changing past.
We know from the miracle of radiocarbon dating that a typical drop of water deep in the Pacific Ocean is about 1,000 years old, though the oceans themselves formed more than four billion years ago (I’m glad I’m not responsible for explaining the relationship between those two facts). The entertainments that awaited my family and me at Stinson Beach Saturday—the endless surf, the diggable sand, the pelagic birds (and no oil rigs)—are the same that have existed for each of those thousand or the past million years. Although these evergreen qualities of the beach were complemented by a sampling of my Kindle library and by my wife Kate’s amazing iPhone photography, the essence of our trip was timeless, or even outside of time.
Thoroughly sunscreened, Kate and I gripped the sand with naked feet and laughed at the seaside escapades of our children as the stress of the week or of the year faded from our shoulders. I was reminded of something Marcus Aurelius said: “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” Californians have access to delightful locales where we might step away from the consumption of megawatts and instead just breathe, just think, or even just attempt the cessation of thinking. Such delights are free, and freeing. If you can make such an investment in your peace of mind, consider an extended stint walking along a beach, hiking Sierra paths, or gazing up old-growth redwood trees. In these places you may find the essence of summer.
In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions about kites, plot and plots, cute animals, sequels, Portugal, competition for Harry Potter, boxing, big questions, reimbursements, decarbonization, 17 seasons, rich rungs, tragic novelistic choices, the interests of billions, one-word names, the reduction of pathogens, imagination, famous daughters of famous fathers, the view from space, popular films, islands, geometry, fast “food,” dead rituals, Victorian releases, Oscar-nominated films, our many days of summer, people named Ellen, the Buddha, prisons for parents, the lessons offered by pain, people whose names start with M, and Shakespeare. When I asked the Buddha question to Truman, he answered it correctly and instantly, so I made it harder. Thanks for the QAQC testing, Truman!
Happy birthday to my brother Oliver, college professor and movie reviewer for the New York Observer.Click his reviews to see some fine and principled writing.
I hope to see you at de Vere’s Davis this evening at 7. If you bring a full team, I can all but guarantee that you will score in double digits. Jake will be there.
Your Quizmaster
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Here are three questions from a Pub Quiz from July, 2008:
- American History. Who was the first American to orbit the earth?
- Books and Authors. What is the last word of the title of this 1726 novel? Travels into several remote nations of the world, in Four Parts, by Lemuel [BLANK].Fill in the blank.
- Pop Culture – Music(Karaoke Question). What Rolling Stones song begins with the line “I was born in a cross-fire hurricane”?
P.S. More oceanic inspiration: “We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.” John F. Kennedy