Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
In a classic first-season episode of The Twilight Zone, Burgess Meredith plays Henry Bemis, an avid reader who finally finds enough time to catch up on his reading. The ending of the 1959 episode, titled “Time Enough at Last,” depends upon a happenstance that easily-slighted Donald Trump would call “unfair.”
Trump is not known for his love of reading. Mark Twain is alleged to have said, “The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them. While anti-intellectualism is regrettable, if only for the resulting lack of imagination, curiosity, and empathy, I suppose such philistinism should not be surprising, given the variety of distractions presented to us by the media and the world’s agents of consumerism. At times, our very world seems to isolate us from the written word. In the aforementioned Twilight Zone episode, this attitude is embodied by the wife of Henry Bemis, who unaccountably refused to let him read, even going so far as to crossing out all the lines in a favorite book of contemporary poetry.
While Bemis originally faced a paucity of reading opportunities, today we face is the abundance of choices. Over a million books are published every year in this country, or about one book for every 300 people. That’s a lot to keep up with, and a lot to choose from. I’ve read more than 20 books since the summer started, but I’ve only just dipped my toe into the water. Despite my railing against consumerism, I too feel the itch to purchase the new book, rather than to turn to one of the dozens of titles waiting weightlessly in my Kindle or Audible library. Once they were the new books, but then they got passed over for another title.
I sense that same surfeit of choices when I am deciding what music to listen to. Once I depended only on the radio for my music, and continue to be grateful for stations like KDVS that take the curation responsibility seriously. Then I delved into Pandora, letting algorithms choose my songs according to what I had previously enjoyed. Now we are Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers, and the choices are again too numerous: almost anything I can imagine is found in that jukebox. All the cool kids once listened to Lou Reed and The Cure; while I did not buy their albums when I was collecting vinyl or cassettes, I can access almost anything of theirs now, and am catching up. As I write this, I am enjoying Far From Over by the Vijay Iyer Sextet, voted the best jazz album of 2017. Because, why not?
On this Labor Day, I am grateful for the labor of all these authors and musicians, and for the innumerable choices available to me, more than were found in the decimated public library of Henry Bemis. With so many options available to all of us, I am also grateful every time I see you enter our Irish Pub on a Monday night, for it means that you’ve chosen your friends and my barked puzzles over even the most enticing book, music stream, or TV show. Emerson said that “It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.” At Pub Quiz, where every point must be earned, your friends will also forgive you for being too smart.
If we choose to read books, each of us carries our own library. I hope that today you can pick up a good book and pick up a friend on your way to the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz!
Tonight’s Quiz will feature questions on dramas that take place in closets, college football, the world wide web, plane travel, impatience, Shrek, baseball, agencies full of agents, shadows and lights, necessities for a clean house, space exploration, telephone redundancy, the example of snow, status indicators, exciting weather phenomena, poetic murals, nervousness, Canadian origins, turnovers, visiting pagans, nuclear families, hard domes, acronyms, Ogre songs, equiny music, Olivias, Buddha jokes, three six-letter words with the same meaning, secretaries, pretty good averages, categories, Barack Obama, social media, middle grounds, aforementioned places, and Shakespeare.
Happy 26th wedding anniversary to my wife Kate! Once Labor Day belonged only to us.
See you tonight!
Your Quizmaster
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Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
- NASA. The NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson turned 100 years old recently. What movie made her famous?
- Books and Authors. Nominee of 17 Tonys, what playwright of Barefoot in the Park became the only living playwright to have a New York theatre named in his honor (in 1983)?
- Sports. The teams with the current best and worst record in baseball are both found in the American League East, Central, or West?
P.S. “The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.” Pablo Neruda