Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Happy Thanksgiving Recovery Day! Actually, I just made up that holiday. Friday I was biking with my son Truman to downtown Davis when I was passed by Davis bearded inventor Peter Wagner, creator of those delightful Whymcycle vehicles that one sees on Picnic Day and sometimes at Central Park on Saturday mornings. Riding a two-story bike that would be jaw-dropping in any other city, Peter yelled out to us “Happy Digestion Day!” He also honked what looked like a homemade horn made of a funnel and a long tube. The man invents holidays and delightful toys – maybe he’s our Kris Kringle.
Peter wasn’t the only stranger who yelled something at me over the break. While I tried to do as little shopping as possible, last Wednesday I did a small bit of grocery shopping at a time when a number of anxious shoppers were picking up last-minute items. Hank, the guy who barely seemed old enough to ring our groceries at Safeway, seemed surprised that I did indeed want a bag for my single box of cereal. No doubt he knows how people in Davis feel about plastic grocery bags. I told Hank that my boy Jukie and I were heading to Rite Aid pharmacy next, and we didn’t want to be accused of shoplifting our Grape Nuts. He smiled.
Ten minutes later, we walked past Hank as he was maneuvering an electric wheelchair shopping cart back towards the store. “Hey Hank,” I yelled, “do you need a push?” “No, I got it,” he said. Then, after a pause, he shouted, “Hey Jukie, did you pay for those Grape Nuts?”
I appreciate people like Hank just as I appreciate Pub Quiz participants like Chuck, Jason, and Denise who actually interact with my bombastic welcoming message on Pub Quiz night, choosing to answer, loudly, my rhetorical questions. If you value our Davis community, as I do, consider in what humorous and positive ways you might interact with your fellow citizens.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature five questions about films that came up in conversation over Thanksgiving (at least in my house). Expect also questions about office supplies, famous websites, sequels, North Korea, Walt Disney and other rich people, soup, sex education, jerks, boxing, baseball teams, silvery metals, Superman, stupefaction, villains, morning television, Academy Award nominees, young women, basketball, famous agreements, tourist attractions, news headlines, Thanksgiving aftermath (new category), and Hamlet, the play by Shakespeare.
You might re-read Hamlet before 7 PM, when the chime will ring to begin the Thanksgiving recovery edition of the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz!
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
- Great Americans. Fill in the Blank. John F. Kennedy was the only U.S. president whose BLANK outlived him.
- Unusual Words. Q, the initial of the man who provides James Bond with those delightful gadgets, stands for what four-syllable word?
- Davis Driving. Is the distance between this pub and the Sacramento International Airport closest to 10, 20, 30, or 40 miles?
- Pop Culture – 50 Year-Old Television Programs. What British TV drama this year won an Institutional Peabody “for evolving with technology and the times like nothing else in the known television universe”?
- Another Music Question. In 2010, what rapper had his only #1 hit with “Black and Yellow”? I hope you appreciate the precise wording of this question.
This coming Thursday, The Poetry Night Reading Series will be featuring a performance by Columbia College Professor David Lazar. Please join us Thursday night at 8 at the John Natsoulas Gallery (521 1st Street).
According to his website, “David Lazar’s books include Essaying the Essay (Welcome Table Press), The Body of Brooklyn and Truth in Nonfiction (both Iowa), Powder Town (Pecan Grove); Michael Powell: Interviews and Conversations with M.F.K. Fisher (both Mississippi). Forthcoming is Occasional Desire: Personal Essays, from the University of Nebraska Press. His essays and prose poems have appeared widely in anthologies such as Bending Genre, Understanding the Essay, Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction, An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Sentence), and Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America, and magazines such as Gulf Coast, Black Clock, Sentence, Denver Quarterly, Best of the Prose Poem, Southwest Review. Five of his essays have been “Notable Essays of the Year” according to Best American Essays. He created the undergraduate and Ph.D. programs in Nonfiction writing at Ohio University, and directed the creation of the undergraduate and M.F.A. programs in Nonfiction Writing at Columbia College Chicago. He is the founding editor of the literary magazine Hotel Amerika, now in its thirteenth year, which has featured groundbreaking issues in transgeneric writing and the aphorism.”