Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Looking across the crowd braving the thick and smoky air at yesterday’s Veterans Day ceremony at the Davis Cemetery and Arboretum, I remarked to myself that we haven’t many World War II veterans left, the numbers having dwindled even since I first started performing poems at such ceremonies about five years ago. These heroes who fought the Nazis of yesteryear inevitably remind me of my late Uncle Chuck, perhaps one of the youngest World War II-era vets who did not lie about his age to enlist early. Chuck was a boxer and a sailor back then, and later a gentle photographer and the father to three of my favorite cousins.
We lost another even more notable World War II veteran today in Stan Lee, who has just passed away at age 95. Lee created innumerable characters that we know from the movies, even if we never picked up a comic book, as I did often in the 1970s and 1980s. Lee enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942, serving first in the Signal Corps, and then later as a U.S. Army playwright. If my dad had known such a designation was available to him, he might have joined the army during the Korean War, even though he was a Quaker.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Lee created and co-created many featured characters who have been breaking box office records in the last decade, including the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, the X-Men, Daredevil, Dr. Strange, Black Panther, and Spider-Man. Has any other American created so many iconic heroes? Considering especially the panoply of flawed heroes he invented for our amusement, I might even argue that Stan Lee was the Shakespeare of American popular culture, even if Lee was somewhat less ambitious with his language.
Luckily, Lee was a productive creator for decades, having been thanked in 2006 for his 65 years of work for the same company. That will trump even my eventual number of years teaching at UC Davis! Stan Lee’s 2015 memoir was titled Amazing, Fantastic, Incredible. I couldn’t agree more. Thanks to Stan Lee and to all American veterans who have contributed so significantly and inspiringly to American life and culture. They deserve our deep and foul-weather respect and thanks, without regard to the threats provided by winds, smoke, or rain.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will be spiced with international flavor, in recognition of International Education Week at UC Davis. Don’t be daunted, though, for there will still be plenty of questions about films and musicians with whom you are certainly familiar. In addition to topics raise above, expect also questions about captains, anagrams with all the instances of the letter N removed, law school nightmares, esteemed swashbucklers, new holidays, spread slogans, shamanism, doomed relationships, congresses, delightful narratives, spicy food, German expressionism, balloons, piano accomplishments, doctors who also act, people from New York, long rivers, national drinks, kabuki, French ale societies, music genres, unusual reflections, spiritual leaders, adventuring imperatives, liaisons, the summer Olympics, people named Marion, non-royalty, dumplings, and Shakespeare.
Please join us tonight, and join me in raising a toast, high, to Stan Lee. Excelsior!
Your Quizmaster
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Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
- Books & Authors. On which of his birthdays did Harry Potter discover his magical heritage?
- Sports. What NFC North team plays its home games at U.S. Bank Stadium?
- Shakespeare. In Henry IV, Part II, who says “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”?
P.S. The performance poet Brandon Leake performs in Davis this coming Thursday night at 8 at the Natsoulas Gallery! You should join us.
P.P.S. “Nevermore shall men make slaves of others! Not in Asgard–not on Earth–not any place where the hammer of Thor can be swung–or where men of good faith hold freedom dear!” Stan Lee