A few days late due to technical issues (my home computer in the the hospital with third-degree overuse), last week's trivia recap is finally up and in full effect.
We asked a question about banksy this week. Here's a wonderful piece from Channel 4 news showing him outting up the pieces on the Palestinian/Israeli dividing wall:
This Saturday, the good people at Unique New York are hosting The Panorama Challenge,
an evening of New York-themed visual trivia to benefit the City
Reliquary, a museum in Williamsburg dedicated to memorabilia and
artifacts of everyday city life through history. It's really a cool
place, and now that they have an actual space to display things, it's
time for them to start ramping up their notices.
Our museum collection displays thoughtfully arranged artifacts of New York City’s rich history, which entice viewers to learn more about the five boroughs. Some of the highlights of the collection include architectural remnants of city buildings, Statue of Liberty memorabilia, a geological display of New York’s underground composition, and a 1939 World’s Fair exhibit...
A central part of our mission is to plan and host public events, which provide neighbors and visitors with a place to meet, exchange ideas, and celebrate the diversity of our community. Some of our annual events include Bicycle Fetish Day, Collector’s Night, and The September Tribute to Our City. We maintain a commitment to neighborhood beautification and restoration at and around the City Reliquary Museum as a way to provide a pleasant and safe place for people to gather, relax, disseminate information, and enjoy the camaraderie provided by a city of over eight million people.
It's $25 for tickets but that includes two free drinks (Brooklyn Brewery is also a sponsor), and hey, it's a Saturday Night. You were going to shell out that much for a good time anyway.
Details and ticket information at the Reliquary's website, or you can call them at 718-R U CIVIC.
Edit: [gracias, vidiot]
By the way, just because I don't always repost the recaps from the trivia night doesn't mean I don't still post them at the DSO site. Because I do, and I am, and here's the latest one.
]]>Well, again, if you weren't there, you really missed something.
It was large group night, with two excellent and boisterous groups dominating the action and the scoresheet. That might have been because you would have needed to build a critical mass of people to want to brave the snowstorm, never mind that there was definitely a Fuck Valentine's Day vibe to the evening; even the people who were encoupleded really weren't interested in the corporate ooeygooeyness of the alleged "holiday."
We gave away more prizes per capita than ever before as well. I got down early, and went to the Jas Mart on St. Mark's and went a little apeshit with the Japanese snacks. If it had chocolate on or in it and was shaped like a bear, I picked up a couple of boxes. Chocolate because, hey, who doesn't like chocolate, and bears, because like Mister Colbert says, bears are godless killing machines hell-bent on our destruction. And who am I to contradict that. Exactly.At the risk of quoting John Edwards: I was wrong.
I thought there would be more team names involving crazed astronauts wearing diapers, but the trend went the other way, as thoughts strayed toward the freaky guy masturbating like Darling Nikki, behind a sheet, backlit thirty feet tall, in front of a screaming cheering live audience of sixty-five thousand and a viewing audience of a billion or so. Janet Jackson shows a nipple with a hat on it for a quarter of a second and society almost falls to its knees, and then Prince has himself a nice long lock-the-doors scream-all-you-want wank in the rain, and everyone breaks their fingers talking about it being the best live stadium show since Cheap Trick played Budokan. You puritans are so cute when you're being selective in your outrage!
This week's rounds:[mirrored from here.]
Yesterday started with Janet being a guest on Howard Stern, and ended with closest Scrabble Solution near-tie ever, in two wild guesses as to the distance from Uranus (2,735,555,035 km = 1,699,795,070 miles) that were less than 9,000 miles apart. Yow.
Last night's celebrity spotting: A man who used to make sure Warren Zevon's bottle was always full while on stage. And on Warren's birthday and everything! (More on that below.) Yes, the Charlie Hodge to Warren's Elvis Presley, his Vodka Fluffer, was in the hizzy last night. Right On.
That said. This week's rounds:
1. On This Day - Big ups to Yakov Smirnoff and Ray Stevens, as well as the Emperor Hadrian (who turns 1,931 today) and his childhood buddy, The Great Ernest Borgnine.
2. Audio Round: Warren Zevon's Collaborators - a compilation of acts with whom Warren has collaborated, from the Everly Brothers and the Turtles to Steve Winwood and REM. (And someone asked about this, and I wasn't sure, so I had to look it up: John Waite ["Missing You"] was a guest vocalist on Zevon's farewell LP, The Wind. It's not the closest connection, but it counts.)5. Name 3's - Three soles, three vampire movies, three kinds of sleeves, and something about a dirndl.
I'm noticing the team names get better and worse like the stock market. Team name futures are way up this week, so sell high:
[mirrored, as always, from the official DSO blog.]
I'm not sure if it was the sudden and way overdue explosion of cold, or the impending State Of The Union Address, or a collective hangover from watching the Golden Globes (I feel like I'm one of five people walking the Earth who didn't see them; I had no idea), but it seemed like a relatively chill room last night. Usually you rowdy freaks bring a mighty noise, but you were almost... well behaved.
That was unnerving. Please don't.
Also, I was thinking about changing the way I read the scores. It takes a lot of time to read the scores by rank, and we're running later and later these days, which is not the direction Janet & I want to go with this. Would it bother anyone if I took a page out of these recaps (and the Last Exit playbook) and gave the top three scorers in order and then just gave everyone else's team name and score? When it was a tiny, close-knit group back when we started this, it wasn't a big deal, but nowadays it's kind of become an issue.
Let me know what you think. If you like hearing the rankings in order, I'm fine with keeping on with it. It just feels unnecessarily long, is all.
That said. This week's rounds:
1. On This Day - Happy birthday to Vidal Sassoon, the late great Andy Kaufman, and fellow baldy Don Zimmer.
2. Audio Round: Pleased To Meet Me - I tried to balance off the Kenny Loggins clip with Sam Cooke and Death Cab For Cutie (a band I'm still warming to), but god, what a terrible song. That somehow many of you got anyway. Seriously, it's like I don't even know who you are sometimes.
3. Monkey Business - Not just the Marx Brothers movie and Gary Hart's yacht, but a question about marmosets. Marmosets! Who says we don't stretch your minds, even just a tiny bit!
4. Let's Talk About Chicks, Man. - Questions about Chickens, chicks, cocks, cock-a-leekie soup, and the album that hatched the single "You Never Met A Motherfucker Quite Like Me." (I don't even think of "motherfucker" as a cuss word anymore. To me, it's the new "golly.")
5. Name 3's - In which I gave you the three all-time best-selling Chick Tracts, three Beethoven symphonies, three Rockys, and something about the Pineapple Express.As a first-anniversary present (if you can call this a present; I feel a little like I'm buying you a bowling ball with my name on it, and then letting you know in advance, but still), I was thinking about putting together a weekly podcast, to try and, I don't know, spread the word or something. Anyway, to say I took advantage of the MLK holiday to work on the dream I have, a dream where every child, no matter their color, creed, sexual orientation, country of origin, proximity to New York, ability to hold their liquor or make friends, literacy level, current level of incarceration or severity of medication needed to function in society, every child could participate in Janet's and my stupid little trivia thing... to say that? That would be kinda messed up.
But here's the first pass at what I think I could do every week without going apeshit. I don't listen to podcasts barely at all, so especially those of you who do, if you could give this a listen and let me know what you think is missing or clunky, I'd be most grateful.
(UPDATE: It's back up, hopefully fixed. Give this one a go, and let me know what you think.)
I'm trying to keep the feel of it fairly clean, but I'm not above the occasional sound effect if it helps. And I know the reading is a little clunky. That will hopefully fix itself as I do a few more of these things.
Any ideas?
]]>Mirrored, as always, from here.
Craziness. My voice is somewhere around the register of James Earl Jones this morning.
The Season Two Finale (and year-end blowout) was kind of messy. Nineteen teams, more than a few of whom changed their names at random without telling anyone (please don't do that; if you change your name, please put your old name on the answer sheet so we know who you are), and it wound up being our second-largest night ever. Woot!This week's rounds:
1. On This Day - When the wrestler formerly known as Chyna shares her birthday with Sarah Vowell, Howdy Doody and Louis Pasteur, you know it's a day for all ages.
2. Audio Round: The End Of The Innocence - A round to commemorate the end of aught-six. I didn't do anything so déclassé as use Don Henley (not yet, anyway), but there was Styx's "Don't Let It End," the Kinks' "Till The End Of The Day," and "Endicott," by the vastly underrated Kid Creole and the Coconuts.[Mirrored here.]
It was a lovely night. The fact that we're not having anything close to winter so far this year maybe helped goose the mood of some of youse this week, and certainly the return of the most excellent and raucous posse from Human Rights Watch (who apparently have won a Nobel Peace Prize, go figger!) brightened our day in ways that defy adjectives. Really, though, I'm happy to see you guys. The unexpected success of the DSO is easily the best thing to have happened in my life this year, and I'd buy you all Cadillacs if I could. (Will you settle for some fridge magnets, the occasional book and a few drinks? Maybe dinner for two at CremCaffé Ristorante next door, or a little something from our favorite Broadway show?)
This week's rounds:1. On This Day - Happy Birthday to Branch Rickey, Simone Beck and Kate Hudson, and props to James Randi and Grand Funk Railroad.
2. Audio Round: Not All Christmas Songs - I was hoping to put together a round of songs about wintery themes that weren't about Christmas, but sometimes when you're cutting and pasting song clips for these rounds, things just don't go together the way they should. So I fudged the original idea and made it half-Christmas music (the Carpenters, the Ramones, Band Aid, the Vince Guaraldi Trio) and half songs about snow (Johnny Cash's "Snow In His Hair," the ever-ubiquitous Duran Duran version of "White Lines," They Might Be Giants' "Snowball In Hell"), ice (Jonathan Richman's "Ice Cream Man") and other seasonal themes (The Decembrists, Jay-Z, I think that's everyone).3. The Fall - Janet marked the last day of Autumn with some questions about Camus, Yeats, Bowie, merkins, some band and the lyrics to "American Pie."
4. 'For Hanukkah, Hans Handled Hank's Handicap Handily - I know some people spell it "Chanukah," but I'm not some people. Also, the round was about things that started with HAN (Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf, Hannibal Smith, The Handmaid's Tale, the House of Hanover, Hannah And Her Sisters, and the two states where hanging is still on the books as a possible form of capital punishment), and so that wouldn't have made sense. Also, truth be told, I'm not all that Jewish. As in, I'm not Jewish.