The Pub Quiz begins at 7 p.m. every Monday. It's quite popular, so show up early.
Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
“Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.” ~Gwendolyn Brooks
I hope that you and yours enjoyed Father’s Day. Through the magic of Facebook, I spent more time sharing greetings with peers than with people of my father’s generation. I did get to wish a happy Father’s Day to Dana Gioia, an intellectual and poetic mentor of mine who was giving a reading in Sacramento yesterday.
Back in DC, in 2004, on the occasion of my father’s funeral, I got to visit with Dana at his Chairman’s office in the National Endowment for the Arts building. We talked about my dad’s contribution to the arts (especially in Washington DC, where he had won the Margo Jones Award), as well as about poetry, jazz, and Shakespeare. Perhaps our nation’s most successful NEA chair, Gioia politely turned down President Obama’s invitation to stay on at the NEA, as well as subsequent high-level offers from colleges and universities, for he wished to focus on his writing.
Now Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at USC, Dana keeps writing write essays and presenting public talks that continue to inspire me and, with other mentors I could name, help to fill that intellectual and artsy absence in my life that I have known for the last eight years. I especially appreciated the opportunity to introduce Dana Gioia to my daughter, Geneva, and to hear the two of them talk about the writing, theatre and illustration projects that she is working on this summer, including starting acting and production classes today with the Acme Theatre Company here in Davis. The show must go on!
Tonight’s Pub Quiz, not surprisingly, will be an homage to dads everywhere. De Vere’s Irish Pub has been filling with dads and their children on Monday evenings. Another especially productive writing mentor of mine, John Lescroart, complained last week that he and his eminent team of six had to sit at a table for four. For a man who attracted several hundred friends and admirers to his last big book event in Davis, at the Odd Fellows Lodge, Lescroart is not used to sitting at the equivalent of the Thanksgiving meal kids’ table. Of course the best way to secure a table that is big enough for your team is to come to the Pub early with that team. I think Lescroart and friends arrived by 6:15 last week, so you might want to try for 5:45 or 6.
Some of you were confused last week about candy, thinking that a “kind” of candy was the same as the company that manufactured that candy. While we all know that M&M's are the most popular kind of candy in the United States, the Mars Bar, the chocolate bar that features nougat, soft caramel, and almonds coated in milk chocolate, is not even in the top 25, even though the same company makes both M&M's, indisputably the most popular kind of candy in America, and many other candies, including Milky Way, Twix, Skittles, Snickers, as well as the Mars bar. I hope this information is helpful to you, and that it doesn’t contribute to any morning cravings for your favorite kind of candy.
Tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on dads and more dads, as well as cars, time travel, urban forests, William Shatner, bow ties, peanuts, Hawaii, executions, spats, classical music, sports math, tights, seven-syllable words, great films, fathers even older than late Charlie Chaplin, felons, anger, pronouns, first hits, the bubonic plague, beans of the alcoholic variety, figurative fathers, famous people whose names start with the letter B, poets, liver, daily reading assignments, Russia, Ireland, islands, camels, things you should have learned in geometry class, Romantics, San Francisco (that heaven of invention), and Shakespeare.
See you tonight!
Your Quizmaster
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
1. Mottos and Slogans. What television network calls itself “The Most Trusted Name in News”?
2. Internet Culture. What does Apple call its lightest laptop?
3. Newspaper Headlines. What new film won the box-office race this past weekend?
4. Four for Four. Which of the following animals, if any, are even-toed ungulates? The dromedary, the giraffe, the mountain zebra, the peccary.
5. Nursery Rhymes. In the nursery rhyme Little Bo Peep, what must Bo Peep do in order to find her sheep?
P.S. Michelle Bitting will be reading at the Natsoulas Gallery this coming Thursday night at 8. If you can believe it, 19 people from the last Poetry Night came to the after-party at de Vere’s, filling an entire room full of poetic revelers. If you can handle that much fun, do join us.
