Useless Information

Because I have no other way of generating content: Trivia returns!

This may only be for a week: it happened that I was in town on a Thursday, I decided to go, and after two hours of recycled and otherwise easy questions, I'm in no particular mood to go back. The current writing crew is, apparently, completely out of ideas, as there were rounds (plural) of questions that I've heard before. In fact, I'm pretty sure they repeated the final question (ordering Kevin Costner movies). Yes, I've been doing this thing for two-plus years, and you're bound to hear the same question once in a while, but it isn't like it's impossible to come up with a good trivia question, or at least a new one. Anyway, here's my miss, and a couple others I made up.

1. In what country was roulette invented?

2. During the Olympic Parade of Nations, which country almost always enters the venue first? Also, what is the exception to this rule?

3. We all know Johnny Depp's first film was A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Kevin Bacon was in the original Friday the 13th. But name the mega-stars whose early work includes these 80's horror films:

a) Leprechaun

b) Cutting Class

c) Return to Horror High

4. Who was the last member of the Whig party to be elected President of the United States?

Happy Almost-new Year

Well, every year I get started on the posts later and later.

All in all, 2009 looks to be a banner year for the Preschool. I'm living in a new town (well, I'm sort of living in two towns right now), with a new person, and, with any luck, will soon have a new job. "Luck," of course, being the operative word. All this excitement is not without downsides, though. The new town meant giving up the old job. Chances are, the new job will be in yet another new town, which means the w might also get to experience the joy of a job search in what might be charitably termed a "tight" job market. And, most importantly, I'm rarely around for trivia night anymore, thus dealing a devastating blow to the major source of content around here. And, sadly, no replacement seems in the offing; the w did find an ad for trivia night at a local pub, but when we went there for a drink on Saturday, we found the place shuttered and "For Lease." Not a good sign.

There are content possibilities: No way am I detailing the academic job search, but I could always bring back the cooking segment. In the meantime, I'll fill space by looking at how I did on last year's resolutions.

1. Get the PhD. Well, oops. I'll have it in May, though, I swear.
2. Brown-bag it more. I was helped tremendously by the 12:20 class I taught in the fall, which kept me from even eating lunch most days.
3. Less red meat. Less butter. Less sugar. Definitely less red meat - it helps a lot that the w doesn't like it much - but I do like me some cookies.
4. Way less pizza. I was doing better on this the first half of the year. I can, however, count on one hand the times I hit Todaro's AYCE buffet.
5. Stop using sponges to clean the dishes, as they are, apparently, nothing more than slightly soapy bacteria farms. We do have scrub brushes in the kitchen now, and I try to use them for most things. Still, the sponge is terribly convenient for cleaning knives. I'm still working on this.
6. Reach 400 on the 1001 Movies You Must See list. I was well ahead of the pace through the summer, but then the getting-married and writing-the-dissertation bits got in the way, as did the seemingly interminable sequence of 1950s Japanese dramas in my Netflix queue. I ended the year having seen 104 movies on the list, giving me a total of 370. Of course, by now, the list has likely been updated, so who knows where I am.
7. Ride the bus more. I definitely pulled this one off, even if it occasionally involved driving halfway to campus, parking at the grocery store, and riding the bus from there. I usually went shopping on my way home.

A Post Few of My Readers Are Likely to Understand

A graph G is strongly asteroidal if it contains three vertices a, b, c such that there is a path between any two of these vertices that

1. Does not contain the third vertex, nor any neighbor of the third vertex.
2. Does not contain two consecutive vertices that are adjacent to every neighbor of the third vertex.

This? Is my job.

Fun Fact: There's only one Stephentown on Earth

Okay, so last week really was my last trivia night. Maybe. I'll have to spend some time in Clemson next semester, and the w is convinced I'll be arranging things so that I'm there on Thursday nights. We'll see. For now, savor the misses from last week's victory.

1. In what southeastern state might you find the towns of Frog Jump, Only, and Sweetlips?
2. In what southwestern state would you find the town of Ding Dong?
3. What freshwater mollusk produces red or pink pearls?
4. Which family of trees includes both the largest and fastest-growing living thing on earth?
5. What is the more common name of herpes zoster?

Where have all the tan M&M's gone?

Because I ran across this while I was cleaning out my bookbag: trivia returns!

1. What original Lifesavers flavor was nearly removed from the roll in 1999, after Nabisco announced that it was "not Y2K compliant?"

2. How many times did Marshal Mathers, a.k.a. Eminem, flunk the ninth grade?

3. What country's first nuclear weapons research facility is now a tourist attraction known as "Nuclear City?"

4. What film, starring Tupac Shakur and Janet Jackson, was banned from the Cineplex Odeon Universal City in Los Angeles, out of fears that it might cause trouble in the trendy City Walk complex nearby?

5. What part of the Britney Spears doll's anatomy do you push to get her to sing?

Tomorrow will likely be my last trivia night in this town. Goodness knows what direction this blog will take afterwards. Will I find a new trivia night in Winston-Salem? Start writing my own? Reprint all the Ken Jennings questions I miss? Stay tuned.

Been a Long, Lonely, Lonely, Lonely, Lonely, Lonely Time

Okay, so, Fall Break has stretched into an extended hiatus, as wedding and honeymoon time have been supplanted by research time and job-application time and write-the-dissertation-already time. I have a brief moment of blogging time tonight, though, so I return with a question:

Curriculum Vita or Curriculum Vitae? Or does it matter? My understanding was that "Vitae" was plural, but still acceptable usage (similar to "criteria").

Se Habla Ingles!

In case you haven't noticed, the Preschool has been on Fall Break. There was no trivia last week, and there probably won't be any this week. I am pleased to report, however, that on October 18, the f officially became the w. In the next few days, there will be a recap of our honeymoon in Mexico, or at least a recipe for fried bananas.

I thought it was Jimmy Durante!

Trivia night got off to a rocky start, when I arrived to find that the rest of my team was absent. A couple of early misses had me thinking about leaving at halftime, but, ninety minutes and a couple of lucky guesses later, an improbable victory gave a much-needed infusion of cash to the Preschool's coffers.

The difficulty level of trivia has been a lot higher lately, but I feel like the ones I missed were actually pretty easy. Judge for yourself.

1. What singer was the subject of the Hello Gorgeous Museum in San Francisco, which gave out wigs and fake noses to visitors wishing to impersonate her?
2. What multi-faceted character did comic Don Rickles voice in the movie Toy Story?
3. What medical procedure, applied to humans, did the World Health Organization decry as "against human integrity and morality?"
4. What clothing line, a spin-off of Phat Farm, is designed for urban women?
5. Who was the first athlete to be named Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year twice?
6. Final: What Steven Spielberg movie did Senator Tom Coburn bash NBC for airing, citing its "full-frontal nudity, violence, and profanity?"

Buckaroo Banzai is not the answer to any question

We missed a lot of questions this week, and many of them were good questions. Unfortunately, I misplaced the question list somewhere between the bar and the car, and I can only remember one of our misses. Such is the risk of bar trivia. Happily, it turns out I did back up my extra trivia document after all, so I'll add a couple extras of my own.

1. What Grammy-winning singer made tabloid headlines in 1996 when it was reported (erroneously) that he had asked his wife for a divorce via fax?

2. Who is the only driver to complete the Indianapolis 500 and the Coca-Cola 600 on the same day?

3. What dubious achievement did the Philadelphia Phillies accomplish on July 15, 2008, against the St. Louis Cardinals?

4. Which amendment to the Constitution provided for separate election of the President and Vice-President?

You Enjoy Themselves

Phish is touring.

You Shall Never Be Hungry Again!

Fantastic week at trivia this week. Not because we won - we didn't - but because trivia was actually hard. At least, we thought it was hard. We have a veritable smorgasbord of missed questions for you, my trivia-hungry readers. Dig in!

1. Who won ESPN's award for "Wide Receiver of the '80s?"
2. What was the first animated film to be nominated for Best Picture?
3. What was the title of Alexandra Ripley's much-anticipated sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind?
4. What superstar lamely told Madonna that her show was "neat," during the documentary Truth or Dare?
5. Which hip-hop heroes collaborated with heavy metal band Anthrax to remake the hit "Bring the Noise?"
6. What fast food chain has begun selling Brazil nut chocolate chip cookies, in an effort to benefit rainforest communities?
7. What self-described "Architect of Rock and Roll" helped cut the ribbon at the opening ceremonies of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

Note - we actually missed eight questions, but I am unable to verify the answer to the eighth, or even to find a reference to the incident the question is about. So, out it goes.

Where'd you go?

Three reasons for last week's lack of posts:

1. My laptop died, thus depriving me of my usual entry to the Internets.
2. We missed zero questions at trivia. I could have taken some from the stash I save for just such an occasion, but those were on my laptop, in a folder I don't usually back up - see reason #1.
3. Heroes premiere + no TiVo = no more watching OTH on Mondays.

I hereby promise to miss trivia questions this week.

Trivia: Still More Fun Than Studying

This week did not go nearly as well for us as last week. But, as usual, our loss is your gain, because more misses for us is more questions for you. I know there's a subset of my tiny tiny readership that will have no trouble with the halftime question...

1. What does the "W" stand for on a WAP phone?
2. Who was the first African-American to grace the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue?
3. Halftime: Name the last seven films to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
4. In what year was the original Playstation released?
5. Which Peanuts character was dressed in clothes designed by over three hundred fashion designers in a 1990 retrospective at the Louvre?
Final:
6. Which English-speaking nation stopped minting one- and two-cent coins in 1991, when the cost to produce them exceeded their value?

Is "Oedipal" the word I'm looking for here?

Okay, so going into episode two, let's recap where everyone is:
Lucas is married... to Brooke! No wait, it's Peyton! Um, it's Lindsey? No, it's a dream sequence, and he's in the airport, waiting for... Peyton, which is exactly what we expected all along. They're in Vegas, getting married, or maybe they're not, I'm not entirely sure, because I spent a lot of the episode watching on mute because I was on the phone with the f.
Dan is not dead after he was hit by a car... but he's in the hospital. No, wait, he's in a room made up to look like a hospital room, and his fake nurse is - wait for it - Fran, the Nutjob Nanny! This is her elaborate revenge scheme to get Jamie back. I get the feeling that this week, she will make Dan re-write his last book so that her favorite character doesn't die.
Nathan's back hurts.
Haley is doing something.
Skills is sleeping with Nathan's mom. Yeah.
Mouth is leaving for Omaha, and wants Millie to go with him. Millie decides to go, but changes her mind, because Brooke is going to war with her mom for control of the company. How exciting! Brooke, ever the martyr, tells Millie to go, and the show's two "unattractive" people ride off into the sunset. Even more exciting, Brooke is attacked by a masked man as she locks up the store for the night. Is it an Oedipal plot? Find out in two minutes!

You Can Do What You Want to Do

I'm disappointed in the difficulty level of the trivia lately. It's one thing when a team gets a ridiculously high score for the week; any given set of questions could be right in one team's wheelhouse. But, and I know I've harped on this before, when the top three teams are within two points of a perfect score, that's just no leeway for teams to get anything outside their areas of expertise.
Anyway, on to a story of our only miss: Each round, we're given the categories for each question in advance. This, in theory, helps us decide how many points to bid on the first two questions. To pass the time between questions, our team usually tries to come up with possible questions for the later categories. On occasion, we have been able to come up with the exact question - last week, I correctly predicted that the Just Shoot Me question would ask for the name of the magazine (sadly, this clairvoyance did not help us correctly answer the question). On rarer occasions, the category is so obvious that we have come up with the correct answer without a question. Tonight, the category was "backup dancers," and we figured the answer simply had to be K-Fed. When it wasn't, we were so stuck that we were unable to come up with anything. So that's question one, question two is the only other question we really had to think about, and then there's two I made up. Please to enjoy.

1. What future superstar was a backup dancer in Janet Jackson's video for "That's the Way Love Goes?"
2. What rap star suavely blamed his teammates after he was cut from a tryout for the Toronto Raptors?
3. What is the oldest continuously used auto raceway in the U.S.?
4. In Calvin and Hobbes, what are Calvin's parents' names?

Or, you could watch the RNC

We're just over an hour from the premiere of One Tree Hill, and when we last saw the gang, Lucas was sitting in the airport with two tickets to Vegas, proposing to his phone. We also saw Brooke, Peyton, and Lindsey on their respective phones. Who is on the receiving end of the proposal? Well, if it's Brooke, that would just be weird. As for Lindsey, she just got done telling Lucas that, when she told him she was seeing someone else - thus causing him to flip out and assault a high-schooler, possibly costing him his coaching job - she was lying. "Hey, sorry I f%$@ed with your mind and screwed up your life" doesn't strike me as the sort of thing that would lead to a proposal. Seriously, if it's Lindsey, this is going to be a short season of recaps.
Also to be answered: Will Mouth really quit his job and move to Omaha? Will Millie the Absurdly Gorgeous Frumpy Girl go with him? Is Dan finally dead? Will everything this season be Nathan's fault? Will Skills have a meaningful plot line? Tune in tonight and see!

It's all right, 'cause there's no Saved By The Bell!

This week was "90's sitcom trivia," and, despite having watched a great deal of television in that decade, I learned just how much I don't know about 90's sitcoms. For example, I did not know that JAG, Melrose Place, Dawson's Creek, and Beverly Hills, 90210 were sitcoms. I'm on the record as being against "theme nights," and the inability of the organizers to stay inside their announced themes is one reason. Having to type "On [show], [question]" over and over is another.

1. On The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, what is Will's father's occupation?
2. And where did Will and Carlton attend college?
3. On Full House, what was Jesse's original last name?
4. On Everybody Loves Raymond, what unusual quirk does Raymond's brother Robert have when he eats?
5. What is the name of the magazine where the cast of Just Shoot Me works?
Final:
6. On Seinfeld, what food caused Jerry to end his fourteen-year non-vomit streak?

Like the Ken Jennings Trivia Email, only easier. And not in email form.

The trivia team got the term off to a solid start, cruising to an easy victory at an easy trivia night. We only missed two questions (well, more, because we could only name six of the eight events that Michael Phelps won last week), so I picked out two extras.

1. Whose last words were reported as "I love you, Jesus," by a nun, and, "I can't breathe," by a doctor?
2. Which newspaper first received the tip that led to the man who admitted to killing Bill Cosby's son?
3. Which U.S. presidential candidate said, "The Internet is a great way to get on the 'Net?"
Final:
4. What international event prompted USA Today's first weekend edition, in 1996?

60 is the new 55

I'd like to take this opportunity to assure my mother that I did, indeed, send her a card for her birthday, and to thank her for making this all possible.

Back To School

School is back in session, and with it, new trivia. We only missed three this week, but missing three questions was enough to keep us out of the money. Especially galling was the fact that we probably would have gotten the first question if we had heard it correctly - it wasn't a question about the Pharaohs.

1. In what ancient Egyptian city did the Pharos reside?
2. What is the average lifespan of a human red blood cell?
3. Which automaker purchased Land Rover (at the time, the last major British-owned car company) in 1994?