Final entry in the 2012 XYZZY best games review project — Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis. With tremendous innovation, technical polish, and abundant humor, Adam Thornton upends the medium of interactive fiction with a work that’s simultaneously traditionalist and transgressive, a layered and richly allusive delivery system for some highly demented and depraved content. It’s a hugely impressive achievement, and I can’t imagine anyone else pulling it off. I can’t imagine anyone else even trying.
[We interrupt our regularly scheduled IF reviews for this topical superhero discussion. That review of Mentula Macanus is coming soon– er, on its way.]
I’ve been reading a lot of 1960s Marvel comics lately, letter columns and all. I did this once before, with just Spider-Man comics, which was a lot of fun. This time I’m skipping around more from title to title, getting a feel for the way the universe gelled, and how the constant stream of feedback from readers contributed to that process. It’s really given me a sense for what Marvel did differently back in those early days. For a while there, they could almost do no wrong — “what they did differently” was more or less synonymous with “what they did right.”
Know what else I’ve been doing a lot lately? Seeing Joss Whedon’s Avengers movie. Well, okay, just twice, but that counts as “a lot” in my movie-watching book. The movie is everything I wanted it to be. It was even more satisfying the second time around. Like those early Marvels, it makes the right call pretty much every time. Really: just like those early Marvels.
Continued stories
In 1961, when the Marvel Universe as we know it began, comic books were disposable, not collectible. There was no expectation that whoever bought issue #41 would necessarily have bought issue #40 or have any intention to buy issue #42. Consequently, each one was required to be self-contained, with one story, or even multiple stories, that began and ended within its covers. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but the general expectation was that a comic book contained at least one complete story. Sure, there were motifs that continued from one issue to the next, but they were more or less in the form of an established status quo. Clark Kent always works at the Daily Planet. Lois Lane never gets any closer to figuring out his secret identity. Jimmy Olsen is always just as young and eager and boneheaded as he ever was or ever will be. Stories that deviated from this status quo always made sure to return to it before the issue was over.
Many early Marvels followed this pattern too, though their internal status quo was a fair bit more interesting. However, it quickly became apparent that the stories they wanted to tell were too complex to be contained within a single book. Not only that, they seemed to be attracting older, more sophisticated readers, who might be more reasonably expected to buy a title consistently. So, in many books, “continued stories” became the rule, and whoever read issue #41 might in fact need the previous one or the next one, or several iterations thereof, to get the full tale.
Oh, the complaints that readers sent in about this! The company was accused of greed, insensitivity, poor storytelling, and more. In fact, the hue and cry was so great that at one point Marvel actually abandoned continued stories and tried to keep all issues self-contained. The (predictable) result? Duller, more superficial stories. In fact, it may have almost been a calculated move on their part — by the time they did it, the Marvel Universe had already been established as an enormous tapestry of characters whose lives regularly interwove, collided, and separated again. To write the very kind of stories they had made obsolete may have been their way of saying, “Oh, this? Is this really what you want?” Needless to say, continued stories returned soon afterwards.
In 2012, the majority of movies are self-contained, but there are plenty of franchises in which each sequel moves the characters along a larger arc. However, what we hadn’t seen yet is a movie that ties together multiple franchises in the way that The Avengers does. There are four different lines of movies, each with its own sequel trajectory, that come together in this one. Four sets of stories feed in, and this story will resonate along at least three lines in the future. (I’m not sure if there are going to be any more Hulk movies, though no doubt the success of Avengers makes that outcome more likely. Heck, maybe even Black Widow and Hawkeye will get their own franchises.)
This is an immensely powerful position for a movie to occupy. In the comics, a shared universe gets you several great things:
- If you’re following multiple lines that come together, you get to feel like an insider when the collisions happen. The more lines you follow, the more satisfying this can be.
- The coherency of each strand is enhanced by its participation in a greater coherent whole. When Spider-Man bursts into Stark Industries, he may wonder why Iron Man isn’t showing up. Those of us reading Iron Man know that he’s trapped by a villain in another part of the factory, and knowing this lets us feel that both Spidey and Stark are a legitimate part of a larger, grander story.
- When personalities do come together, especially if they clash, the drama of the encounter is greatly enhanced when each character is fully fleshed out with a detailed background and a story of his own.The Avengers movie inherits each of these advantages, along with the sheer pleasure of seeing a bunch of great actors thrown into an ensemble cast, and an enormous sense of payoff from the most elaborate setup ever.
These people do not get along
As I said, Marvel set up a fictional universe in which its superheroes were constantly running into each other. And when that would happen, inevitably, they would fight at least once. Fans loved seeing the good guys square off against each other, if only from the geeky desire to take the measure of each hero. And so Stan Lee would contrive some sort of misunderstanding or unusual circumstance that would force the heroes into conflict. Letter columns were always full of people eager to know who would win in a fight: Hulk vs. Thor? Thing vs. Iron Man? Spidey vs. Black Widow? Hero vs. hero conflict gave those fans a little satisfaction, though not always as much as they wanted, given that the story often took a left turn before either hero suffered a full defeat.
The Avengers takes this cue and runs with it. And, uh, now it’s probably time for the SPOILERS ASSEMBLE! warning.
The movie gives us so many awesome hero vs. hero matchups:
- Black Widow vs. Hulk, twice. She dominates him strategically as Banner, he dominates her physically (of course) as Hulk
- Thor vs. Iron Man vs. Captain America
- Hawkeye vs. everybody, which was a great way of establishing Hawkeye’s badass credentials. (Casting Jeremy Renner didn’t hurt either.)
- Stark, Banner, and Cap piercing Fury’s subterfuge, leading to a great 6-way argument and a lovely Whedonesque camera move, inverting the heroes and placing the Staff Of Bad Influence in the foreground
- Thor vs. Hulk
- Black Widow vs. Hawkeye
And that’s all before they team up to fight the Big Bad! No wonder this movie had to be 143 minutes long. These matchups do several things for the movie, besides their obvious Big Action Thrill value. I mentioned how turning Hawkeye against everyone, and having him nearly take down the whole shebang, was a great way of establishing him as a powerhouse to be reckoned with, despite his lack of superpowers. Really, that’s true for all the inter-hero fights. In order for us to believe in the enormous victory the Avengers pull off in the movie’s climax, we have to believe in their powers and abilities. Having them establish these against each other is both efficient and effective. This way, we see more heroes in action more of the time, and our belief in one reinforces our belief in the others.
Moreover, the physical conflicts help the movie express the characters’ underlying philosophical conflicts. Superhero stories, at least when they’re done well, are metaphors writ large. So when Thor fights Iron Man, it isn’t just Thor fighting Iron Man — it’s the Mythical/Ancient/Pastoral at war with the Modern/Scientific/Technological, and it’s not accidental that the image of Idealized Patriotism and Selfless Heroism is defeated by neither and brings both together.
Finally, the conflicts move the plot along, which is far from a given in modern action movies. Heroes fighting each other does everything from achieving key turning points (such as when the Widow administers a “cognitive recalibration” to Hawkeye, switching him back to the side of the angels) to subtly filling in explanatory details (such as when Banner finds himself holding the Stick of Psychic Malevolence as he’s getting angry.)
How do you solve a problem like The Hulk?
In fact, this last one helped me understand something about the movie that puzzled me the first time around. I’ve mentioned before that although the Hulk exists in a world of superheroes, he’s not a superhero himself — he’s a monster. Unlike everybody else on the team, he’s not necessarily here to help. This is a hard problem to solve for any story that includes him as a protagonist, and the first time I saw The Avengers, I thought the film hadn’t quite solved it. Why is he all “SMASH BLACK WIDOW!” the first time he appears and then all “SMASH ONLY BAD GUYS AND CATCH IRON MAN AND GENERALLY HELP OUT!” the second time?
Then my friend Tashi suggested this interpretation to me: Banner’s revelation during the climactic battle (“I’m always angry”) indicates that he has figured out that suppressing his anger is the wrong way to go. So instead, he lives with it all the time so that it doesn’t blossom into rage, and tries to atone for his past damage by helping the helpless. (Boy, sounds Whedonishly familiar, doesn’t it?) He believes that he might be able to control “the other guy” now that he’s learned to live with his anger, but he’d rather not take the chance if he doesn’t have to.
Then he gets tangled up with the whole SHIELD thing. He finds himself aboard a massive airship — as he comments when it takes off, that’s a worse place for him to be than even a submarine. Loki’s whole plan is to get the Hulk to wreck everything once he’s aboard the Helicarrier. Well, that and also get Hawkeye to wreck everything from outside the Helicarrier. So, using the remote magic of the Nasty Pointy Spear Of Malefic Intent, he manipulates Banner’s mind (as indicated by the “put down the scepter” scene), weakening his mental control so that when Hawkeye strikes, the Hulk is in rampage mode rather than “I’m at peace with my anger” mode. Then, later, when Banner motors up for the final battle, he’s himself again, and can drive the beast enough to be a hero.
I love this explanation, and I think it’s supported by the film. It’s certainly better than anything Stan Lee figured out in the 60’s. His Hulk was constantly hunted, and his Banner was far from reconciled with his anger. (That is, once it was established that anger is what triggers the change. At first it was actually nightfall that did it, like a werewolf. The anger/stress thing set in pretty early, though.) He tried pills, and he tried locking himself away. He tried staying out of stressful situations. You can imagine how well all that worked out. The comics Hulk was often well-intentioned, but always misunderstood.
There wasn’t a trace in this movie of Thunderbolt Ross-esque anti-Hulkism — on the contrary, the government is looking for Banner to enlist his help, despite knowing he could potentially Hulk out. You don’t get much of that in the early comics, though they repeatedly attempted to cast the monster as a hero. In fact, he was even a charter member of the original Avengers… but he was out of there by the third issue. He’s really not much of a team player.
Homage and better
Having the Hulk be present for the founding of the movie Avengers is just one of the many lovely ways this film pays respect to its source material. Just as in the comics, Loki is intimately involved with the Avengers’ formation. Just as in the comics, the early Hawkeye and Black Widow are a couple, albeit one frequently beset by misfortune. Just as in the comics, the Avengers bicker and argue and crack wise, although the players and personalities are a bit different in the film from how they work in the original stories.
The movie is far from a literal recreation of those early Avengers issues. Instead, like the first Iron Man movie, it faithfully absorbs the spirit of the comics, but compresses, abridges, and enhances to make a coherent story that fits together like an exquisite puzzle. Thank you Joss, for mining the gold from an enormous vein, then shaping and polishing it so beautifully for us. And by the way, that really long sequence shot that went from hero to hero during the third act was JUST AWESOME. Mmmm, I think it’s time to see this movie again.
Here’s another entry in the series of 2012 XYZZY nominees game reviews: Robb Sherwin’s Cryptozookeeper. It’s the most Sherwin-esque Sherwin game I’ve yet seen. It’s gonzo, it’s funny, it’s extreme, and it’s shambolic, and it’s all these things to the most highly refined degree I’ve ever seen Robb accomplish, which means it’s all these things to the most highly refined degree I’ve ever seen anyone accomplish.
IF-Review has published the second in my series reviewing all the Best Game XYZZY nominees of 2012. The game this time is Wade Clarke’s Six. I don’t think I’ve ever been so charmed by an IF game.
It’s been a long, long time since I reviewed a text game, so I’m embarking on a mini-project of reviewing all four games nominated for the 2011 Best Game XYZZY award. First up: Zombie Exodus. My review is up now at IF-Review. Thanks to Mark Musante for publishing it.
At Geek Bowl V last year, my team The Anti-Social Network ended up winning all the marbles, except the marbles were actually considerable sums of cash. Hooray! This year, the event moved from Denver to Austin, Texas, and we didn’t fare quite so well, coming in 10th out of 146 teams. Still a respectable showing! But not enough to get paid, as only the top 3 teams win money.
Nevertheless, a great time was had! I got to spend quality time with my wonderful teammates, met the delightful Valerie Thatcher, spent a great afternoon with the estimable Rob Wheeler, and got to experience the Austin 6th Street bar strip during a pretty freaky power outage. Turns out that the bar scene is really not my scene, and the bar scene when none of the bars or streetlights have electricity, and thousands of people are roaming through darkness, is really REALLY not my scene.
Of course, the reason I went there was Geek Bowl VI, which now bills itself as the biggest live trivia event in the U.S. It’s a pub quiz multiplied by 20, and every year, Geeks Who Drink does a little better job with the event. It’s never without its flaws, but it’s quite impressive to manage 150 or so teams and deliver a variety of good questions in a fun way. Not to mention the cash prizes, which make for a very cool incentive.
Here’s the format: each team has its own small table, with 6 chairs. Quizmasters read questions from the stage, and the questions are also projected onto large screens throughout the venue. Once all the questions in a round have been asked, a two minute timer starts, by the end of which you must have turned in your answer sheet to one of the roaming quizmasters. The game consists of 8 rounds, each with its own theme. Each round contains 8 questions — usually, each question is worth one point, so there’s a maximum possible score of 8 points for each round. However, some rounds offer extra points — for instance, Round 2 is traditionally a music round, with 8 songs played, and one point each awarded for naming the title and artist of the song. In a regular GWD pub quiz, it’s only Round 2 and Round 8 (always the “Random Knowledge” round) that offer 16 possible points. However, in this year’s Geek Bowl, two other rounds were upgraded from 8 potential points to 16. Finally, teams can choose one round to “joker”, meaning that it earns double points for that round.
For posterity and enjoyment, here are the questions from Geek Bowl VI. Note that I’m reconstructing these from memory and notes, so they may be missing any clever turns of phrase that they might have had originally, and any inaccuracies that result from my paraphrasing are solely my fault. I’ll put any commentary about our team’s experience in [square brackets].
At the request of Geeks Who Drink, I had taken these down. Then, in a pleasing and surprising turn of events, we had a good conversation over email in which they decided that having the questions posted might be okay after all, as long as they were posted at least a week past the date of the event. So, I’m pleased to say, the questions have returned to this entry! Thanks, Geeks!
Round 1: Austin-tatious, a round about Austins and flamboyance
1. What is the name of Stone Cold Steve Austin’s trademark finishing move? [We were clueless on this one, guessing “cold cock.” Nope!]
2. What fancy-ass palace was built by Louis XIV of France on the site of his dad’s hunting lodge? [Teammates Dave and Lori had actually visited there, so they had this one well in hand.]
3. Who wrote the theme to Austin Powers, 30 years before the movie came out?
4. Ryan Good rocked the Twitter-verse by announcing that he was resigning as what musical artist’s “swagger coach”?
5. Jane Austen wrote two novels with one-word titles. For one point, name them both.
6. How many yards is an NFL team penalized for excessive celebration after a touchdown?
7. Spelling counts for this question: What is the first name of President Obama’s former economic advisor Mr. Goolsbee? [Again, clueless. We guessed “Osten.” Not even close! Well, except for the fact that we knew it was some variant of “Austin.”]
8. Tawûsê Melek is a peacock angel in the Yazidi religion of what ethnic group of Russia and northern Iraq?
[Our score for this round: 6]
Round 2: Music
[The usual GWD music round has some theme or other. They play 8 mp3 excerpts, and teams must name the title & artist of each song. Geek Bowl is usually a little grander — for instance, last year they brought in a mariachi band to cover 8 different songs. This year, they took advantage of Austin’s self-billed status as the “live music capital of the world” by bringing in eight different musical artists, one for each question.]
1. An 80’s hair-metal band covered “Teenage Dream” by Katy Perry. [Our team is fortunate to have Brian Ibbott, creator and host of the very entertaining Coverville podcast. Brian nailed this one right away.]
2. A Cuban band covering “Careless Whisper” by Wham!. Or Wham! featuring George Michael if you want to get technical.
3. A rockabilly band covering “I Got Stripes” by Johnny Cash. [We knew it was Johnny Cash, but couldn’t identify the song.]
4. An air guitarist and air drummer “covering” “Hot For Teacher” by Van Halen.
5. A classical string quartet covering “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters.
6. A local theater group doing an a capella version of “The Money Song” from Avenue Q. [For this one we named the musical instead of the artist, which was no problem. However, we were unable to come up with the title “The Money Song”, instead taking a shot with the unwieldy “When You Help Others (You Can’t Help Helping Yourself).”]
7. A brass group covering “Crazy Train” by Ozzy Osbourne.
8. A glee club from the University of Texas doing a vocal version of the beat from “Kill You” by Eminem. [We were nowhere close to this, guessing “Cuban Pete” by Desi Arnaz. Hey, it never hurts to guess.]
[Our score for this round: 12, giving us a total of 18.]
Round 3: A 50/50 round about sex
[Round 3 is often some version of 50/50 chance questions like true/false or multiple choice with only 2 choices.]
1. On the Kinsey scale, would Waylan Smithers be closer to a 0 or a 6? [We guessed in the wrong direction on this one. We didn’t know the scale, and I thought it might have had a slight anti-gay bias by putting homosexuality closer to 0 than 6. Nope!]
2. Who first coined the phrase “vaginal orgasm”, Sigmund Freud or Margaret Mead?
3. Who did Frank Sinatra bone first, Ava Gardner or Mia Farrow?
4. Who released the song “Let’s Talk About Sex”, TLC or Salt-n-Pepa?
5. If you were tying up your partner for some traditional Japanese bondage, what sort of rope would you use: jute or sisal? [Another one with no clue, but here we guessed right. Teammate George literally wrote the two answers down on two scraps of paper, held one in each hand, and had Lori pick a hand.]
6. If you’re a dacryphiliac, which one are you turned on by: yelling or sobbing? [Guessed wrong here, though. We reasoned that “lacrym-” has to do with tears, therefore “dacrym-” must be something else. Nope!]
7. In the 17th-century Japanese woodcut by Hokusai called The Dream Of The Fisherman’s Wife, is she getting it on with the crew of a fishing-boat or with octopi?
8. What was the power source of the first known vibrator: wind-up or steam-powered?
[This round had a bonus 9th question, a speed round worth 8 points in itself, making the round worth a total of 16.]
9. In three minutes, name the eight characters besides Carrie Bradshaw who have appeared in more than 20 episodes of Sex And The City. First names are sufficient. [We got 5 of these: Miranda, Charlotte, Samantha, Big, and Steve. That we even got that many was thanks to Brian.]
[Our score for this round: 11, bringing our total to 29.]
Round 4: High-culture/low-culture Before And After
[This round used the old “Before and After” format seen on Wheel Of Fortune and Jeopardy! to lock together two different answers, one to a high culture question and one to a low culture question. For instance “A William Shakespeare and George Romero production about cross-dressing zombies” might be “Twelfth Night of The Living Dead.”]
1. A philosophical principle for selecting the simplest answer as the correct one chooses a 90’s wheeled kid’s toy.
2. A 2100-year-old armless statue of a hottie goes on an adventure with a pug puppy and his kitten pal.
3. The English monarch who went on the Third Crusade helps Debbie Harry with her fragile cardiac organ.
4. A teaching strategy devised by Plato’s mentor educates a founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan.
5. An ancient Greek’s machine for moving water somehow helps Samus Aran destroy enemies. [Brian’s video game knowledge came through on that second part.]
6. Dickens’ only novel featuring a female narrator depicts what Kid ‘n Play get up to when their parents aren’t around.
7. An award-winning play about Sir Thomas More introduces some new biker characters from a drama series on the FX channel.
8. Two Brazilian ladies eat poo from a dome-like architectural structure atop a larger dome.
[Finally a perfect round score! Our 8 on this round gave us a total of 37.]
Round 5: Hips and Hops
[Round 5 of GWD is always a visual round. In the regular pub version, this consists of a half-sheet of paper with 8 pictures on it. At Geek Bowl, it was 8 images projected onto the screen, with questions alongside. I used to have to rely on my lame powers of description for this, but the Geeks have since posted a video! Now my lame descriptions have been moved to the answers section.]
[Another perfect round! 37 + 8 = 45.]
Round 6: No Straight White Males Were Harmed In the Making of This Round
1. The National Women’s Hall Of Fame is located in what central New York town, which was also the site of the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention? [Great pull by Lori on this one.]
2. What model of Pontiac did Oprah give away to every member of her audience in 2004? [Hilariously, a variation on this very same question came up in the trivia game some of us had played the night before. How I love quiz synchronicity.]
3. Manon Rhéaume, the first female goalie to play in the NHL, was signed to what expansion team in 1992? [Larry and Dave puzzled this one out nicely.]
4. Future coin star Sacajawea was a member of what Native American tribe? [I knew this thanks to Dante’s recent coin-obsession.]
5. On October 1, 1989, Axel and Eigil Axgil entered into the world’s first legal civil union for a gay couple, in what Scandinavian country? [Toss-up between two countries on this one, and we guessed wrong, with Sweden.]
6. Reggie and Cheryl Miller are basketball-playing siblings who played for what two rival universities?
7. In her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, what feminist argued that pornography incites men to rape? [This one KILLED me. 18 years ago, when I was steeped in academia, I’d have had it cold. In 2012, however, I just could not retrieve it, and nobody else had even heard of it.]
8. Fill in this 4-word quote from Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing: “I’m just a struggling black man trying to __________ in a cruel and harsh world.” [I have seen that movie at least 3 times, though none recently. I think all of us around the table had seen it. Yet none of us could recall it at this level of detail.]
[This was a bit of a struggle. 5 points scored, bringing our total to 50.]
Round 7: A Movie Round About Pizza!
[In regular GWD, Round 7 is a second audio round. It’s often movie clips, but can be a wide variety of other things, like clips from NPR interviews or 1980s commercials. In Geek Bowl, though, Round 7 seems to have solidified as a movie round, with onscreen movie clips. The twist this time was that 16 points were available. Each clip contained a 1-point question and a 2-point question. You had to answer one or the other — answering both would net an automatic 0 points.]
1. Video: This, stopping at about 0:45. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: Where does Jake find The Geek? [We answered the 2-pointer]
2. Video: This. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: What movie did the director make immediately after this one? [We answered the 1-pointer.]
3. Video: This, stopping at about 0:26. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: Name the producer, a famous b-movie maker who helped launch the careers of Jack Nicholson, William Shatner, and Robert De Niro, among others. [We answered the 2-pointer.]
4. Video: This, stopping at about 0:37. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: How does Pizza The Hutt die? [We answered the 1-pointer.]
5. Video: This. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: What is the name of the fat kid who burns the vampire with garlic pizza? [We answered the 1-pointer. Great job George even identifying that much.]
6. Video: This, stopping at about 0:17. 1-point question: What is Wayne’s last name? 2-point question: What Pepsi slogan does Wayne recite at the end of this scene? [We answered the 1-pointer.]
7. Video: This. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: Give the last name of the director, which he shares with his son, director of “The Princess Bride.” [Kind of a heavy-handed hint there, dontcha think Geeks? We answered the 2-pointer, grimacing at how easy it was compared to the other 2-pointers.]
8. Video: This. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: In what New York City borough does this scene take place? [We answered the 2-pointer — way to go Lori.]
[Good but not great on the movie round. We scored 12 points, for a total of 62.]
Round 8: Random Knowledge
[Round 8 of GWD is always a hodgepodge, and always worth 16 points. Usually, the point distribtion is random too, with some questions worth 1 point and some worth as many as 4. However, in the Geek Bowl, each question was worth 2 points.]
1. Exact answers and first names required. For 1 point each: Name the author of The Princess Bride and the author of Lord Of The Flies. [Abbott and Costello-esque confusion ensues as members of our team try to tell each other the answers.]
2. In 2003, Peyton Manning and Steve McNair shared the NFL MVP award. The last time that happened was 1997. For 1 point each, name the two players who shared the award that year. [We got one right, but guessed wrong with Troy Aikman on the other.]
3. Unlike headhunting, head-shrinking has only been found on one continent. For one point, name the continent. For another point: the process uses herbs containing what organic compounds, also found in red wine and tea? [We got the compound but missed the continent, guessing Africa.]
4. For one point each: in the acronym HDMI, what do the M and the I stand for? [Got the I but not the M, guessing “Multiple.”]
5. Famous Browns. For one point, who preceded Gordon Brown as prime minister of England? For another point: The landmark Supreme Court Case Brown vs. Board Of Education overturned what controversial 1896 decision?
6. Three installments of the Final Fantasy series were released for the Playstation: VII, VIII, and IX. Each of these games has a central protagonist. For one point each, name any two of them. [Thank goodness for Brian pulling out one of these. We guessed wrong on the other, with Sephiroth, who was actually the antagonist in Final Fantasy VII.]
7. Scientists with effects named after them. Question 1: The effect that causes water to swirl counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere is named after what scientist? Question 2: Christian Doppler, discoverer of the Doppler effect, was born in what Austrian city, also the birthplace of Mozart?
8. After Hungarian-British conductor Georg Solti, who has won more Grammy awards than anybody else with 31, the 2nd and 3rd place record for most Grammys are held by a 78-year-old producer and a 40-year-old bluegrass singer and fiddler. For one point each, name them. [We guessed wrong on the producer, saying Clive Davis.]
[11 points scored this round. We hadn’t used our joker yet, so we used it here, doubling our points to 22 and bringing our final total to 84.]
And now…
THE ANSWERS
1. What is the name of Stone Cold Steve Austin’s trademark finishing move? The Stone Cold Stunner
2. What fancy-ass palace was built by Louis XIV of France on the site of his dad’s hunting lodge? Versailles
3. Who wrote the theme to Austin Powers, 30 years before the movie came out? Quincy Jones
4. Ryan Good rocked the Twitter-verse by announcing that he was resigning as what musical artist’s “swagger coach”? Justin Bieber
5. Jane Austen wrote two novels with one-word titles. For one point, name them both. Emma and Persuasion
6. How many yards is an NFL team penalized for excessive celebration after a touchdown? 15
7. Spelling counts for this question: What is the first name of President Obama’s former economic advisor Mr. Goolsbee? Austan
8. Tawûsê Melek is a peacock angel in the Yazidi religion of what ethnic group of Russia and northern Iraq? The Kurds
Round 2: Music
[Answers are in the questions.]
Round 3: A 50/50 round about sex
1. On the Kinsey scale, would Waylan Smithers be closer to a 0 or a 6? 6 (exclusively homosexual)
2. Who first coined the phrase “vaginal orgasm”, Sigmund Freud or Margaret Mead? Sigmund Freud
3. Who did Frank Sinatra bone first, Ava Gardner or Mia Farrow? Ava Gardner
4. Who released the song “Let’s Talk About Sex”, TLC or Salt-n-Pepa? Salt-n-Pepa
5. If you were tying up your partner for some traditional Japanese bondage, what sort of rope would you use: jute or sisal? Jute
6. If you’re a dacryphiliac, which one are you turned on by: yelling or sobbing? Sobbing
7. In the 17th-century Japanese woodcut by Hokusai called “The Dream Of The Fisherman’s Wife”, is she getting it on with the crew of a fishing-boat or with octopi? Octopi
8. What was the power source of the first known vibrator: wind-up or steam-powered? Wind-up
9. In three minutes, name the eight characters besides Carrie Bradshaw who have appeared in more than 20 episodes of Sex And The City. First names are sufficient. Samantha Jones, Charlotte York, Miranda Hobbs, Mr. Big, Steve Brady, Stanford Blatch, Trey McDougal, Aidan Shaw
Round 4: High-culture/low-culture Before And After
1. A philosophical principle for selecting the simplest answer as the correct one chooses a 90’s wheeled kid’s toy. Occam’s Razor Scooter
2. A 2100-year-old armless statue of a hottie goes on an adventure with a pug puppy and his kitten pal. Venus de Milo and Otis
3. The English monarch who went on the Third Crusade helps Debbie Harry with her fragile cardiac organ. Richard The Lionheart Of Glass
4. A teaching strategy devised by Plato’s mentor educates a founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan. Socratic Method Man
5. An ancient Greek’s machine for moving water somehow helps Samus Aran destroy enemies. Archimedes’ Screw Attack
6. Dickens’ only novel featuring a female narrator depicts what Kid ‘n Play get up to when their parents aren’t around. Bleak House Party
7. An award-winning play about Sir Thomas More introduces some new biker characters from a drama series on the FX channel. A Man For All Seasons Of Anarchy
8. Two Brazilian ladies eat poo from a dome-like architectural structure atop a larger dome. 2 Girls 1 Cupola
Round 5: Hips and Hops
1. Image: a picture from Dr. Seuss. Question: What Dr. Seuss book is this image taken from? [Answer: Hop On Pop]
2. Image: An assassin in a black hat and cowl. Question: In what movie did Doc Hopper hire this assassin to eradicate a certain amphibian? [Answer: The Muppet Movie. That’s your basic wheelhouse question for me.]
3. Image: 3 different pictures of hips, decorated variously. Question: To what performer do all these hips belong? [Answer: Shakira]
4. Image: The painting Night Hawks by Edward Hopper. Question: What is the name of this famous painting by Edward Hopper?
5. Image: A vaguely C-shaped organ. Question: This was ripped straight out of somebody’s head. What in the hell is it? [Answer: Hippocampus. George caught onto this answer very quickly.]
6. Image: Some hops. You know, the plant. Question: What variety of hops are these? Hint — they happen to be named after a city in Texas. [Answer: Amarillo hops. Somehow my unconscious brain knew this. I do not know how.]
7. Image: Close-up on a male statue’s groin. Question: These famous hips belong to what statue? [Answer: Michelangelo’s David]
8. Image: An African-American guy from the 1980s. Question: This man is sometimes called the Grandfather of Hip-Hop. Name him. [Answer: Afrika Bambaataa. Major kudos to teammate Larry on this one. Half the team was leaning towards “Grandmaster Flash” for this answer, but Larry insisted that the man pictured was tougher-looking than any picture he’s ever seen of Grandmaster Flash. He was arguing for Afrika Bambaataa, and since he’s our team’s closest equivalent to a hip-hop expert, we went with it. Glad we did!]
Round 6: No Straight White Males Were Harmed In the Making of This Round
1. The National Women’s Hall Of Fame is located in what central New York town, which was also the site of the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention? Seneca Falls, New York
2. What model of Pontiac did Oprah give away to every member of her audience in 2004? The Pontiac G6
3. Manon Rhéaume, the first female goalie to play in the NHL, was signed to what expansion team in 1992? The Tampa Bay Lightning
4. Future coin star Sacajawea was a member of what Native American tribe? Shoshone
5. On October 1, 1989, Axel and Eigil Axgil entered into the world’s first legal civil union for a gay couple, in what Scandinavian country? Denmark
6. Reggie and Cheryl Miller are basketball-playing siblings who played for what two rival universities? USC and UCLA
7. In her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, what feminist argued that pornography incites men to rape? Andrea Dworkin
8. Fill in this 4-word quote from Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing: “I’m just a struggling black man trying to __________ in a cruel and harsh world.” “keep his dick hard”
Round 7: A Movie Round About Pizza!
1. Video: This, stopping at about 0:45. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: Where does Jake find The Geek? [We answered the 2-pointer] Movie: Sixteen Candles, of course. Jake finds The Geek under the coffee table.
2. Video: This. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: What movie did the director make immediately after this one? Movie: Goodfellas. Scorsese directed Cape Fear immediately afterwards.
3. Video: This, stopping at about 0:26. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: Name the producer, a famous b-movie maker who helped launch the careers of Jack Nicholson, William Shatner, and Robert De Niro, among others. Movie: Rock And Roll High School, directed by Roger Corman.
4. Video: This, stopping at about 0:37. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: How does Pizza The Hutt die? Movie: Spaceballs. Pizza The Hutt dies by eating himself.
5. Video: This. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: What is the name of the fat kid who burns the vampire with garlic pizza? Movie: The Monster Squad. Character’s name is Horace.
6. Video: This, stopping at about 0:17. 1-point question: What is Wayne’s last name? 2-point question: What Pepsi slogan does Wayne recite at the end of this scene? Wayne’s last name is Campbell, and at the end of the scene, he says, “Pepsi: The Choice Of A New Generation.”
7. Video: This. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: Give the last name of the director, which he shares with his son, director of “The Princess Bride.” Movie: The Jerk. Director’s last name: Reiner.
8. Video: This. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: In what New York City borough does this scene take place? Movie: Saturday Night Fever, which takes place in Brooklyn.
Round 8: Random Knowledge
1. Exact answers and first names required. For 1 point each: Name the author of The Princess Bride and the author of Lord Of The Flies. William Goldman wrote The Princess Bride, and William Golding wrote Lord Of The Flies.
2. In 2003, Peyton Manning and Steve McNair shared the NFL MVP award. The last time that happened was 1997. For 1 point each, name the two players who shared the award that year. Brett Favre and Barry Sanders.
3. Unlike headhunting, head-shrinking has only been found on one continent. For one point, name the continent. For another point: the process uses herbs containing what organic compounds, also found in red wine and tea? Continent: South America. Compounds: Tannins
4. For one point each: in the acronym HDMI, what do the M and the I stand for? “Multimedia Interface”
5. Famous Browns. For one point, who preceded Gordon Brown as prime minister of England? For another point: The landmark Supreme Court Case Brown vs. Board Of Education overturned what controversial 1896 decision? Tony Blair preceded Gordon Brown, and Brown vs. Board of Education overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson.
6. Three installments of the Final Fantasy series were released for the Playstation: VII, VIII, and IX. Each of these games has a central protagonist. For one point each, name any two of them. Cloud, [which was the one we got] Squall, and Zidane.
7. Scientists with effects named after them. Question 1: The effect that causes water to swirl counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere is named after what scientist? Coriolis Question 2: Christian Doppler, discoverer of the Doppler effect, was born in what Austrian city, also the birthplace of Mozart? Salzburg
8. After Hungarian-British conductor Georg Solti, who has won more Grammy awards than anybody else with 31, the 2nd and 3rd place record for most Grammys are held by a 78-year-old producer and a 40-year-old bluegrass singer and fiddler. For one point each, name them. The producer was Quincy Jones. [Yes, again, dammit. George was arguing for Quincy Jones, but we couldn’t believe he’d be an answer twice in the same game. Those tricky Geeks! This answer even had a parenthetical comment: “(That’s right, two Quincy Jones questions!)”] The fiddler is Alison Krauss
Thanks for a great time, Geeks. Hope I can afford to make it there next year if it’s held out of town again.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about my annual Christmas tradition with my friends Siân and Kelly, a mix CD of songs I’ve been listening to that year. The songs generally reflect a little something about my life in one way or another, though not perfectly so — sometimes they’re just songs I’ve imprinted on for some reason. The liner notes tradition has continued as well, but I didn’t post the notes from 2010. See, 2010 was a terrible, terrible year. Professionally, it was by far the unhappiest I’d ever been in my job, and personally, my marriage tailspun into a major crisis right at the same time we moved into a new house and my work life was at peak misery. It was very difficult, and painful, and I withdrew from many things and people.
Then came 2011. In January, I started a new job, thank god. I am in a much healthier atmosphere now, and am much, much happier at work. Laura and I finally found the right counselor in the spring, and have healed a lot of things. By the time November rolled around, I had started to emerge from a fair amount of depression, and it was in that mood that I made this year’s CD. I feel really happy with the collection, both as a musical collage and as a reflection of my year.
1. DEAR PRUDENCE – Siouxsie and the Banshees
Siouxsie Sioux was always in the back of my mind as somebody I wanted to learn more about, so last year I procured a greatest hits album. I liked it, though I don’t think I’ll go much deeper than that. I quite enjoy her voice, especially on this cover. It was a pretty Beatles-y year for me, so this was a fitting choice for that, but even more so for the lyrics and tone of the song itself. To me, this is about emerging, after being shrouded in protection. That’s pretty much what happened with me this year. I can hardly measure how much better things are now, both at home and at work, compared to this time last year. Not that everything is magically perfect — there’s still a lot of work to do — but the skies are a lot sunnier now.
2. ALL THIS BEAUTY – The Weepies
And what do we see when we come out to play? This was a year of The Weepies for me. They’re a married couple of singer-songwriters, Deb Talan and Steve Tannen, who started out as fans of each other’s solo work, and then literally began to make beautiful music together. Their harmonies are lovely, and their songs are just killer. I absolutely fell in love with their album Hideaway, from which this track is taken. That was the launching pad for my Weepies infatuation, and this was one of the songs that made me want to buy the album. (Thanks to the Internet radio station for bringing them to my attention.) It’s hard to pick just one song from that album, but this one fit my mindset a lot, or at least a part of it. (Lucky for me, there are other Weepies songs to fit other parts. 🙂 ) It’s about remembering to be amazed — there is so much beauty in this world, and sometimes it’s easier to see it if you close your eyes, then slowly open wide.
3. HERE COMES THE SUN – Paul Simon with David Crosby and Graham Nash
Speaking of lovely harmonies. I saw Paul on tour this fall, and he completely surprised me by singing this song as part of his set. It’s such a beautiful song anyway, and it fits his voice perfectly. After a little research, I found that he actually has a long history with the song — he sang it with George on an SNL episode way back in 1976, and various times in his career after that. I’m a lifelong Paul Simon fan, but I had no idea about this connection. It was a high point of the concert for me, and those always find their way to these end-of-year compilations. Not only that, it resonates with one of the most beautiful moments from the Love show I saw this year (more about that later), and perfectly encapsulates the theme of the year. Hence my title. I had a little trouble finding a good recording of him singing it solo, so I went with this one, from the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame’s 25th anniversary concerts.
4. TRUE FAITH – New Order
Sometimes focus falls on something one year because it belonged to a project from the previous year. So it was with this song. My Christmas gift for my sister in 2010 had a Guns ‘n’ Roses theme, since that’s one of her favorite bands. I decided to follow up on that with her birthday gift (not much of a reach, since her birthday is on New Year’s Eve.) Our tradition is some kind of themed CD as her birthday gift from me, so last year I decided to make her 3 volumes of songs from 1987, the year G+R’s first album came out. I love a lot of the music from that year — it’s probably not coincidental that I was 17 at the time, and just fully embracing music as a part of my identity for the first time. I’m sure plenty of people find much of their favorite music rooted in their late teens. This song appeared on that collection — it’s one of two New Order songs written that year to be bonus tracks on their greatest hits collection Substance. I find the music both hypnotic and uplifting, and the lyrics fit in well with the previous song — “my morning sun is a drug that brings me here.”
5. SECRET LOVE – Stevie Nicks
Why yes, Stevie Nicks did come out with a new album this year! 🙂 In Your Dreams was her first release in 10 years, and I’m sure it’s no surprise to anyone that several songs from it would appear on this compilation. This one was the advance single, and the record company offered a download of it with pre-orders of the album. It’s based an a demo I’d been listening to for years. Stevie has tons and tons of these unrecorded demos that have circulated amongst fans forever, and it’s an incredible thrill when she finishes one up with a proper studio version and releases it. Sometimes these actually turn out to be a little less satisfying than the demo — a couple of songs from the 2003 Fleetwood Mac album are like that — but often they are wonderful realizations of a rough outline. That was the case with this song. I got a full-body rush when listening to it for the first time. I think Dave Stewart does a fantastic job of production, Stevie’s vocals sound great, and it got me very excited for the album.
6. MOONLIGHT (A VAMPIRE’S DREAM) – Stevie Nicks
Here’s one of my favorite tracks from that album, and one of the standouts from her wonderful concert this summer. Again it’s based on a demo, but in a peculiar way. The demo that fans have been calling “Lady From The Mountain” has the beginning verses and piano part, but the more driving music that kicks in on the lyric “Strange, she runs with the one she can’t keep up with” is all new. Apparently Stevie was inspired by the first Twilight movie — she says it reminded her of an experience she had, though she coyly never reveals what that was. I’ve never read or seen any Twilight anything. All I know is that this song charges me full of energy every time I hear it. I love what it does with “Lady From The Mountain”, marrying its fragility to a smooth, powerful backbone.
7. GERM FREE ADOLESCENTS – X-Ray Spex
This song begins what I think of as the “Thank You Siân” section — all artists I’ve learned to love because of her influence. Laura was friends with Siân first — they were in CU‘s English Literature PhD program together. That’s how I met Laura too, except that I was doing my M.A. Siân wrote her dissertation on punk rock. I remember her telling me about X-Ray Spex back when she lived in Colorado — in fact, now that I look at the dissertation, its very title is an X-Ray Spex reference. So I filed that away but rarely thought of it again until she mailed me a couple of CDs of punk songs from the Sunday Times. This song appeared on that CD, and I liked it enough to seek out a compilation. The songs in that collection made X-Ray Spex one of my favorite punk bands — “Identity”, “Art-I-Ficial”, “I Am A Cliche”, “Let’s Submerge”, “Age”… I’ll stop before I list out all their songs. They’re all great, but this was the one that lit the way, and there’s still something special about it.
8. SHOOT THE MOON – Hugh Blumenfeld
Yeah, here’s another guy I wouldn’t be listening to if not for Siân. Hugh is actually a friend of hers, and she’s put various songs of his on mixes she’s made for me over the years, and I eventually became a fan. She and Kelly visited us in August of 2010, and she brought me four of his CDs at that time. My backlog being what it is, I ended up listening to them in November, which marks the beginning of this music-listening year for me. There were many songs I enjoyed from those CDs — I picked this one both because it reminded me of Dante and because it happened to have a wonderful resonance with another much-loved song from another much-loved Siân Mile artist…
9. THE SPACE RACE IS OVER – Billy Bragg
I think Bragg is Siân’s favorite artist overall, and another one I adopted because she passed some of his best stuff along to me. I’ve been buying more things in MP3 form in the past few years, to feed and fill the iPod’s sacred shuffle, but that’s meant that I don’t listen to them as closely as I do my CDs. Therefore, I periodically burn a batch to CD, and so it was with one CD from a Billy Bragg box set I’d downloaded a couple of years ago. It’s a fine collection — some songs I knew and liked because Siân had included them on various compilations, while others I heard for the first time and learned to love on my own. This was one of the latter. I think my jaw literally dropped when I heard him sing, “I watched the Eagle landing on a night when the moon was full / And as it tugged at the tides I knew that deep inside / I too could feel its pull.” What an incredibly gorgeous lyric. I love the way this song summons an elegiac and wistful tone for the bright future that might have been. I think it’s better than the Blumenfeld song, though that’s hardly a fair comparison, and they do pair so nicely.
10. PICTURE WINDOW – Ben Folds and Nick Hornby
This is from the album Lonely Avenue, in which Ben Folds and Nick Hornby do their version of an Elton John/Bernie Taupin partnership — Hornby wrote the lyrics and Folds wrote and performed all the music. It is a gorgeous album, and while it’s hard to pick a favorite song on it, this one emerged from the pack for a couple of reasons. First, I think it’s just heart-rendingly poignant; it’s easily the most moving song on the record. Second, it reminds me strongly of an experience that made a major impression on me this year. A very close friend of mine went through a horrible hospital experience this summer — her 12-year-old son went into the hospital as a result of multiple health issues crashing into each other. I visited them frequently during this period — her son loves comics and music, so I was able to relate to him and bring him some things to make him happy in that difficult hospital environment. I watched him suffer awful, awful mental and physical anguish, and I watched her agonize every day over him, playing the very difficult role of protector and intermediary between him and the institutional realities. There was a series of horrible situations produced by a combination of organizational dysfunction, misjudgements, parental personalities, and the nature of his issues, which weren’t easily pigeonholed. After several weeks of hell, he finally got some treatment that, although rather invasive, began to turn things around. They were in there for a couple of months total, and they’re still recovering. Watching your child suffer like that day after day is one of the worst things I can think of.
11. HELPLESS – k.d. lang
About 5 years ago I saw a movie called Away From Her, about a woman (played by Julie Christie) whose mind is slowly disintegrating from Alzheimer’s. It made a huge impression on me, and this song played over the credits of that movie. It blew my mind. lang’s incredible voice brings out a power I’d never heard in this song before, and every time I hear it, I feel this thick blanket of emotion settling over me. Eventually I sought out the album it came from — Hymns Of The 49th Parallel, in which lang covers all Canadian artists — and listened to it this year. Covers are definitely her metier, I think — her own material (with the exception of Ingenue) tends to fall flat for me. Whereas when she gets a hold of something that’s already really strong, like this song, she can make it profoundly affecting.
12. LIVING IN TWILIGHT – The Weepies
Remember when I said the skies are sunnier now? I know that’s true because we spent much of the earlier part of the year in the twilight this song so perfectly describes. Parts of my life this year were like one of those movies all scored by one artist (Magnolia, Harold & Maude, Good Will Hunting). The Weepies sang the soundtrack of my movie.
13. THE SOUND OF SETTLING – Death Cab For Cutie
Last year, Pink was the artist I discovered 10 years later than everyone else. This year, it was Death Cab For Cutie. I think I listened to their album Transatlanticism for about 3 weeks straight in September. It is just amazing. I knew I’d be picking a song from it for this compilation, and the choice was so difficult I just randomized it. Fittingly, this was one of the Death Cab songs that made me decide I needed to go out and buy their albums. I find the first lyric especially arresting: “I’ve got a hunger / twisting my stomach into knots / that my tongue has tied off.” Wow! I just love that.
14. YOU JUST HAVEN’T EARNED IT YET, BABY – Kirsty MacColl
There is one reason that things are better between Laura and I, and that reason is that we have worked our asses off this year to get to where we are. We have both been very committed to learning new ways of relating, and putting our new knowledge into practice. As a consequence, our conflicts are fewer, less frightening, and more quickly resolved. I don’t mean to make it sound like we’re finished working, but we’re closer than we’ve been in years, and we’ve earned it, baby. I’ve loved this song ever since hearing it on the She’s Having A Baby soundtrack in high school. I’ve never been much of a Smiths person — I like Johnny Marr well enough, but with a few big exceptions I just find Morrissey too grating. However, I do have strong affection for some Smiths covers, and this one tops the list. I adore Kirsty’s voice, and the production is gorgeous and uplifting. I can’t get enough of it.
15. ON SUNDAY – ‘Til Tuesday
‘Til Tuesday’s Welcome Home was another of those CDs I burned from downloaded MP3s. I’ve been a Mann fan for years, but never went beyond the “greatest hits” level with her old band. I like this song a lot, and it fit my life since part of my commitment with Laura was to do a regularly scheduled session of emotional/relationship work on Sundays when we didn’t have a couples therapy appointment. “Why spend your sadness now? / Save it up for me, on Sunday.”
16. ROCKS AND WATER (LIVE AT CHAUTAUQUA 2011-08-27) – The Weepies
As a part of my Weepy year, I saw them on tour at the Chautauqua Music Hall. It was a wonderful concert, everything I’d hoped it would be and more. The “more” was composed of a few things. One of these was actually the amazing set and lighting. They had this stylized miniature city set up on one side of the stage, and then kind of a forest glade on the other, and throughout the show, the lighting would change on various things to highlight different parts. At one point, a previously unseen river gets lit up, running through the city and the woods. You can get a little flavor of it from this photo, though obviously that doesn’t get at the different lighting changes. One of the other great parts was the new songs they played — well, new to me anyway. I have their albums, but forgot all about the fact that they had solo careers before they got together! This is a song from one of Deb’s solo records, and I just adored it the first time I heard it. As soon as I came home, I downloaded both her version and one that they did in an iTunes exclusive concert. However, neither version captivated me the way the concert version had. Lucky for me, some bright soul put up a bunch of clips from the concert on YouTube, so I used my handy-dandy DownloadHelper and turned the audio from that clip into an mp3. God bless the internet.
17. SEA AND SAND – The Who
Three things about this song. 1) I listened to Quadrophenia more intently this year than I had ever done before. For reasons “I Can’t Explain”, Quad was kind of a passed-over Who album from my youth, so I ended up really appreciating it much later than most of the rest of their material. 2) This song is a major standout from that album for me. It’s one of the most perfect Who songs to me, flawlessly blending Pete’s fantastic lyrics and storytelling with the immense power of the band. 3) Given that “Sea and Sand” was already on my list, how could I resist pairing it with “Rocks And Water”?
18. HERE COMES THE SUN/THE INNER LIGHT [TRANSITION] – The Beatles
I went to Las Vegas for a trivia convention this summer — a great experience. While I was there, I saw the Cirque Du Soleil show of The Beatles Love — an utterly transcendent experience. I’ve already written about how I spent most of the show with tears streaming down my face, so I won’t rehash all that. I just new that I needed to pick a song for this compilation to represent that experience. It was very hard to choose. I settled on this one both for the reasons I mentioned in the Paul Simon entry, and because this part of the show remains absolutely indelible for me. It wasn’t the yoga poses and the trapeze artists, though those were certainly eye-popping. Instead, it was the massive ball of candles, glowing warmly and rising from the center of the stage, as robed children sit on the edge, radiating joy from meditative poses.
19. ADD MY EFFORT – The Weepies
Yep, one more Weepies song. This one returns to the theme touched on earlier in the MacColl and ‘Til Tuesday songs. It’s about loving someone who frequently lives in darkness — really loving them. I was always adding my effort, but without understanding, that effort can be fruitless or even counterproductive. However, when understanding is there, effort can be enough.
20. CHEAPER THAN FREE (FEATURING DAVE STEWART) – Stevie Nicks
Yep, one more Stevie Nicks song. This the closer for In Your Dreams, and it felt like a perfect closer for this collection as well. It is a pure love song, and for me, purely magical. “What’s cheaper than free? You and me. What’s better than alone? Going home. What does money not buy? You and I. What’s not to feel, when love is real?”
Until next year…
Last year, I wrote about the Beatles album Love, an astonishingly brilliant mash-up of Beatles songs crafted by George and Giles Martin. That album is the soundtrack to a Cirque Du Soleil show of the same name, which appears in only one place in the world: the Mirage hotel and casino in Las Vegas. Well, when I knew I would be going to Vegas, exactly a year after writing about Love for the first time, I seized the opportunity to see the show.
I’m finding the experience of the show very difficult to put into words. Here are the words I gave it in an email I sent that night:
Oh my god, I think it may have been the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t stop crying. Seriously, I must have cried through like 70% of it. I kept thinking, “I can’t believe this is happening to me.”
Why? Well, a big part of it had to do with sound. I’ve never heard anything like the sound in that theater. They built the theater at the Mirage especially for this show. There are something like 6,000 speakers in it. Every seat has speakers embedded invisibly, including a speaker that faces the seat behind it. Hearing the incredible sound collage of Love in that theater… it feels like being inside the music. No, that’s not it. It felt like the music was inside me. I’ve been to plenty of concerts, including some where I was seated in the front row, directly in front of the band, hearing them play. This was different. The music was everywhere, not just in front of me, with pieces separated out — some close, some far, but all incredibly crisp and clear. It was perfect. It sounded perfect — like a sonic diamond. It would have been a moving experience just to sit in that theater and listen to the album, with no show at all.
But of course, there was a show. This was my first (and only) Cirque show, and it had what Cirque is known for: acrobatics, feats of daring, movements so graceful and gorgeous you can hardly believe they’re possible. “Humans in the service of beauty” should be their motto. And all of that was wonderful, and thrilling, but it wasn’t what was causing the tsunamis of emotion in me, or at least not in itself.
There was something remarkable, though, about seeing those movements synchronized with music that I love. Sometimes, the bodies on stage gave physical expression to the soaring, giddy feeling that was in me, inspired by a particular sound or lyric. Or a hopeful feeling, or a loving feeling, or sorrowful, or whatever. In a DVD extra to All Together Now, a documentary about the show, Yoko says, “Beatles were like acrobatics of the mind, and Cirque Du Soleil is the acrobatics of the body. When it comes together, it makes a kind of… something that’s whole.” She’s absolutely right. The other crucial quote from the film is from Dominic Champagne, director of the show: “You know, bodies go. George Harrison is dead, but we can really say that his spirit is with us, and we gave a body to that spirit. All together.”
It seems ridiculous to even try describing the various pieces of the show in any detail. It’s even worse than the old “dancing about architecture” bit, because the show is already dance, and theater, and art, about music. Not to mention, my powerful emotional reaction to it all makes me keep reaching for superlatives in a way that feels authentic to write, but I suspect is rather tedious to read.
So I’m not even going to try anything like a systematic recounting of the show, but instead just mention a few things that resonated intensely with me, and that remain strong memories of the show:
- The kids: For whatever reason, I just did not expect there to be kids in this show. The way they were used just blew me away. Since becoming a parent, I’ve gotten rather softhearted about children as symbols. Consequently, seeing them sit in happy meditative poses in front of a huge ball of candles for “Here Comes The Sun”, or rocket towards the sky on a bed whose billowing sheet envelops the audience in dreamy atmospherics, or scramble through the rubble of the Blitz, was quite moving for me.
- The imagery: Champagne calls the show “a rock and roll poem”, which aptly captures its astute use of imagery. Rather than just a greatest hits dance performance, or a musical homage, or, as I had originally imagined it, “a bunch of guys in tights, swinging from trapezes, forming human pyramids, and so forth”, the show is actually an evocation of some of the most important emotions woven into Beatles music. It does this with a deft use of images. Liverpool just after World War II — crumbling or destroyed brick edifices, exploded further by youthful energy. Groupies and Beatlemania — a girl with a dozen legs, frenetic in her movements. Longing and disappointment “As My Guitar Gently Weeps” — letters raining from the sky onto a solitary dancer. Lucy in the sky with diamonds — twinkling LED stars hang down everywhere, illuminating the swings and arcs of a trapeze artist.
- The voices: I don’t just mean the singing, though that was breathtaking, especially the a capella voices of “Because.” But beyond that, at several points in the show, Beatle shadows are projected onto screens or hanging muslin, and they move in sync with recordings of the Beatles talking, from studio sessions or casual chatter. Combined with the amazing sound quality, this produced an amazing feeling of intimacy, like you were right there with them. It was an especially wonderful surprise because those sounds are not included on the album.
I could go on, and on, but I won’t. Suffice it to say that if The Beatles hold a special and sacred place in your heart, as they do for me, Las Vegas has just become your Mecca. You must go there and experience Love in that theater, at least once in your life. I don’t know that everyone else will feel what I felt, though if you love the Beatles I suspect you will. For me, it was elevation, suffused with spiritual transcendence and love. If there’s such a thing as heaven, I hope it feels like that.
I got both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in English Literature, and for quite a while there I thought I was going to become an English professor, one of those new media and popular culture types combined with a wide swath of 19th century novels and poetry. Then I watched Laura go through her Ph.D. process, and thought, “There have to be less excruciating paths to travel — maybe I’ll pursue this computer thing.”
I don’t regret for a second my decision to abandon academia, but sometimes my brain starts to spark, and I think of the classes that might have been. Recent such sparkage has been inspired by Stevie Nicks’ new album, which I’ve been listening to many times over (as should surprise few who know me.) I’ve been wanting to write about all these flying thoughts, and suddenly I realized the perfect form. It allows me to gesture grandly towards a bunch of broad themes, without having to apply any actual rigor to discussing them. Hooray! Plus, since it’s imaginary, I don’t have to try to engage with some of the more irritating (to me) aspects of what the field has become, or rather what it was 17 years ago, the last time I read a syllabus. It’s my party, and I don’t have to invite Julia Kristeva if I don’t want to…
In Her Dreams: The Allusive Stevie Nicks
DESCRIPTION
Stevie Nicks’ 2011 album In Your Dreams serves as a capstone to her 35-year career as a singer/songwriter. Its songs both build upon and comment upon many of the themes, poetic modes, and even specific lyrics that emerge from her considerable body of work. Beyond that, they draw from a rich variety of sources — literary, cinematic, musical, autobiographical, and more. As is typical of Nicks, their meanings are layered and their referents not always clear. This class will explore issues of allusion, intertextuality, and influence both external and internal, using the work of Stevie Nicks as a lens and the structure of In Your Dreams as a frame.
COURSE PLAN
We will meet once per week, with each session dedicated to exploring a different aspect of Nicks’ work, as highlighted by a particular song or songs from In Your Dreams. Naturally, these themes enrich each other, so we’ll bring them together more and more as the class goes on, with a couple of sessions at the end devoted to synthesizing what we’ve learned. Class sessions will be focused on discussion, and participation will comprise a key part of the course grade. The other elements of the grade are a final paper and two Chain Links projects, explained below in the Grading section. For each class session, course material will be assigned along with supplementary reading, viewing, or listening of interviews and documentary programs.
GRADING PLAN
Your grade will be based on the following components:
1) Regular attendance and active, engaged participation in class discussions. Students are expected to have paid careful attention to that week’s assigned material, be it words, music, or video, and to arrive in class having already thought through some of its implications and interconnections. I encourage you to do further reading and listening beyond what’s assigned — the more you know, the better you’ll be able to recognize important connections.
2) Two Chain Links projects. As we’ll see in this course, Nicks’ work is deeply engaged with a panoply of sources, works that resonate and harmonize with each other. Together, these works form a web of influence, “the web that is my own” as she sings in “Edge of Seventeen.” The purpose of Chain Links projects is to add to this web. The nature of what you create can be fairly free-form: songs, films, essays, stories, poems, paintings, plays, and computer games are all examples of viable projects. However, while their form is flexible, their content must meet some specific requirements. First, all Chain Links projects must be engaged with Nicks’ work, either directly or on a clear thematic level. Secondly, all Chain Links projects must be approved by me in advance. Meetings will be scheduled during my office hours for these approvals. I also strongly recommend that you bring works in progress to me for coaching sessions, to ensure that you’re on the right track. Because of the flexible nature of these assignments, grading is highly subjective — let’s be sure we’re on the same page.
3) A final research paper, 12-15 pages in length. This is a thesis-driven paper on a topic of your choice, due at the final exam session for the course. As with the Chain Links projects, you are required to discuss your topic with me before turning in your final paper. I expect a research paper to be original in its conception, rigorous in its argument, and polished in its execution. Remember, an “A” paper is one that teaches me something.
Final evaluation components are weighted as follows:
20%: Participation
20%: First Chain Links project
20%: Second Chain Links project
40%: Final paper
ASSIGNED READING
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Fleetwood: My Life And Adventures In Fleetwood Mac, Mick Fleetwood
Storms: My Life With Lindsey Buckingham And Fleetwood Mac, Carol Ann Harris
Complete Stories And Poems, Edgar Allan Poe
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
Interview With The Vampire, Anne Rice
The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice
Reading Packet: Selected articles and interviews
ASSIGNED VIEWING
New Moon, Chris Weitz
The Dance, Fleetwood Mac
Selected interviews and program excerpts
ASSIGNED LISTENING
Fleetwood Mac – “Angel” [Tusk]
Fleetwood Mac – “Destiny Rules” [Say You Will]
Fleetwood Mac – “Dreams” [Rumours]
Fleetwood Mac – “Everybody Finds Out” [Say You Will]
Fleetwood Mac – “Eyes Of The World” [Mirage]
Fleetwood Mac – “Freedom” [Behind The Mask]
Fleetwood Mac – “Gypsy” [Mirage]
Fleetwood Mac – “Illume (9/11)” [Say You Will]
Fleetwood Mac – “I’m So Afraid” [Fleetwood Mac]
Fleetwood Mac – “Not Make Believe” [mp3 provided]
Fleetwood Mac – “Silver Springs” (1997 live version) [The Dance]
Fleetwood Mac – “Sisters Of The Moon” [Tusk]
Fleetwood Mac – “Storms” [Tusk]
Fleetwood Mac – “Sweet Girl” [The Dance]
Fleetwood Mac – “That’s Alright” [Mirage]
Stevie Nicks – In Your Dreams [full album]
Stevie Nicks – “After The Glitter Fades” [Bella Donna]
Stevie Nicks – “Battle Of The Dragon” [Enchanted]
Stevie Nicks – “Bella Donna” [Bella Donna]
Stevie Nicks – “Candlebright” [Trouble In Shangri-La]
Stevie Nicks – “Desert Angel” [Timespace]
Stevie Nicks – “Edge Of Seventeen” [Bella Donna]
Stevie Nicks – “Enchanted” [The Wild Heart]
Stevie Nicks – “Fire Burning” [The Other Side Of The Mirror]
Stevie Nicks – “Ghosts” [The Other Side Of The Mirror]
Stevie Nicks – “Have No Heart” (demo) [mp3 provided]
Stevie Nicks – “I Can’t Wait” [Rock A Little]
Stevie Nicks – “If Anyone Falls…” [The Wild Heart]
Stevie Nicks – “Lady From The Mountain” (demo) [mp3 provided]
Stevie Nicks – “Leather And Lace” [Bella Donna]
Stevie Nicks – “Long Way To Go” [The Other Side Of The Mirror]
Stevie Nicks – “Love Is” [Trouble In Shangri-La]
Stevie Nicks – “No Spoken Word” [Rock A Little]
Stevie Nicks – “Rooms On Fire” [The Other Side Of The Mirror]
Stevie Nicks – “Rose Garden” [Street Angel]
Stevie Nicks – “Secret Love” (demo) [mp3 provided]
Stevie Nicks – “Sleeping Angel” [Enchanted]
Stevie Nicks – “Sorcerer” [Trouble In Shangri-La]
Stevie Nicks – “Stand Back” [The Wild Heart]
Stevie Nicks – “Street Angel” [Street Angel]
Stevie Nicks – “Touched By An Angel” [Sweet November Soundtrack]
Stevie Nicks – “The Wild Heart” [The Wild Heart]
Selected interviews
CALENDAR
Supplemental interviews and articles will be assigned each week along with the scheduled reading, listening, and viewing.
Week 1: Introduction — A brief history of Stevie
In-class listening: “The Chain”, “Dreams”, “Go Your Own Way”
Week 2: “Must secret loves secretly die?” — Clandestine romance and veiled autobiography
Reading due: Fleetwood: My Life And Adventures In Fleetwood Mac
Listening due: “Secret Love”, “Stand Back”, “Everybody Finds Out”, “Secret Love” (demo)
Week 3: “Part of a great romance” — Retrospection and introspection
Reading due: Storms: My Life With Lindsey Buckingham And Fleetwood Mac
Listening due: “For What It’s Worth”, “Rose Garden”, “Love Is”, “Sweet Girl”
Week 4: “Always in and out of your light” — Power struggles and regrets
Reading due: Jane Eyre
Listening due: “In Your Dreams”, “Dreams”, “Silver Springs”, “Bella Donna”
Viewing due: The Dance
Week 5: “In the smoke and the fire” — Fiction and reality
First Chain Links project due
Reading due: Wide Sargasso Sea
Listening due: “Wide Sargasso Sea”, “Fire Burning”, “I Can’t Wait”, “No Spoken Word”
Week 6: “I stare at my city” — Permeable roles and the general maternal
Reading due: Interview With The Vampire
Listening due: “New Orleans”, “Illume (9/11)”, “Ghosts”
Week 7: “The candle burns bright” — Rock and roll vampires
Reading due: The Vampire Lestat
Listening due: “Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream)”, “Candlebright”, “Lady From The Mountain” (demo), “Sorcerer”
Viewing due: New Moon
Week 8: “The moon never beams without bringing me dreams” — American gothicism
Reading due: Selections from Edgar Allan Poe
Listening due: “Annabel Lee”, “Gypsy”, “Have No Heart” (demo), “Storms”, “Edge Of Seventeen”
Week 9: “I am a soldier’s mother” — Permeable roles and the specific maternal
Listening due: “Soldier’s Angel”, “Desert Angel”, “Eyes Of The World”, “Battle Of The Dragon”, “Freedom”
Week 10: “But you’re so alone” — Isolation within adulation
Second Chain Links project due
Listening due: “Everybody Loves You”, “Sisters Of The Moon”, “Not Make Believe”, “Enchanted”
Week 11: “Like a ghost through the fog” — Closures and hauntings
Listening due: “Ghosts Are Gone”, “Angel”, “Long Way To Go”
Listening to revisit: “Sweet Girl”, “Silver Springs”, “Ghosts”
Week 12: “Love was everywhere, you just had to fall” — Storybook romance
Listening due: “Italian Summer”, “The Wild Heart”, “If Anyone Falls…”, “Destiny Rules”, “Rooms On Fire”
Week 13: “I used to dream that you were an angel” — Resonance of recurring themes
Listening due: “You May Be The One”, “Sleeping Angel”, “Touched By An Angel”, “Street Angel”, “I’m So Afraid”
Week 14: “Deeper than a deep well” — Country music and love songs
Listening due: “Cheaper Than Free”, “Leather And Lace”, “After The Glitter Fades”, “That’s Alright”
On day 2 of TCONA, the first trivia event was scheduled at 8:30am, but it was the Quiz Bowl Seeding Test, which I co-wrote. So I wouldn’t be taking it, which was all for the best, since I’d had a late night. I left my sister asleep in our room and toddled on down to the conference room around 9:45, as the test was breaking up.
The next event was “LearnedLeague Live!”, hosted by Shayne Bushfield, or rather his alter ego, Commissioner Thorsten A. Integrity. If you’re not familiar with LearnedLeague, it requires a bit of explanation. The game is played over the Internet, six questions per day in a variety of categories, and with varying levels of challenge. The twist is that each 6-question match places you head-to-head against another player. You must not only answer the questions, but also play defense against the other player by assigning a point value to each question — a zero, two ones, two twos, and a three. The points are how much the other player will score upon answering the question right. Consequently, you’re required to both assess the difficulty of each question and also guess your opponent’s chances at getting it right, depending on his or her skills in the category. And LL provides zillions of stats, so you can make this analysis just as painstaking as you like.
When I first heard about the game, it sounded a bit overwhelming, intimidating, and time-consuming. I stayed away for a while, and then even after I was ready to join, I had to wait to be invited by a trivia buddy. Now that I’m in it, I love it. The questions are excellent, the format is fun, and the whole thing is quite addictive. The live version of it was a lot of fun too. The group was seated at a bunch of tables, 8 people to a table. Each player was assigned a number and given a packet of questions. Then we faced off in a series of 7 four-minute matches — you’d turn the page to reveal the questions, scribble down your answers and assign points to them, then the Commissioner would read off the answers. You’d compare notes with your opponent to learn your scores, and figure out who won the match. Here’s a sample set of questions, along with the point values I gave them and whether I got them right or wrong:
- Name the three yellow properties in the standard American version of the board game Monopoly. (1 point, wrong)
- This 1942 Aaron Copland ballet tells the story of a young woman, accomplished in all the skills of a cowpoke, who hopes to attract the attentions of the head wrangler on a ranch; commensurate with the pre-feminist tradition of the day, he is unimpressed by her skill but succumbs to her charms when she trades her cowboy duds for a dress and shows a more “womanly” side at the ranch dance. (3 points, wrong)
- Among other things, this film is known for G, A, F, (octave lower) F, C. (0, right)
- The holiest city of Zoroastrianism, Rhaga, is today known as Rey, a suburb of what western Asian city? (2, wrong)
- What is the mode in this number series? 1,2,2,3,3,4,4,4,5,5,5,5,13,17,17 (2, right)
- This word can be used generally to apply to any appendix or supplement, but when used as a legal term refers specifically to an amendment to a will. (1, right)
It was a whole lot of fun. I ended up with a record of 3-2-2, which is pretty comparable to how I tend to perform in online LL (I ended my first season 13-11-1, and I’m 18-15-3 overall.) That meant that I didn’t advance to the championship round which was held later that day. My teammate (and tablemate, and the guy who actually invited me to LL) George Doro did, though, and ended up taking the silver medal overall! (Did I mention that TCONA gave out actual medals to event winning individuals and teams? It was pretty cool.)
After lunch was one of my favorite parts of the entire event: a panel featuring Ken Jennings, Bob Harris, and Ed Toutant, talking about Jennings’ match (with Brad Rutter, who bailed on TCONA in the 11th hour) against IBM’s Watson computer. This, as you may know, was an event that I found fascinating, so a live panel on it with Jennings himself was catnip for me. Even better, it turns out that Toutant, in addition to being rich and famous (well, game-show famous), spent his career as an IBM engineer, and served as a consultant to the team that built Watson. He observed the computer’s behavior in its middle stages, and wrote a report that provided his insights as both a software designer and a game-show expert. After that, he played against Watson in its final practice matches before it went in front of the cameras. Toutant’s report is available online at edtoutant.blogspot.com. I particularly enjoyed his entry on gamesmanship, which not only has very insightful tips about Jeopardy! strategy, but finally explains why Watson chose such bizarre dollar amounts for its Daily Double wagers!
The panel explained that there are four strategic elements in Jeopardy:
- Daily Double wagering
- Picking a square
- Buzzing or not
- Final Jeopardy wagering
Watson was programmed to take advantage of all these strategic elements to the best of its ability. It picked squares to maximize its chances of finding a Daily Double — these generally occur in the harder clues (the bottom 3 clues of each row), and I was fascinated to discover that according to the unbelievably comprehensive J! Archive, the first column on the board has by far the highest percentage of Daily Doubles found. Watson based its buzz on its confidence level — a delay was intentionally built in on answers where Watson was less confident. And the reason why it wagered such peculiar numbers for Daily Doubles was basically to increase its chances of screwing up an opponent’s mental math. As Toutant wrote, “One of the most challenging parts of Jeopardy! for many players is the need to do quick math in their head under pressure, especially when making a bet. It is always easier for humans to do math that involves only round numbers. Unlike humans, Watson can’t get flustered and forget to carry the one during addition. So Watson should exploit his inherent math superiority by never using a round number on a Daily Double wager… This may give viewers the impression that Watson’s thinking is very precise, but the real motivation is to make the math more difficult for his opponents when they have to make a wager.”
Another great aspect of this panel, and of TCONA in general, was the opportunity to spend some time with Jennings. I wasn’t watching Jeopardy during his run, so he isn’t an icon to me at quite the level he is to some people, but he’s still the closest thing the trivia world to has a rock star. How cool it is, then, that he is down to earth, funny, and personable. In a roomful of trivia nerds, social skills stand out, and Jennings excels in this arena. Interestingly, he didn’t dominate every competition. He held his own, but was beaten in some events. I ended up convinced that his knowledge is very strong, but what made him so hard to beat in Jeopardy was his extraordinary touch on the buzzer — he’s just about peerless in this physical aspect of trivia. Well, unless he’s competing against a computer. Jennings’ own account of TCONA is here.
After the panel were the quiz bowl matches. If you’re not familiar with the quiz bowl format, I explain it here. I think it is still my favorite trivia format. It combines individual challenge (in the toss-ups) with team synergy (in the bonuses), and it encourages that zen trivia flow state that I love. This time, unfortunately, the fates were not with my team. The six-person Anti-Social network added a couple of friends and split into two four-person teams. In addition to that, our team took on an extra person, a Las Vegas native who had shown up solo at TCONA and was seeking a team to join with. He was knowledgeable, but a bit eager, and not terribly accustomed to the format, so there was a bit of a breaking-in period there. Unfortunately, once that period was over, we only had a couple of games left. We played five games in a round-robin format, and ended up doing well in the later ones, but it wasn’t enough to advance us to the finals. On the plus side, I got to spend some time with Dave Gatch, who wasn’t participating in TCONA as a player, but who came out to Vegas to serve as a reader for the quiz bowl portion. (Dave and his mom come to Vegas a lot, so apparently it wasn’t a big sacrifice.)
After flaming out in the quiz bowl, that was pretty much it for my trivia day — the only other events that day were playoffs for which I hadn’t qualified. So that meant that my sister and I got to hit the town! We took the monorail to the Bellagio, saw the fountains, gambled a bit. She took me to a fancy dinner at a wonderful restaurant called Olives, where we had so much delicious food. Once again, we wandered around gambling and hanging out. I taught her a bit more about video poker and she taught me a bit more about slots. At the end, we headed back to Bill’s room for a little more pseudo-Jeopardy, then gambled into the night. It was a great, great time, and a great close to a second day of Vegas and trivia.
Day 3 was playoffs and championships, and I wasn’t much involved. I stuck around to watch the quiz bowl finals, but for some inexplicable reason they chose to repeat a set of questions for the semi-finals — not a lot of fun to sit and watch the same questions asked twice. So I bowed out at some point and went to a final buffet lunch with my sister before she caught her plane for home. I still had one more night at the hotel — I had tickets to see The Beatles’ LOVE (Cirque Du Soleil show) at the Mirage that night. I decided after hearing the album that I had to make a pilgrimage to see the show, so there was no question that if I was in Las Vegas, I’d be going.
And I’m so, so glad I did, but that experience deserves a post all its own. For now, let’s revisit those Learned League questions:
- Name the three yellow properties in the standard American version of the board game Monopoly. Atlantic Avenue, Ventnor Avenue, Marvin Gardens
- This 1942 Aaron Copland ballet tells the story of a young woman, accomplished in all the skills of a cowpoke, who hopes to attract the attentions of the head wrangler on a ranch; commensurate with the pre-feminist tradition of the day, he is unimpressed by her skill but succumbs to her charms when she trades her cowboy duds for a dress and shows a more “womanly” side at the ranch dance. Rodeo (You’ve probably heard its most famous song, Hoe-Down).
- Among other things, this film is known for G, A, F, (octave lower) F, C. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (This.)
- The holiest city of Zoroastrianism, Rhaga, is today known as Rey, a suburb of what western Asian city? Tehran
- What is the mode in this number series? 1,2,2,3,3,4,4,4,5,5,5,5,13,17,17 5 (Mode means the number occurring most often.)
- This word can be used generally to apply to any appendix or supplement, but when used as a legal term refers specifically to an amendment to a will. Codicil
I ended up tying my opponent in this match, with a score of 5 points each.