Paul O'Brian writes about Watchmen, trivia, albums, interactive fiction, and more.

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Put On Some Silver

Because I’m sending these year-end CDs to Wales, my listening year runs November to October, giving me time to assemble and mail a mix in time for Christmas. This year, that meant I’d done most of the assembly work during the first week of November. Shortly after that, you may or may not have heard, the United States held a presidential election. It was a pretty low-key affair — only about 55% of us actually bothered to vote. What’s more, we have this quirky system that gives more power per voter to rural (ahem, whiter) areas of the country than to more diverse urban areas, a system we’ve decided to reinforce by drawing super-crazy boundaries around congressional districts in order to keep them as ideologically homogeneous as possible.

Anyway, when faced with a choice between the most dangerous and least qualified major party nominee, like, ever, and a woman with decades of political experience and a clear, proven track record of working to help vulnerable people with compassionate policies, we of course chose the qualified woman. That is to say, more people voted for her. Like, a couple million more. But, funny thing, she’s not actually going to get to become president, because the couple million extra people who voted for her live in the wrong states. Did I mention we have a quirky system?

Anyway, for people like me who were rooting for the qualified woman to not only win the most votes but also to get elected president, it’s been kind of an emotional time. You know how after you go through a big breakup or suffer some kind of major loss, every single song that comes on the radio seems to gain this halo of extra resonance, to get freighted with a bunch of additional meaning so that it turns out all those songs are about EXACTLY WHAT YOU’RE SUFFERING, who knew? Listening to music was kind of like that for a few weeks in November.

That experience seems to have permanently infiltrated my experience of making this mix, and thus of listening to these songs. So it’s possible these liner notes may feel a bit repetitive for that reason. Oh, and also for the reason that a bunch of these songs have already been written about in the context of my ongoing album assignments project. All those messy caveats aside, here’s a mix of songs I was listening to in 2016, and a few thoughts about each one.

1. Taylor SwiftClean
This was the year I got around to 1989. The Taylor Swift album, I mean. I’d never been drawn to her stuff too much previously, though she did always seem to me like the real thing, a talented singer-songwriter who was committed to a musical life, rather than being a video pop tart. But the country idiom isn’t a natural one for me, so I never sought her out until I heard the infectious and addictive “Shake It Off.” (And stay tuned for that one.) A few singles into this album and I knew it was for me. I wasn’t wrong, either — I love the whole thing, and this track is especially compelling to me. It’s a collaboration between TS and Imogen Heap, who herself vaulted onto my list after this. Her album is on the docket for next year. “Clean” is a relationship song, clearly, but heard in the November context it was how I was hoping to feel on the 9th. That didn’t work out.

2. Jefferson AirplaneEmbryonic Journey
As I wrote in my review of Surrealistic Pillow, I think this is my favorite rock instrumental of all time. I find it absolutely transcendent, in a way that defies encapsulation in language. Maybe that’s part of the definition of “transcendent.”

3. Joni MitchellCarey
Blue was an assigned album this year, and listening to it I was struck anew at just how gorgeous it is. Every note sounds so pure and right. Every song feels on par with all the others, so picking a song from it was a bit arbitrary. “Carey”, though, feels emblematic of the album, musically joyful and lyrically both aching and celebratory. I love the bohemian images, and the feel of reveling in the sweetness of life just as we still revel in the sweetness of this album. The lyric “put on some silver” makes me think of making the choice to embrace life and happiness even in dark times. It seemed a fitting title for this collection.

4. Fountains Of WayneAction Hero
After getting to know FoW last year, I dove deeper this year, branching into some other albums, including their (presumably final) entry from 2011, Sky Full Of Holes. It’s a typically great collection, but for me this song stands above most of the rest. There’s the usual lyrical cleverness, stringing together rhyme chains like “tests”, “chest”, “best”, “guess”, “rest”, and “stress”, with an internal rhyme of “suggest” thrown in there as a flourish. But the moment that gives me goosebumps everytime is after the second chorus, when the music swells underneath “and he’s racing against time.” Where the action hero metaphor starts out comical, with the man serving as a bit of a punchline, by the end of the second chorus his true heroism reveals itself to us, reflecting upon us the way we’re all racing against time.

5. The LumineersSubmarines
On a musical level, I find this song hypnotic. The way it switches time signatures back and forth keeps me wonderfully off-balance, and the mix of instrumental voices is a pleasure — strong piano, subtle cello, stomps and snares for percussion. Lyrically, it’s about seeing a danger coming that nobody else believes. I can imagine there were a few who could relate to that feeling recently. I wasn’t one of them, though — I’m not sure whether I wish I’d seen it coming or not. That’s a bit like the old philosophical question about knowing the time and manner of your own death.

6. The MotelsSuddenly Last Summer
I think The Motels are one of the most underrated bands of the 1980s. I love Martha Davis’ voice, and her writing often has a mysterious, evocative quality, hinting at truths greater than the words can capture. This song is a perfect example — I’m not sure exactly what it’s about, but you can’t miss the the yearning, regret, and pain in the music. It always makes me think of how some incident can change your life completely in an instant, branching you into a future very different from the one you expected. For me, the words “one summer never ends, one summer never begins” are about that inflection point.

7. Bob DylanPositively 4th Street
I listened to a lot of Bob Dylan this year. The subtitle of this mix may as well be “Hope Ya Like Dylan!” He’ll be showing up frequently in this list. This song is one of the best kiss-off tunes of all time. In Dylan’s context, I think it’s about the false friends he had in the Greenwich Village folk community, people who pretended to love him but were in fact jealous of his success and ready to undermine him at any turn. (At least, from his perception — no doubt there are many sides to that story.) In the 2016 context, it’s about seeing through bullshit, something we’ve all had to become well acquainted with.

8. Peter GabrielLovetown
Here’s a little-known Peter Gabriel track, from the soundtrack to the 1993 movie Philadelphia. Like many of the soundtrack’s songs, it’s an interpretation of the tone of the movie — a complement to Neil Young’s “city of brotherly love, don’t turn your back on me,” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Oh brother are you gonna leave me wastin’ away on the streets of Philadelphia?” Gabriel’s song is more subtle, more translucent than transparent. But that’s where I think its power resides. It brims with powerful images, like “do those teeth still match the wound” and the corresponding “whose lonely lips will find these hidden scars?” I listened to that soundtrack this year, and even though I love most of the other songs on it, this one felt the richest and the deepest to me.

9. The Velvet Underground & NicoVenus In Furs
As I wrote, this is the song that captivated me most when I listened to the VU’s debut album on assignment this year. It illuminates an unusual relationship to suffering — pain as release, pain as freedom, pain as comfort. It’s not my path — as Armatrading said, “It’s their way of loving, not mine.” But I’ve learned about it from friends, and come to see it as another aspect of diversity, and possibly even a different approach to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. It’s a brilliant purple candle flame in a darkened room, casting weird shadows on the wall but nevertheless an irresistible cynosure.

10. Bob DylanUp To Me
Oh, “Up To Me.” The way these mixes come about is that as I go through the year of music listening, I keep throwing standout tracks into a playlist, and then I pick from that group when November comes around. There are always more songs than would fit on a single CD, so some culling is necessary, and that’s all to the good. Some songs, though, I mark as sure keepers, that will make the mix no matter what else doesn’t. This is one of those songs. I found it on the third disc of Dylan’s 1985 box set Biograph. I listen to music mostly during my commute, and when a song particularly catches my interest, I repeat it. And when it obsesses me, I repeat it until I’ve learned it. That’s what happened to me with this song, which is every bit as good as anything from Blood On The Tracks, one of my favorite Dylan incarnations. It feels like an epic novel to me, but condensed down into a series of scenes that indelibly carve the runes of friendship, regret, responsibility, loyalty, and memory.

11. Stevie NicksSisters Of The Moon (demo)
There was a period, probably about a decade ago, where conditions in my life and conditions on the Internet were ripe for gathering lots and lots of Stevie bootlegs. People had web sites up where they’d feature some collection of mp3s for a week, then take those down and put up a whole new set, week after week, site after site. Some of this stuff gets pretty repetitive — how many fan-taped shows from the 2002-03 Fleetwood Mac tour does one person need? (Answer: a combination of “the best quality one” and “the one from early in the tour where they hadn’t dropped the rare songs yet.”) But there’s one collection that stands as my favorite. It was labeled “Gems” by whoever put it up, and the description is apt. It’s piano demos, mostly young Stevie singing by herself, accompanying herself, doing versions of her songs from when they were freshly written. Of that collection, this one is my favorite, an acoustic “Sisters Of The Moon” before it became a Fleetwood Mac powerhouse, when it was just a spooky, hushed, mystical gauze draped over a Tiffany lamp.

12. Buckingham NicksCrying In The Night
When I saw her on October 27th, Stevie’s set was full of surprises, but none more surprising than this one. This is the opening track from the Buckingham Nicks album, the one she and Lindsey released before they were invited to join Fleetwood Mac. This album isn’t even available to buy — it’s been out of print since a few months after it was released in 1973, and has never even come out on CD. (At least, not in a version released by any record company.) I never, ever expected to hear it live, and it was a huge thrill. Maybe that means we’ll see a disc one of these years? We keep hoping.

13. The PretendersStop Your Sobbing
Yes, The Pretenders and Stevie Nicks are side by side in this mix because they were side by side in concert. And yes, pairing “Crying In The Night” with “Stop Your Sobbing” was no accident. But I’d likely select this song even without the thematic connection, because Chrissie’s performance on it was her fiercest of the night. Yeah, it’s a Kinks cover, but for me this is a Pretenders song through and through, and one of the best. This month, it also represents what to do next.

14. The PoliceTruth Hits Everybody
Now here’s a song that resonated in November. I’d just assigned Outlandos d’Amour the month before, and rediscovered the furious allure of The Police as a young band, especially Stewart Copeland. Now, listening back to the music I’d selected from the year, this song jumped out at me and took me by the throat. Reality has seldom felt so merciless.

15. Bob DylanTombstone Blues
Here’s another version of merciless truth, one flooded with metaphor and cloaked in symbol, but the chorus is pretty plainspoken: “Mama’s in the factory, she ain’t got no shoes / Daddy’s in the alley, he’s looking for food / I am in the kitchen with the tombstone blues.” Sure, there’s Belle Starr and John the Baptist and Galileo and Gypsy Davey and on and on, but at its heart this song is about poverty, desperation, and death. It turns out those are powerful forces that, in a democracy, can be harnessed and pointed at a target. Sometimes, the target is even the people themselves, though they only find that out later.

16. Jenny Lewis with the Watson TwinsThe Big Guns
The commander-in-chief says, “Death to all those who would whimper and cry.” Okay, I’m still on the previous song, but it connects right up. This Jenny Lewis solo album is much closer to the parts of Rilo Kiley that I love than was the actual last Rilo Kiley album. This track was a standout when I listened to it months ago, but it really jumped up when I was putting the mix together. “I’ll pretend that everybody here wants peace / Have mercy, have mercy, have mercy on me / Cause we’re tired and lonely and we’re bloody.” Some people just love the big guns, and we’re going to be hearing a lot more from them soon. Not that the last 8 years were some peaceful haven — we’re still in some kind of 1984 state of constant war — but it was directionally correct, and we’re about to lose that, I think.

17. HeartGoodbye Blue Sky (live)
Which leads right into this. I think it’s very hard to cover Pink Floyd successfully — I’ve not even heard that many people try. But I absolutely adore this version of “Goodbye Blue Sky.” It comes from a Heart live album in which they play the entirety of Dreamboat Annie, and then go on to cover some of the other people’s songs they loved from that period. The original of this is fantastically sinister, but the Ann Wilson treatment just launches it into the stratosphere, no unsettling reference intended. The incredible sense of menace and power fit my November mood perfectly.

18. ColdplayAmsterdam
The turning point. This song captivated me when I listened to A Rush Of Blood To The Head on assignment. I connected with it emotionally far more than any other song on the album. To me, this song is about being in the deep well of despair, for a time that feels it will stretch into eternity, and then finally seeing a shaft of sunlight break through. Right at 3:57, the song absolutely takes off, and the feeling changes from hopelessness to freedom. I’ve been through this once already. In 2004, I gave up on us in disgust, only to witness what felt like a miracle in 2008. This time, I’m not giving up — we just have to keep climbing until we get to that sunlight.

19. Bob DylanThe Times They Are A-Changin’
This song was first played on October 26, 1963. Less than a month later, and before the song was released on an album, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, giving the clarion words an entirely different cast. Yet when we hear it now, it signals all the good changes that came out of that painful decade. The words, though, can play either as hopeful or foreboding, or maybe both at the same time. “The battle outside ragin’ / Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls.” That’s where we are. But the change doesn’t stop, and we can be a part of it.

20. Taylor SwiftShake It Off
So here we are. I started with a wish to be clean, but it’s a dirty time that lies ahead. But I can’t stay mud-encrusted. As much as I can, I have to rise above, and the only way I know to do that is to connect with human joy. This song crystallizes that for me. Haters gonna hate, and that’s not something we can change. What can we do? Shake, shake, shake it off. 🙂 And look forward to 2017, despite everything.

Happy New Year.

Wait Another Day

This year’s music mix has a new factor thrown in. Normally these collections are culled from the music I’ve been listening to over the previous year (with “year” being defined as November – October, so I can get the CD mailed to Wales in time for Christmas). That part hasn’t changed, but the new factor is the album assignments game I’ve been playing with Robby over the fall. That’s changed my listening habits, so that a couple of days out of each week are now devoted to a particular album, with the aim of writing about it later. That’s brought in some things that wouldn’t have been in my regular rotation — Elvis Costello and The Clash among them. It also means that some of this stuff I’ve already written about, so I’ll try not to repeat myself. Of course, that means I may be a bit briefer than usual on some tunes.

1. The Airborne Toxic EventNo More Lonely Nights
Case in point. TATE is now on my “to-do” list after this track, which performs the minor miracle of resurrecting this Give My Regards To Broad Street tune into something subtle and moving.

2. Stevie NicksBelle Fleur
Okay, I just wrote four paragraphs of background about Stevie’s 24 Karat Gold album, then realized that they’re supposed to go in my article about the album itself. Robby doesn’t know it yet (as I write this), but I’m assigning that album to him next.

Meanwhile, a few words about this song. It’s an example of a song that I’ve had in demo form for decades, but never really connected with that much. This re-recording, on the other hand, moves me a lot. To me, it’s a story of love and magic, but not magic love — it’s no ticket to dreamland. What it is, though, is an exchange of stories, and a sharing of lives — you sing to me, and I’ll sing to you.

3. Joe JacksonOde To Joy
Speaking of new albums from old friends, I just saw Joe Jackson in concert in October, touring to support his new record Fast Forward. This was my favorite song he played that night, and my favorite from the new CD. I love its wholehearted embrace of joy, joy as a pure experience unfettered by the material and phenomenological planes. The New Yorker did a wonderful profile of Joe, and one of my favorite parts of that is this quote:

Some of my early stuff was infected by the deadly disease of cynicism, which is a disease of the young, I think. When you’re young, it seems very clever to be cynical. But as you get older, hopefully, if you’re not completely stupid, you realize that you have to be a bit more positive, as a simple matter of survival.

I happened to listen to this album right before reviewing Don Henley’s Cass County, and Joe’s optimism is a lovely contrast to some the harshness on display there. And being Joe, he cleverly quotes Beethoven in the bargain.

4. Elvis CostelloMystery Dance
I wonder if the kind of world that could produce this song is gone forever. Can sex still be mysterious when so much information about it is so easily retrieved? Sure, there’s a world of difference between reading about something and doing it, and lots of what’s out there could warp a kid’s perceptions and blur the difference between fantasy and reality, but there was a time in living memory when you could try and try and still be mystified. Does that happen anymore?

5. The ClashDeath Or Glory
I can hardly say more about this than I did in my London Calling post. Suffice it to say that I put it on repeat in my car for a day, and never got sick of it. And I drive a lot! It’s as energizing the 20th time as it was the first.

6. Fleetwood MacSongbird (live)
This last year was a special one for Fleetwood Mac fans, because we saw something we never thought we’d see again: Chrstine McVie touring with the band. I actually saw them in December 2014 and April 2015, which is why there are two songs from the set list on this CD. In April, she didn’t play “Songbird” — apparently she was dealing with some kind of injury, because it came back to the set later. She played it in December though, and it’s just the most perfect set closer. I never got the chance to see Fleetwood Mac in its prime — my first FM show was the 1987 tour where they replaced Lindsey with two other guitarists, and my first time seeing the classic lineup was in 1997. That was also my last time until now. It was such a joy to hear this song at the end of the show. This recording is from 1977, and was included in the Rumours expanded edition that they released a couple of years ago. [The YouTube clip I linked to above is from a different 1977 show — I couldn’t find the expanded edition one online.]

7. Tori AmosPromise
I’ve been a Tori Amos fan for a long time now, so I was aware that she had a daughter named Tash. But that wasn’t uppermost in my mind while I was listening to her new album Unrepentant Geraldines this year. So when I heard this song, I could tell it was a duet, but I didn’t recognize the other voice — all I could hear was that it was somebody who had a lot on common with Tori vocally. As I listened to the lyrics, discerning that this was a conversation between mother and daughter, I started to wonder, “Could this be Tash?” And sure enough, it is. That realization sent chills through me. Tash was born on 2000, so she was probably 13 when this song was recorded. Given that, it’s a remarkable performance, and as a parent I find the lyrics very moving.

8. Roger McGuinnIf We Never Meet Again
I revisited McGuinn’s album Back From Rio this year — I’ve always liked his twelve-string guitar sound, and this is my favorite of his non-Byrds releases. This time around, “If We Never Meet Again” latched onto me. The tone is just golden, and the message of acceptance for whatever may come sits well with me.

9. Best CoastEach And Everyday
I came across this band on a Fleetwood Mac tribute album done by a bunch of indie groups, called Just Tell Me That You Want Me. There were lots of great covers on that album, but Best Coast’s version of “Rhiannon” really grabbed me, mainly I think because of singer Bethany Cosentino’s voice. So I sought to know more about them and ended up quite enjoying both of their first two albums. (I haven’t got their third yet, but it’s on my wish list.) This is a track from their debut.

10. The ClashThe Card Cheat
There are so many great things about this song, but it has to start with the production. Contrary to what you might expect from a punk band, this song is as well-produced as any pop gem. The ringing piano, valedictory horns, majestic rhythm section — it’s like a classic Phil Spector “Wall Of Sound” record, infused with a cathedral grandeur. Wedding this incredible sound to the tale of a lowlife gambler is like the aural version of a Scorsese film, elevating the dismal criminal world to an operatic level.

11. Paul F. TompkinsKing Hat
My friend Tashi put me onto this comedian, whose records I just adore. Many of his bits have now become part of the conceptual vocabulary in my mind, especially the ones from his most recent album Laboring Under Delusions, which is a concept piece about all the various jobs he’s done in his life. I listened to that album a bunch over this last year, and knew I wanted to include something from it. I had a hard time picking. I went with this one because a) it’s a great showcase for his style, b) it’s a linguistic rant, which I find endearing, and c) it reminds me so much of the stories Laura tells me about her retail-esque experiences at the library. Oh, and because it’s so freakin’ funny, of course.

12. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis feat. Mary LambertSame Love
Here’s another album I spent an awful lot of time with over the last year. I was a bit late to the Macklemore party, but boy The Heist is great. A number of songs from it got thrown into the hopper for this mix, but if I had to pick just one (and, it turned out, I did), it’d be “Same Love.” I so appreciate the personal story flowing into the cultural analysis, and the strong, clear call for hip-hop to stand behind marriage equality. Damn right I support it.

13. Dan WilsonFree Life
Dan Wilson was the lead singer and writer of the 90’s band Semisonic, who were a one-hit wonder with the song “Closing Time.” It’s a shame that they never found greater success, because Wilson is an absolutely brilliant songwriter, who did amazing work with Semisonic and then went on to co-write such killer songs as Adele’s “Someone Like You” and the Dixie Chicks’ “Not Ready To Make Nice.” This song is from his 2007 solo debut, and it stands out for me this year because my iPod dialed it up as I was driving back from New Mexico, having just participated in the 2015 Geek Bowl in Albuquerque. It felt so perfect for that specific moment in my life that I put it on repeat a few times, just listening to the music and feeling free.

14. Elton JohnRocket Man (I Think It’s Going To Be A Long Long Time)
Sometimes a classic just jumps out and reminds you why it’s a classic. I was listening to Honky Château in the car, and when this song came on I marveled at how intensely gorgeous it is. Plus, it’s a fantastic song to sing along to, which is probably why I sang it over and over on that 45-minute commute.

15. Elliott SmithJunk Bond Trader
I’ve had XO in my collection for a while, and while I enjoy it, I never really imprinted on it. Figure 8, on the other hand, knocked me out. So many great songs on that album — as with Macklemore, there were a bunch in the running and it came down to this one. The lyrics to this are so fantastic — elliptical and evocative, with the occasional razor-sharp one liner, like “Checking into a small reality / Boring as a drug you take too regularly.” What’s it about? I really don’t know. But I sure do dig how it’s about it.

16. Fleetwood MacSisters Of The Moon
This was the highlight of the April 2015 Fleetwood Mac show. It’s always been one of my favorite Stevie songs — I love the power chord progression and the mystical vibe. She can’t hit those high notes any more (the backup singers do it for her), and the cocaine-fueled frenzy that used to characterize live performances of this song is long behind her, but still, it is a powerful, spellbinding incantation, and it lifts me up every time I see it.

17. Florence + The MachineDog Days Are Over
Speaking of powerful. Ceremonials was a big record for me in 2014, so I decided to check out Florence’s debut as well, and I’m glad I did. There’s a reason this song got so famous. I love rock songs with big drums and a big voice like this — they make me feel like I’m flying.

18. Best CoastThe Only Place
Here’s a song from Best Coast’s second album. True to their name, it’s a paean to California, and I have to say they make a pretty good case. Especially for somebody like me who could be perfectly happy never seeing snow again, Southern California seems like a pretty amazing place to live. Oh, except for the earthquakes. And, I guess the mudslides. And the forest fires. And how expensive everything is. But other than that, aces!

19. Fountains Of WayneBright Future In Sales
One final showcase from another album I really got into in 2014. My friend Trish has been a huge FoW fan for ages, and always told me I should check them out. You know how it is with that kind of thing, though — I’d always think, “Yeah, I should,” and then go listen to something I already know. That’s the beauty of the wishlist, though. I can just tag something based on a passing thought, and then some angel will bring it into my life, where I can give it the attention it deserves. This album, Welcome Interstate Managers, dominated my car for about 3 weeks, and I got to love each and every song on it. There were a bunch to choose from, but this one does a great job of encapsulating the humor, the characterization, the storytelling, and the awesome power pop slam that Fountains Of Wayne brings to its music.

Geek Bowl IX answer recap

And now, the Geek Bowl IX answers!

Geek Bowl IX question recap

Well, another Geek Bowl is in the books, and once again, I am happy. We didn’t win, but we came in 2nd place! Given that 134 teams played, and that the 2nd place prize is $3000, we feel pretty damn good about that. This year, sticking with the “Mothra” theme from last year, we were “The Mothras of Retention.” (No, not that kind of retention. Like, retaining facts. Come on.) We had the same lineup as last year, and boy do I love this team. Not only is it a great mix of specialties and styles, they’re also just a lovely group of people, with whom I always enjoy spending time. Not a blowhard or prima donna in the bunch. Oh, and did I mention that they’re all really frickin’ smart? Oh my god, I can’t even tell you. (But I’ll try.)

Mothras Of Retention team photo

L to R top row: Larry, Don. Bottom row: Brian, George, Jonathan, me

This year the bowl was in Albuquerque (henceforth ABQ), at an Indian casino called Isleta. I drove down from Denver, which was mostly fun. I’m always up for a road trip, but boy is there a whole lotta nothin’ between, let’s say, Colorado Springs and Santa Fe. (Uh, no disrespect to anybody’s town in “driveover country.” You could make a case for Pueblo.) Anyway, I got into ABQ around 5:30pm and checked into my hotel. (As always, hat tip to the awesome “name your price” feature on Priceline.) Teammate Don is a former ABQ resident, so he made reservations for us at a great New Mexican restaurant. Our team met up with another team, comprised of a couple former members of the Anti-Social Network and the friends they recruited to play along. That team’s excellent name: “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Rutter.” Also, teammates Brian and George had brought their wives, and Don invited a couple of ABQ friends. It was a big table. Great meal, too.

After that, about half of us headed to a house rented by Shane Whitlock and his wife, where a towering collection of trivia minds ate awesome food, drank good wine, and answered question after question, most prominently a Buzzer Battle tournament run by “Not Rutter” member Bill Schantz. There was also a really fun pub quiz created by Jeremy Cahnmann, whose game you should totally check out if you’re ever in Chicago. Ah, a fine time indeed. The next day I slept until 10:30am, which I mention because it is an AMAZING occurrence which never ever happens in my life anymore. The team got together at 4:30pm to run warmup rounds for 90 minutes or so, and then it was on to the main event!

As we gathered near the door, George passed around a small sheet of paper, upon which he had written down some guidelines that we’d always talked about but never formally codified. We quickly came to call them the Commandments, and here they are:

  1. Read/listen to the damn question.
    1. Read it again.
    2. Pay attention to the category.
    3. Don’t interrupt the question/audio. Let it finish before guessing.
  2. If you think of an answer, say it/write it, so the whole team knows.
  3. Everyone look over each answer sheet before turning it in.
  4. If the answer is a name and surnames are enough, don’t write the first name.
  5. If spelling doesn’t count, don’t sweat it.
  6. If an answer is used once in a quiz, nothing prevents that same answer from being used later in the same quiz. (The Quincy Jones rule – so named because QJ was an answer twice in one Geek Bowl.)
  7. “No” is not enough. Offer a solid alternative or a clear reason why the suggested answer is definitely wrong.
  8. Avoid facetious answers.

Following all these rules consistently is a lot harder than it sounds, and in fact we flubbed one of them one time at this Geek Bowl, but more about that in the answers post.

The event was held in a large auditorium, which apparently serves as a Bingo hall most of the time. It was very well suited for this night — good sound, lots of space, broad tiers with no fixed seating, friendly staff, etc. As has been the case for the past few years, the Bowl itself was very, very well-organized. Geeks Who Drink (GWD) has really got this down to a science now, and it came off expertly. The big change this year was that they had a headlining musical act, an outfit known as The Dan Band. In case you’ve never heard of these guys (I hadn’t), they’re a comedy/music group led by a guy named Dan Finnerty, who dresses like a gas station attendant (literally) and sings all songs by women. They were the wedding band in Old School, and also appeared in The Hangover. Knowing nothing else about these guys, I feared they would be boorish and obnoxious, but they actually turned out to be pretty funny and charming. As Don pointed out, the concept could be done in a very lazy way, but these guys weren’t lazy. For instance, their opening number — a medley of “Genie In A Bottle”, “No Scrubs”, and “I’m A Slave 4 U”, was proficient and professional, from the actual instrument-playing band to the smooth choreography. Sure, it’s a goof to have this guy singing these songs, and he throws in a lot of “fuck”s, but they don’t expect the gimmick alone to do the work of the act.

The Dan Band

In fact, the same thing can be said of Geek Bowl itself. As I’ve said before, the signature GWD tone is “self-consciously edgy”, but as time has gone on they’ve gotten a lot less self-conscious. I even noticed a considerable difference between this year and last year in terms of the questions. Last year had a round about nasty team names, songs about sex, and historical figures’ faces Photoshopped into vintage porn. This year had half a round about incest, and that’s about it for the raunch. It used to feel like GWD had a compulsory smut/obscenity quota, and that it could get in the way of, y’know, actually having good or interesting trivia questions. Now it feels like they’ve got good question writers who don’t happen to be constrained by the bounds of good taste, but aren’t particularly obligated to leap over them either. (Nothing against sex and swearing, by the way — these are a few of my favorite things, actually — I just don’t like it when they feel mandatory in writing.)

Now here’s the part where I copy/paste and adapt the rules & disclaimers from last year’s post. If you don’t care, you can skip ahead to the questions, directly after the video.

As I’ve done in previous years, I’m going to recap the questions and answers here. A few caveats about this, though. First, the Geeks are pretty careful about their intellectual property, and the agreement we’ve worked out is that I won’t post these recaps until at least a week has elapsed since the Geek Bowl. (Though all things considered I’d have a hard time getting this together in less time anyway!) Second, I consider these recaps a tribute to the excellent question writers of the Geek Bowl, and an advertisement for a really fun event, but I am in no way officially associated with Geeks Who Drink, and I have not been supplied with question material. The recap below is not a verbatim representation of the Geek Bowl 9 questions. They are reconstructed from my notes and memories, which are very fallible. This year I had the bright idea of taking photos of some of the question slides — cameras are allowed at Geek Bowl as long as they can’t receive data. However, even those slides are very frequently paraphrases rather than verbatim reproductions of the questions as read. I am certain I have left out some of the cleverness, some of the humor, and some of the pinning precision. Anything in the questions and answers below that is wrong or crappy is my fault, not theirs.

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. (Though the final round has a 5-minute timer.) 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, one other round was upgraded from 8 potential points to 15 — we could see from the pre-printed answer sheets that question #8 in Round 4 would have 8 answers, for a total of 15 answers in the round.

Finally, teams can choose one round to “joker”, meaning that it earns double points for that round. Obviously, you’d want that to be one of the 15 or 16-point rounds, unless you really believed you wouldn’t score above 8 in any of them, which is highly unlikely. We discussed our jokering strategy ahead of time, and decided on thresholds. The Round 2 threshold was 14 — in other words, if we felt very confident about 14 out of 16 answers in Round 2, we would joker it. We didn’t end up settling on a Round 4 threshold, but it turned out not to matter. We probably would have jokered on at least 13, and failing that we’d automatically joker Round 8.

Now, for posterity and enjoyment, the questions of Geek Bowl 9. I’ll note our team’s experiences in [square brackets.] As I did last year, I’ll put the answers in a separate post, since this one gets long enough as it is.

Round 1: Duking It Out In The Duke City
Albuquerque is apparently nicknamed “The Duke City”, so this round was all about dukes.

1. Born in 1899, Duke Ellington came to be a major participant in the “Renaissance” of what New York City neighborhood? [I think all of us answered this one in unison.]
2. If you wanted to correctly spell the name of Duke University’s basketball coach, how many “z”s would you use? [I’m so out on questions like this, but between Larry, Don, and Jonathan, we got there.]
3. Patty Duke played both roles, Helen and Anne, in separate film versions of what play?
4. Here’s something you won’t understand: what band, on the album track following “How I Could Just Kill A Man”, sampled the song “Duke Of Earl”, by Gene Chandler? [We were clueless on this one. Took a wild guess.]
5. Due to a 1982 contract dispute, cousins Coy and Vance briefly replaced what TV siblings? [Brian (who served as our scribe) actually has a running “Coy and Vance” replacement joke on one of his podcasts, — I think he was writing the answer before they finished asking the question.]
6. Which was longer, the infamous gap between Duke Nukem 3D and Duke Nukem Forever, or the infamous gap between Guns ‘n’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion albums and Chinese Democracy? (Just answer “Duke” or “GnR”.) [We guessed wrong on this one.]
7. What “P” word means the entire system of noble titles? [Slam dunk by George.]
8. According to Channel Islanders, and despite her presumable lack of male sex organs, who is the Duke of Normandy?

[Not our best round. We ended up with 6 correct answers.]
See the answers

Round 2: Dude Sings Like A Lady
Round 2 is always a music round, and for the last few years, they’ve had 8 different live bands each play about 25 seconds of a cover version of some song, and then performing that same 25 seconds again. This year, though, since they’d gone to the trouble of obtaining a “name”(ish) band, Round 2 was all about The Dan Band performing snippets of 8 different songs. Same approach — about 25 seconds, repeated once. The extra twist was that the round was “Bechdel Tested, Mother Approved” — true to The Dan Band ethos, all the songs were both by women and about women. The round description made a fairly big deal of specifying that we were to name both the song title and the “original female PERFORMING artist” for each tune, for reasons that will become clear below.

Previously I just listed the answers here, because I couldn’t describe the round without giving them away. But in late 2016 the Geeks posted a video recap of the round, so now I can just embed that! The answer summary has moved, appropriately enough, to the answers post.

[We felt really, really good about this round, and jokered it without hesitation. We were right to do so, as we aced it. So that gave us 32 points, plus our previous 6 made a total of 38.]
See the answers

Round 3: Red Or Green?
Round 3 at Geek Bowl is pretty much always some kind of 50/50, speed round, or multiple choice situation. This year it was a 50/50, based around New Mexico’s official state question: “Red Or Green?” In case it’s not clear, the question refers to what kind of chile you’d like on your food. (Though when I was asked on Friday night, I was also offered the option of both!)

1. Who bought Reddit in 2006: Condé Nast or Yahoo? [We guessed wrong on this one, and I’m sorry to say I was one of the ones steering us wrongward.]
2. Which team wore a green shirt at the 2014 World Cup: Italy or Mexico? [Don’s a soccer guy, and was all over this one.]
3. Which chain has more U.S. locations: Red Lobster or Red Robin?
4. In which book did the Red Wedding occur: A Clash Of Kings or A Storm Of Swords? [Don is also a Game of Thrones guy, and once again, was all over it. Go Don!]
5. Did Greenpeace’s initial cause concern nuclear testing or whaling?
6. Not including gulfs, which has more Red Sea coastline: Egypt or Saudi Arabia? [Jonathan drew a map for us that looked not terribly different from the one that accompanied the answer.]
7. The Green Book is the credited work of which controversial political figure: Gerry Adams or Moammar Qadaffi?
8. Which color of light is most conducive to photosynthesis: Red or Green? [Jonathan got to this by knowing about optics, Brian got to it by knowing about the habits of Colorado pot growers. We all got to it! (Not that Brian is a Colorado pot grower, mind you.)]

[We got 7 of 8 here, for an updated total of 45.]
See the answers

Round 4: The World According to LARP
Now, here is where things started to get seriously awesome. I mean, they were already good, but this is where they started to get awesome. This round was done all in cosplay, with each new cosplayer coming out and defeating the previous one, and then asking a question, in character, somehow related to the character. Not only that, sometimes the character was a clue to… well, you’ll see. Now, my account of this is going to be a little bit compromised by the fact that I was furiously taking notes while it was going on, but I’ll try to give you the gist.

The first thing that happened was a wizard took the stage, with resplendent robes and staff and so forth. After an impressive pretend-magic display, she asked us this question:
1. With a name that comes from the Latin words for “heap” and “rainstorm”, what kind of cloud normally produces lightning?

Suddenly a knight emerged, in full Crusades regalia! A mighty battle ensued, in which the wizard was struck down, the knight emerged triumphant, stepped to the microphone, and asked:
2. While we were killing Muslims during the Crusades, Paladins like myself called them by what slightly longer term, which is the same as the name of the quarterback on the show Friday Night Lights? [I knew the word, Don and Brian know Friday Night Lights. Cross-referencing FTW!]

Like a shadow, like a ghost, the ninja struck. The knight never stood a chance. Over his dead body, the ninja asked:
3. Speaking of things white people know nothing about: every year, dozens of people go to the Aokigahara Forest to do… what? [Boy did we struggle with this one. I’ll put the full story in the answers post, but suffice to say we got it wrong.]

Zzap! The phaser blast of a dour Klingon proved in short order that no pajama-wearing human is a match for an honorable descendant of Kahless The Unforgettable. The Klingon approached the mic and asked us a question… in Klingon. We could make out the words “falcon”, “eagle”, and “kestrel”, but that’s it. Then on the screen behind her appeared a translation:
4. What bird is biologically closest to a falcon: a hawk, an eagle, or a kestrel?

Klingons are strong with honor, but you know their challenge area? Friendship. Especially the magic of a magical friendship, which can really be magically friendly, and magical. Thus it was that a very approximate human equivalent of a My Little Pony character defeated the Klingon, and asked:
5. Ponies are defined as measuring less than 58 inches at what specific shoulder area, which the composer of “Lean On Me” would be proud of? [I knew the “Lean On Me” part, and as soon as I thought of it the horse part made sense.]

POW! What puny pony can withstand the full fury of the Rampaging Hulk? Down went the pony, and Hulk asked:
6. WHAT 2012 NBC DRAMA CENTER ON KATHARINE MCPHEE TRYING TO PLAY MARILYN MONROE IN BROADWAY MUSICAL?

You have a Hulk? Well we have a Quiz-Bot! A large robot, carrying a large pencil in one claw and a large drink in the other, with a digital crawling display on its chest reading (I think) “42… 42… 42…” battled the Hulk. Hulk is strongest one there is, but Quiz-Bot is smartest one there is, and it was victorious. It asked us:
7. In statistics, the standard deviation is signified by what 18th letter of the Greek alphabet?

Finally, the players’ mom stepped onstage. Everyone got up, and she distributed some tasty snacks from her purse to all players. Everyone munched happily, while she strode to the mic. Remember how I said that we could see from the answer sheets that question #8 in this round would have 8 possible answers? Well here’s that question:
8. Besides Barbara Walters, name eight of the nine women to date who have been panelists on The View for more than one season. [The full team collaborated to come up with seven, and at the last minute Brian pulled an eighth. WHOO!]

[A strong round – we got 14, raising our total to 59.]
See the answers

Round 5: LandMark Wahlberg
This was a video before and after round. I used to have a long explanation here about it, but happily, just about a year after Geek Bowl 9, the Geeks finally posted the video itself in all its glory on YouTube. So here you have it:

I’ll copy the old explanation, and the answers, over to the answers post.

[We aced this round. 59 + 8 = 67 total points now.]
See the answers

Round 6: The Round You And Your Sister Have Been Waiting For
This was a round on inheritances and incest — that old-time GWD spirit shining through, or at least partway through.

1. According to the King James Version of the Bible, “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit” what?
2. Named Adult Video News #21 All-Time Greatest Porn Film, what 1980 family fuckfest shares its name with a family board game from Hasbro? [Oh, Geeks. Then again, George later said, “I had it at ‘family fuckfest.'”]
3. Named for a geneticist called Reginald C. Something, what’s that quadrilateral chart that biologists use to determine the likely genotype of offspring? [Jonathan came through here.]
4. A pair of federal agents encounter an inbred Pennsylvania clan called the Peacocks in “Home”, a classic 1996 episode of what TV series?
5. A product of over 100 years of inbreeding, the drooling, slow-witted Charles II was the last Hapsburg to rule what nation?
6. Owners of most of Colorado’s sports teams, plus a few others, the Kroenke familly actually got most of their cash by marrying into what Southern family? [Larry knew this one right away.]
7. Unpublished for almost 150 years, The Inheritance was the first novel by what precocious teen, who later quite extensively covered the March family? [Yay, a literature question! I had this one right away, and Jonathan was a half-second behind me.]
8. What famous actress thankfully inherited her looks from her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, rather than her father, the title star of Midnight Cowboy?

[Another perfect round for us. 67 + 8 = 75.]
See the answers

Round 7: Bust A Movie
Okay, so I’ve been a trivia guy for a long time. I’ve seen a lot of great, clever concepts for questions and had a lot of fun. And I am here to say that Round 7 of Geek Bowl 9 was, I think, my favorite trivia round I’ve ever seen. As the moderators explained, “We’ve had video rounds, audio rounds, movie rounds, singing rounds, celebrity rounds, and lots more. But tonight, for the first time ever, we are having a dance round at Geek Bowl.” Here’s what this means: GWD hired a dance troupe called the Keshet Dance Company to re-enact 8 dance scenes from movies. Players had to name the movies.

Keshet was phenomenal — exuberant, fun, and accurate. They drew enthusiastic cheers throughout, and a MASSIVE, IMMEDIATE standing ovation at the end. God, I loved it. My descriptions could not possibly do justice to the round, but lucky for me, there is video!

[Brian was an absolute star on this one, naming 2 dances the rest of us didn’t know at all, and getting there first on several others, even sometimes before they started dancing. Thanks to him putting us over the top, this was another perfect round for us, bringing our total to 83.]
See the answers

Round 8: Random Knowledge
Round 8 of any Geeks quiz is always called “Random Knowledge”, and random it is. At a regular pub quiz, it’s 8 questions whose point values vary anywhere between one and four, for an ultimate total of 16. At Geek Bowl, the Random Knowledge questions are all worth two points each. In addition, at Geek Bowl 9, the Random Knowledge round was EXTREMELY FREAKIN’ HARD! There were 16 points theoretically possible, but according to their official recap post, the highest anybody scored was 13, and the average was SIX points. Out of sixteen. It was brutal. And here it is:

1. According to Statista.com and several other sources, what two countries have the most Facebook users?
2. Which two cable shows were the last ones to win the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Drama series more than once?
3. a) What is the relative minor key of C-major? b) What’s the mathy-sounding name of the wheel that shows the tones of the chromatic scale with their major and minor relative tones? [Hooray for Jonathan, who spent his middle and high school years as a cellist.]
4. a) The Pleiades and the Crab Nebula are both in which Zodiac constellation? b) The Australian flag features the Southern Cross, otherwise known by what Latin name?
5. a) Now in Lebanon, what ancient Phoenician city lent its name to the purple dye favored by ancient rulers? b) Chemically, that dye owes its color to the presence of what halogen element?
6. a) What sort of environmental sensor did Apple add to the iPad Air 2? b) To the nearest hundred, what was the U.S. retail price of the original entry-level iPad?
7. a) The Bhagavad Gita takes the form of a conversation between a Hindi prince and his driver, who is actually what deity? b) They spend a lot of time discussing what Sanskrit word, which signifies the Hindu concept of “what is right”?
8. a) Half the people currently on the International Space Station are from what country? b) Since it’s expedition #42, they made a mission poster that’s ultimately based on the works of what novelist?

As with last year, there was a pre-emptive tiebreaker, a great idea to reduce the awkwardness of two teams standing on stage answering an extra bunch of questions. Also like last year, this was a convoluted and time-consuming question:

Take the number of ounces in a bomber of beer (B), then subtract the number of living original members of the Wu-Tang Clan (W). Multiply the difference by the number of landlocked member countries of the European Union (E). Add to the product the number of seasons the show Gossip Girl (G) ran. Or, in simplified form:

[(B-W) x E] + G

Thankfully, this round had a five-minute countdown to write down answers rather than two minutes.

[We scraped out of this one with 8 points. I sure am glad we didn’t wait to joker! So, our final Geek Bowl score was 91.]
See the answers

And there they are, the questions of Geek Bowl IX. If and when the Geeks release new video from the rounds, I’ll incorporate it here. Until then, see you next year!

$3000 novelty check made out to Mothras of Retention

This Promise Of Paradise

Another year, another music mix. I’m a little later with the liner notes this year — sorry about that. For the past few months I’ve found myself with a whole bunch of short-term, unduckable, hard-deadline projects. (Christmas counts as one of these. :)) My time is opening up a bit more now, so I’m finally able to get to these notes! This year’s mix is heavy on the Neko Case, a singer/songwriter I’ve loved for a few years but really dug deeper into during 2013. It’s also got plenty of the usual suspects (Folds, Nicks, Beatles) and some other stuff that grabbed me this year for a variety of specific reasons.

1. Ben Folds FiveHouse
I got hold of Ben’s box set in 2012, but it didn’t reach the front of the queue until early 2013. The discs are themed — rarities, live stuff, and “greatest hits.” He also got back together for a few tracks with the other two guys in Ben Folds Five (the Five was always a trio), and the hits disc has a couple of new songs from the band, including this one. I loved this song almost immediately. It reminds me of people I’ve known who have been traumatized in a family setting and then left the house behind. Maya Angelou talks about leaving her childhood home of Stamps, Arkansas — not just the place but “the condition that was Stamps, Arkansas.” The places where you go through great pain live inside your head themselves, and even if you can’t burn the house down, you can certainly choose never to re-enter that condition again.

2. Neko CaseAt Last
Oh Neko. Her songs are mostly short but I find them so electrifying. First, there’s her lyrics, elliptical and evocative in that Stevie Nicks way, but with an earthy, bloody touch that gives them a different tang in the brain. Then there’s the music, spooky melodies on country instruments, folk rock with the occasional jagged edge. And finally, the voice oh my god the voice. Neko has one of my favorite voices of anyone, ever. It is almost literally intoxicating to me — I can feel my nervous system lighting up like fireworks when I hear it — my breath gets short and my pulse gets quick. This song has a Dickinsonian quality to it as well, contemplating death with equanimity even as it embraces and longs for life.

3. Neko CaseRed Tide
One reason I dove depeer into Neko’s work last year is that I bought a ticket to see her sing in September, and wanted to know her ouevre a little better before I saw the show. As it turned out, she was sick for the concert, so although she still sounded PERFECT her energy was muted. I think my favorite performance was of this song, which is from the first album of hers I really got to know, a record called Middle Cyclone. Like many of her songs, it is compelling, immediate, and vivid to me. She sings it with this incredible full-throated authority, and again, it makes my brain buzz and my whole body want to be alive.

4. Johnny CashFolsom Prison Blues
I keep falling farther and farther behind on current music, because I find myself fascinated by filling the gaps in the knowledge I grew up with. Johnny Cash was one of those gaps. I’m not usually a country guy, but Cash to me transcends genre. He’s another one with an unforgettable voice, though in a whole different way than Case. (Hm, one letter difference. How about that?) But I only ever knew the barest outline of his work, so I got hold of an “essential” collection for him and added to my repertoire. This song is one of his most iconic, and for good reason. It’s got the great storytelling of folk music, delivered in a way that’s solemn, knowing, and a bit playful all at once. And he performs it at the prison. It’s a stunt, but what a stunt. (Apparently the cheers for “I shot a man in Reno” were added in post-production. Cheating!)

5. Ben Folds FiveAway When You Were Here
The BFF experiment on the box set was so successful that the band decided to get together for a whole new album, released in fall of 2012. My musical shelf being what it is, I didn’t listen to it until 2013. It’s very typical of their work, which is to say it is part rockin’, part silly, part thrilling, and part heartbreaking. This song falls into that latter category. I just love his lyrics, the way he can capture the interior experience with an image — “Sometimes a phrase or a manner that’s you / Comes through me and goes in a flash” — and then enact that image by paralleling “You seemed lost in clouds” and “When I’m lost in clouds.” God, that’s good.

6. R.E.M.The One I Love
In February 2013 I went once again to Austin, Texas, to compete in a big trivia contest called the Geek Bowl. That was the second time I’d gone, and as we’d done the first time, some teammates and I went to a great record store there called Waterloo Records. There among the incoming used CDs was R.E.M.’s Document, an album I’d always had on cassette but never had a digital copy of. So I snagged it for some low low price and revisited it later that year. It’s funny to come back to albums that came out when I was in my teens. (Document came out in 1987, when I was 17 years old.) I remember at the time wondering what it would have been like to be alive and aware when something like Sgt. Pepper, or Pearl, or Surrealistic Pillow was released. Well, now I know, and it’s lovely to get the same pleasure now that I got from the album 25 years ago. It felt like a classic at the time, because it was.

7. Glen HansardLies
I saw the movie Once when it was in the theaters — in fact, I didn’t know this at the time but the showing I saw was the very last movie shown at the movie theater on 30th and Pearl in Boulder, before they tore it down to build a Barnes & Noble. (Boulder used to have at least 4 different movie theaters — now it has one. Apparently the town can’t support that many movies?) I really liked the movie at the time, especially the music, so I put the soundtrack on my wish list some time later, and finally got it in time to listen in 2013. It’s hard to pick a song from this album, but this one seemed quite emblematic of the angst, longing, and fierceness that runs through the film and its music.

8. Lindsey BuckinghamThis Nearly Was Mine (instrumental)
I get impatient with a lot of Lindsey’s solo work lately, all breathy vocals and superfast virtuoso picking. It’s fine, but it gets pretty samey, especially compared with the record I see as his masterpiece, 1992’s Out Of The Cradle. That collection had some of his picking and sing-talking, but it also had fantastic pop songs like “Countdown” and “Don’t Look Down”, lovely ballads like “Surrender The Rain” and “All My Sorrows”, and beautiful instrumental passages like this one. I got the mp3 album from Amazon, burned it to CD last year, and spent some time reacquainting myself with it. “This Nearly Was Mine” is actually a Rodgers & Hammerstein tune, from South Pacific — it was a favorite of Lindsey’s dad, so it got included here as a kind of tribute. Lindsey’s treatment of it is uncharacteristically gentle — even his softest songs tend to have an aggressive edge to them, but not here. (Though the only link I can find is to a live version where he can’t help himself from slipping into virtuoso mode at one point.) He brings out the poignancy of the melody so much that I had to look up the lyrics, and having done so I decided to quote them for the title of this collection, promises of paradise kept, broken, and found at last.

9. The BeatlesHow Do You Do It?
Most of my Beatles Anthology listening was in 2012, but a bit spilled over into 2013. This is from the first one, which had lots of very early stuff from their formative days. That has limited appeal for me, but this tune I found fascinating. I’m used to stories of Lennon-McCartney compositions not recorded by the Beatles but made famous by other artists (e.g. The Rolling Stones having one of their first hits with “I Wanna Be Your Man”, which the Beatles only recorded later.) This song, though, wasn’t by Lennon-McCartney, but fits that early Beatles sound nicely. They recorded it but didn’t release it, and then Gerry & The Pacemakers took it to a giant number one. Great going, Beatles. Of course, they had their revenge when “From Me To You” knocked it off the charts. 🙂

10. Steven WrightCross Country
For Christmas 2011 I made my sister some comedy mix CDs, which allowed me to go out and collect lots of comedy I didn’t have digital copies of before. Steven Wright’s I Have A Pony was one of these. Picking a favorite Steven Wright joke is like picking a favorite Far Side cartoon, but one I’ve always loved is: “Last summer I drove cross country with a friend of mine… The whole way across we only had one cassette tape to listen to. I can’t remember what it was.” Seems like a fine inclusion for a music mix.

11. Iggy PopLust For Life
I’ve been doing an independent learning/writing project revolving around Alan Moore’s Watchmen, pursuing all the cultural texts it references (or is said to reference by fans.) There’s a panel in Watchmen that quotes Iggy’s “Neighborhood Threat”, which led to me getting the Lust For Life album and reading a biography of him. (I wrote up the Iggy/Watchmen connection here.) There are plenty of great songs on that album, but this one is just so magnetic to me, even after it’s been worn smooth by Trainspotting and endlessly repeated cruise commercials. I learned that Iggy actually improvised all the lyrics to this on the first take. Wow! Though I suppose it does explain the “hypnotizing chickens” and “had it in the ear before” parts better than anything else can…

12. Greg WellsDisarm
Okay, so here’s an odd one. This guy Greg Wells? He played a big part in my life recently — he hired me into my current job. Though an IT guy by day, Greg’s true passions are music and photography. He’s a talented musician with a home studio, and during my first couple of years on the job he was developing his most recent album, which is mostly covers with a couple of originals thrown in. He plays all the instruments on all the songs. Greg knew I was a music guy, so he’d periodically bring in draft copies of the album for me to listen to and give feedback on, which was a lot of fun. I ended up really liking this Smashing Pumpkins cover. I think his phrasing is actually better than Billy Corgan’s. I owe Greg a lot — he helped me out of a really bad work situation into something much better — but I’d enjoy this even if I didn’t know him.

13. Ben Folds FiveThe Sound Of The Life Of The Mind
I couldn’t restrict myself to just one song from this album. Nick Hornby wrote the lyrics for this one, as he did for Ben’s previous album Lonely Avenue. I absolutely love the Taupin-John thing those two guys do, and this time Hornby’s lyrics seemed to tap into Folds iconography, recalling the bright but dissatisfied Sara (spelled without an h) from “Zak And Sara.” I have a special affection for people with noisy brains, and I just adore the portrait of how disconnecting it can be to live among people who engage life on a different level, as well as how profoundly satisfying it is to find the life of the mind at last. Plus, this song rocks like a mother.

14. Ben FoldsNot The Same (live)
One more tune from the box set. I got introduced to Ben’s music when I saw him open for Tori Amos at Red Rocks. He played this song at that show, and he did the thing you can hear on this recording, introducing the harmonies to the audience so that they could sing them when the time came. At the end of the song, he climbed on top of his piano and conducted 9,000 singers. Our voices rang off the rocks, in three-part harmony, and I knew I had to find out more about this guy.

15. Neko CaseThe Pharoahs
This is another song from Middle Cyclone. It came very close to being included in the mix from a few years ago, when I was listening heavily to that CD, but in the end it didn’t quite make the cut. I decided to resurrect it since I was doing so much Neko this year — I’d always regretted just a little bit my decision to leave it out. I find the melody so hypnotic and elevating, along with the fucking brilliant imagery — “I listened in when you thought you were alone / Calling the sphinx on a tornado’s phone.” It’s such a perfect vignette of a young crush, that moment of growing up when “the wanting in the movies and the hymns” crashes up against the facts of real life and real people. And my GOD, that voice.

16. Stevie NicksBattle Of The Dragon
This song and the next one are from the same source: a Christmas 2012 mix CD I made for my sister called “Good Songs Bad Movies.” This pensive Stevie rarity is from the perfectly awful movie American Anthem, a starring vehicle for Olympic gymnast Mitch Gaylord. Mitch plays a guy who, uh, wants to be a gymnast. Anyway, this is pure 80s Stevie, a picture of a complicated and vexing relationship, played over sparkling, chiming synths. It deserved a better fate than exile to the American Anthem soundtrack.

17. EvanescenceBring Me To Life
Then there’s this song, which appeared on the Daredevil soundtrack. I’m a big fan of the character and I really, really wanted to like the movie, but I just couldn’t, which should tell you something about how bad it is. The song, on the other hand, I absolutely love. Amy Lee is like a heavy-metal Stevie herself, and this is my favorite thing she ever did — I always have to turn it up loud whenever I hear it. I relate to the lyrics probably more than I should. What I mean by that is they tap into that part of me that wants to save the people I love from their misery and pain. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I always have to keep an eye on how much it drives me, because it can lead to distorted decision-making. It’s really the perfect song for superhero movie, as it addresses the part of the superhero metaphor that I’ve imprinted upon very deeply. Too bad it couldn’t have come with a better movie.

18. AdeleHe Won’t Go
Speaking of rescues, this song is very personal to me. A major feature of my 2013 was watching a close friend spin into an extended crisis, which actually just hit its peak (Jesus, I hope so anyway) a couple of weeks ago. As I watched him go through cycles of recovering and relapsing, I worked hard to blunt the edges coming at him, to ensure he wouldn’t lose everything to a force he couldn’t control. I don’t know how much of that was being a loving friend and how much was my rescuer complex, but I think I did some good things in the end. So when Adele says, “If this ain’t love, then what is? / I’m willing to take the risk,” I hear it right down to my core.

19. Thompson TwinsLay Your Hands On Me
One more song about love and healing. I always thought the Thompson Twins were underrated, and this song is probably tied with “Hold Me Now” for my favorite of theirs. I was listening to a greatest hits collection last year, and this one jumped out at me for reasons similar to the Adele song above.

20. Bob MarleyHigh Tide Or Low Tide
Okay, perhaps more than I realized, the theme of this past year for me has been loyalty and dedication in love. Funny how you don’t always know what something’s about until you make it. I saw the movie Marley in 2012, and listened to the soundtrack in 2013. Bob Marley has always been a greatest hits artist for me, and he still is, but I really enjoyed digging a little deeper into his catalog. This is a gem that was overlooked until the movie featured it prominently — I don’t think it was even on any of Bob’s albums, though as I said I’m not an expert. In any case, it fit perfectly into my year.

21. The BeatlesThe Long And Winding Road
Yes, this song continues the love and loyalty theme, but the reason it featured in 2013 for me was that I finally got around to acquiring Let It Be… Naked, the version of Let It Be without all the Phil Spector overdubs and instrumentation. The biggest difference was on this song, stripped of the choir and orchestra that Spector layered onto the original version. I loved the original, but I think I like this one a little more. It is more powerful in its simplicity.

22. Neko CaseI Wish I Was The Moon
I close with one more from Neko, a piercing melancholy ache. I think I want to let this song speak for itself. “How will you know when you’ve found me at last? / Cos I’ll be the one, be the one, be the one / With my heart in my lap / I’m so tired, I’m so tired / And I wish I was the moon tonight.”

Geek Bowl VIII answer recap

And now, the Geek Bowl VIII answers!

Geek Bowl VIII question recap

Just to make sure I don’t bury the lede: my team, How I Met Your Mothra, won Geek Bowl VIII. It was unreal. 147 teams competed, and we came out on top. The second place team, I kid you not, was made up of Jeopardy! champions. That is some trivia firepower! Any quizzer will tell you, though, that you’re never going to get everything right, no matter how smart you are. The close wins come down to getting asked the right questions, and this time, we got asked enough of the right questions to edge the Jeopardites by one point. Considering it made the difference between a $3,000 team prize and a $6,666.66 team prize, that one point ended up being pretty important!

GeekBowl8-01

Our team this year had some shakeup in its makeup, which may have affected the outcome as well. A married couple (Dave and Lori) that has been part of our Geek Bowl team for the past 5 years dropped out this time for various reasons, and teammate Larry recruited a couple of new members (Don and Jonathan) who are very strong indeed. We hung out together in Austin the night before and day of the Geek Bowl, and as usual that was a lot of fun. Thanks to teammate Don’s organizing efforts, several of us had even brought practice rounds of trivia questions to quiz each other with. So we toddled around different Austin locations, warmup questions flying.

We also went to the Geeks Who Drink pre-party (the “Freak Bowl”) on Friday night, at a place called Recess Arcade Bar — the Geeks had rented the upstairs space, away from the arcade games. That kind of party is not really my scene — my introverted self would much rather hang out someplace quiet with a few people than someplace bludgeoningly loud with a boatload of people. They did have a good live band, though — Guilty Pleasures, an all-girl rock & roll cover band who did a fine job with Blondie, AC/DC, ZZ Top, Beastie Boys, Nazareth, and so forth. They also had these dancers called The Hell Katz, who slung fire, showered sparks, and so forth, which, wow. It was awesome to see, but I was kind of glad I was in the balcony.

As for the Bowl itself, it was held in easily the nicest venue it’s ever had, the Moody Theater in downtown Austin, where Austin City Limits is filmed. The place was gorgeous, roomy, and had absolutely top-notch sound and video, which is especially important in an event like this, where the ability to see and hear clearly can mean the difference between a right and wrong answer. A beautiful building won’t compensate for a poorly organized night, but lucky for us, Geek Bowl 8 was a beautifully organized night, even before it ended so well for us. The early Geek Bowls were pretty rough going, but at this point the organization seems to have solved whatever problems needed solving, allowing them to accomplish some pretty remarkable feats of logistics, like getting 8 different live acts on and off stage quickly enough that we never felt like we were waiting for anything, even though each act only played for 25 seconds. (Well, they each did their thing twice, so I guess 50 seconds.) I feel like GWD hit a peak last year in event management, and it was gratifying to see them not slip an inch, and even improve in some areas.

Then there were the questions. The GWD signature tone is one I often describe as “self-consciously edgy.” They go to great lengths to position themselves as “not your father’s trivia game,” which means you are pretty much guaranteed to hear some combination of f-bombs, sexual references, and scatological humor, along with general irreverence and attitude. This has tended to be my least favorite GWD quality, because it has often felt like a bunch of well-written questions interspersed with two scoops of lowest-common-denominator crap. Over time, though, at least in the Geek Bowl, I feel like they’ve figured out how to integrate those themes well enough that they end up with a bunch of well-written questions that just happen to have raunchy elements. The question-writing has hit a very strong, very consistent stride, and this year’s quiz was no exception.

As I’ve done in previous years, I’m going to recap the questions and answers here. A few caveats about this, though. First, the Geeks are pretty careful about their intellectual property, and the agreement we’ve worked out is that I won’t post these recaps until at least a week has elapsed since the Geek Bowl. (Though all things considered I’d have a hard time getting this together in less time anyway!) Second, I consider these recaps a tribute to the excellent question writers of the Geek Bowl, and an advertisement for a really fun event, but I am in no way officially associated with Geeks Who Drink, and I have not been supplied with question material. The recap below is not a verbatim representation of the Geek Bowl 8 questions. They are reconstructed from my notes and memories, which are very fallible. I am certain I have left out some of the cleverness, some of the humor, and some of the pinning precision. Anything in the questions and answers below that is wrong or crappy is my fault, not theirs.

Quoting myself from 2012, 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, one other round was upgraded from 8 potential points to 16 — we could see from the pre-printed answer sheets that Round 5 would have 16 answers.

Finally, teams can choose one round to “joker”, meaning that it earns double points for that round. Obviously, you’d want that to be one of the 16-point rounds, unless you really believed you wouldn’t score above 8 in any of them, which is highly unlikely. We discussed our jokering strategy ahead of time, and decided on thresholds. The Round 2 threshold was 14 — in other words, if we felt very confident about 14 out of 16 answers in Round 2, we would joker it. The threshold for Round 5 would be 13, and of course for Round 8 there was no threshold — if we hadn’t jokered by then, we certainly would do so.

Now, for posterity and enjoyment, the questions of Geek Bowl 8. I’ll note our team’s experiences in [square brackets.] I’m also going to try something a little different this year and put the answers in a separate post, since this one gets long enough as it is.

Photo of the Geek Bowl VIII title slide

Round 1: These Team Names End Tonight
Remember how I said that the GWD tone is intentionally raunchy? Well, that carries over to some of the names people give their teams, and sometimes you see these names week after week, year after year. Often, they weren’t that funny to begin with, but even the ones that are funny tend to wear out their welcome after a while. So the Geeks, to their credit, mock them mercilessly, and in this round they announced (tongue in cheek, I assume) that the team names mentioned in these questions are herewith banned forever, and anyone with one of those team names will score 0 points for this round.

1. Banned team name: My Grandma Doesn’t Wrestle, But You Should See Her Box. If your boxing grandma were 124 pounds, she would be in what boxing weight class, in between bantamweight and lightweight? [We batted this one around for a while, and then Don nailed it.]
2. Banned team name: Cunning Linguists. Noam Chomsky was a very cunning linguist, who was born in the latter part of what decade? [Jonathan had an answer for this one, but alas, it was not correct.]
3. Banned team name: My Couch Pulls Out, But I Don’t. Even if you did pull out, your method of contraception would be rated very poorly on what scale, which shares its name with a pretty mineral ball?
4. Banned team name: Kitten Mittens. In the nursery rhyme where three little kittens lose their mittens, what food is withheld from them as punishment?
5. Banned team name: Turd Ferguson. In that SNL sketch which we have apparently all seen, Turd Ferguson is the alias used by what film star, being played by what SNL cast member? BOTH answers are required.
6. Banned team name: Ramrod. In the movie Super Troopers, which half of “RamRod” was also the director: Ram or Rod? [None of use knew this movie, so it was basically a coin flip. 50/50 was good to us that time.]
7. Banned team name: Hermaphrodite Barbie Comes In Her Own Box. The more widely accepted word for someone who cannot easily be categorized as male or female is what “I” word, which has its own advocacy group, the ISNA? [I was first out with this one, but I’m sure others at the table knew it.]
8. Banned team name: Just The Tip. Now that she’s split from Al, you could play “just the tip” with Tipper Gore, but her predecessor as second lady is still married. Give that predecessor’s first name.

[We ended up with 7 correct answers in this round.]
See the answers

Round 2: Sexy Songs Of SEX
Round 2 of the Geeks Who Drink pub quiz is always a music round, and in the bar that tends to mean mp3s played over speakers. At Geek Bowl, though, it’s live music all the way. Each year in Austin, they’ve actually brought in eight different live acts, each one of which plays for about 25 seconds, then repeats that same 25 seconds. Obviously there’s no way to present that here without giving away the answers, unless the Geeks choose to put up some video. So it’s all descriptions here — our one hint was that all the songs would be about sex in some way. (Ah, Geeks.) I will note that I am just awful at identifying songs when they’re played without lyrics and in a different style. Lucky for me, Brian, Jonathan, and especially Don are awesome at it.

1. A xylophone-and-drum group called The Djembabes played “Girls” by the Beastie Boys.
2. The best group name of the night was: Cello, Is It Me You’re Looking For? That was an ensemble of six cellists, but they seem to have no web presence, so no link on their name. (Maybe a pickup group of cellists? Can that happen?) Anyway, it was six cellos playing “Push It” by Salt-n-Pepa. [Don recognized this right away, and was kind of annoyed when the cellists went on to play a much more recognizable phrase from the song.]
3. Reggae band Tribal Nation played a rastafied version of Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On.”
4. Then there were the bagpipes. A peck of pipers (and drums) called Silver Thistle played Monty Python’s loving anthem, “Sit On My Face”. [We were absolutely clueless on this one. We ended up guessing “I Want Your Sex” by George Michael.]
5. Afghani group Atash played a lovely and rather haunting bit of “Sexual Healing” by Marvin Gaye.
6. At this point, the MC introduced something called The Gams. I can’t find anything on the web about them either, but maybe that’s not too surprising. Essentially, what happened was that a guy came on stage cradling what looked like a case of soda. “Hot Legs” by Rod Stewart started to play. Then, as the vocals began, a puppet popped out of the case to sing “Who’s that knockin’ on my door?” And that was it. This was probably the lamest part of the night.
7. The next act made up for it. This was a country outfit called Horse Opera, who played a perfectly country-fried version of “Too Drunk To Fuck” by the Dead Kennedys. [Don latched onto a lyric about getting into a fight at a party and was calling the answer as “Kiss Me Deadly” by Lita Ford. However, on the second listen, it became apparent that was wrong. Suddenly Jonathan jolted to life, grabbed a piece of paper, and scribbled down TOO DRUNK TO FUCK. At which point Brian said, “Yes! Dead Kennedys!” And we were off. Awesome.]
8. The final act was The Capital City Men’s Chorus. The amusing thing about this act was that a line of men walked up on the stage, and then behind them another line of men walked up on the stage. Then, behind them, another line of men walked up on stage. And AGAIN. They just kept coming. Very funny. Then they started into their number, but flubbed the beginning. Their conductor turned to the audience, flashed an imaginary Men In Black neuralyzer and said, “That didn’t happen.” Heh. Anyway, the second time the song came off fine, or at least as well as it could considering it was “I Wanna Sex You Up” by Color Me Badd. [Don ROCKED this one. He recognized it almost immediately. From the verse, mind you.]

[We felt very good about 14 of our 16 answers this round, and since that met our previously-agreed-upon threshold, we jokered the round. That gave us 28 points, to combine with our previous 7 for a total of 35.]

Round 3: Lather and Rinse, But No Repeats
Round 3 of Geeks Who Drink is typically some kind of a gimmick round. Sometimes that means a speed round (name everything in some category in 2 minutes), sometimes it’s a “stop” round (the quizmaster reads increasingly-obvious clues to an answer until somebody in the bar shouts “stop”, and then everybody has to answer — something that obviously wouldn’t work at Geek Bowl.) Most often, though, it’s some kind of 50/50 round — true or false; real or made-up; multiple-choice with two answers; or some mix of these. Sometimes it’s even something very specific like 8 South Park questions to which the answer is either Timmy or Jimmy. Round 3 at Geek Bowl 8 followed this trend: it was a 50/50 round about hygiene.

1. In those old toothpaste ads, who fought the Cavity Creeps: Colgate or Crest?
2. True or False: The average cellphone has more germs on it than the average toilet seat.
3. Which one was a real slogan for Irish Spring soap: “Smell like you’re worth exploring” or “Get a little Irish on you”?
4. When you go take a shit during the next scoring break, which toilet should you select if you want the lowest bacteria levels on it: the one closest to the bathroom door or the one farthest from the bathroom door?
5. According to the American Congress Of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which is better: to douche or not to douche?
6. True or False: A recent study by the FDA found that antibacterial soap gets your filthy self cleaner than regular soap.
7. Which has more blades: the manual Gilette Fusion or the Schick Quattro?
8. Who wrote an 1867 paper entitled “On The Antiseptic Principle of The Practice Of Surgery”: Oliver Wendell Holmes or Joseph Lister? [Larry knew this one before they even read the names.]

[We got #3 wrong, but all the rest of them right — a 7-point round which brought our total to 42.]
See the answers

Round 4: I Went To Geek Bowl And All I Got Was This Lousy Anal Probe
This was a round about the paranormal (titled in classic GWD fashion), and lucky for us, George has a particular interest in the topic. He was very strong in this round, though everyone contributed.

1. Before being thoroughly debunked, what spoon-bending Israeli proto-douche insisted that his abilities were a gift from extraterrestrials?
2. 108 Ocean Avenue, formerly 112 Ocean Avenue, is an infamous house in what New York town of 10,000, located on an inlet of South Oyster Bay?
3. Shadow people keeping you from moving? Don’t worry, it’s probably just this phenomenon. [This was another question where Jonathan scribbled something down, and as soon as I saw it, I knew it was correct.]
4. The Zapruder film is to the JFK assassination as the Patterson-Gimlin film is to what? [George nailed this one.]
5. Peruvians may have been communicating with aliens, or maybe they were just high, when they created what UNESCO-recognized geoglyphs? [I had never heard of these at all, but George was all over it.]
6. The Jersey Devil is a legendary creature said to stalk what area of southern New Jersey, also the name of a classic Sopranos episode?
7. The Time/Life books series Mysteries of The Unknown had this many volumes, the same as one of the best episodes of Battlestar Galactica as well as a Smashing Pumpkins song. Coincidence? We think not.
8. This volunteer, nonprofit, paranormal-investigation organization is headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, has Dan Aykroyd as a Hollywood consultant, and has a 5-letter acronym for its name, the middle three letters of which are “UFO”. Name it. [Hilariously, George knew about two different such organizations with “UFO” in the middle, and decided to go for the better-known one. Good decision!]

[We nailed this one. 8 points, for a new total of 50.]
See the answers

Round 5: A Pervert’s History Of The United States
Round 5 of Geeks Who Drink is always a visual round. At a bar, that means half-sheets of paper, usually with some kind of photoshopped craziness on them. At Geek Bowl, it has tended to mean images displayed on large video screens. This year, though, they upped the ante with a full-blown video. Each clue was a still picture, but the camera panned over them in a lingering fashion. This is one of the ways Geek Bowl 8 improved upon its predecessors, especially last year. Geek Bowl 7 showed pictures into which famous faces had been photoshopped, but the pictures went by super fast, and depending on where you were sitting it could be hard to see enough detail in the images to have a reasonable shot at answering the question. By slowing it down and doing documentary-style pans, they solved both these problems and made the round way more fun.

As it turned out, this year was another version of “familiar faces in an unfamiliar context,” but this time the faces were pasted into vintage porn pictures — nothing super graphic, but plenty porny. (Boy, there really was a lot of sex stuff this year.) The idea was that each picture would show a couple, but the faces of the couple would be people who were somehow linked in American history, with the picture sometimes putting a funny gloss on the relationship. Each question was worth two points — one for each face.

Oh here, let me just show you, at least until YouTube gets wind of the content and takes it down. In case you hadn’t figured this out yet, you probably shouldn’t watch this one at work:

[We got everything but #6, wrongly guessing Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. So that was 14 points, for a total of 64.]
See the answers

Round 6: William Shakespeare, Product Support Specialist
This was my favorite round of the night. Eight different quizmasters walked onto the stage, along with one or two others whose job it was to explain the concept, which is as follows: each clue consists of support instructions for eight different modern products, but the clues are written in Elizabethan English, even iambic pentameter sometimes. In any case, the clues were very well-written and extremely clever, and each one was read by a separate quizmaster in fine Royal Shakespeare style. Sometimes the screen would show an additional hint to provide a little context, along the lines of “Name this product whose first model debuted in 2008.” Unfortunately, the style of the round makes it basically impossible to reproduce from memory. I tried scribbling down notes, but they are woefully insufficient.

However, lucky for me, when they showed the answers, they repeated a bit of the prose from each question, so I was able to snap pictures once I figured out that was the thing to do. (Cameras are allowed at Geek Bowl as long as they are not capable of receiving information.) So, because I’m unable to fully reproduce the questions, my recap of this round will display the answer along with just a snippet of the question. (I’m winging it on #1 because I only have notes.) Just take it from me that each one had quite a bit more amusing quasi-Shakespearean diction.

1. “In bouncing the coil just move thy wrist / For hours and hours of fun, what ho!” Slinky
2. “Cook the noodles, eight minutes or so / Stirring occasionally as they soft’n and swell…” Kraft Macaroni & Cheese [I recognized this one right away.]
3. “Grip thou the handle if thou wouldst transport / This technologic dream in Bondi blue…” iMac
4. “Eleven lets thee swap spots with thy foe / Unless he be inside the safety zone…” Sorry!
5. “Swipe the temple touchpad to and fro / And perhaps with thy mouth thou could go ‘whoosh’…” Google Glass
6. “Two hundred miles or farther may thou go, / Before thou must recharge the thing again…” Tesla Roadster
7. “Music, Podcasts, Photos, touch them all / Or ‘FM’ to the radio turn on…” Sony Walkman [We were tossing around things like the iPod touch or iPhone, but the screen indicated that the product’s first version was released in 1979. I thought of the Walkman as the only thing that came out in 1979 and might have the listed capabilities today. I managed to talk my team into it, too — I think this question is the contribution I’m happiest about for myself.]
8. “Should its magic work beyond four hours / Seek help, if thou wouldst not thy todger maim…” Viagra

[We got all 8 on this one, for a total of 72.]

Round 7: Even More Celebrities (We Could Get!)
In the bar version of Geeks Who Drink, round 7 tends to be a second audio round, usually of clips from movies, or tv shows, or commercials, or some such. (Though I hear that some lucky venues get video round 7s — sadly my home bar is not one of these!) In any case, the first several Geek Bowls I went to had movie clips for round 7, but last year they had a little breakthrough and managed to get 8 minor (but geekily beloved) celebrities to read questions, people like Wil Wheaton, Katee Sackhoff (from Battlestar Galactica), and Will Shortz. This year, they repeated the feat with 8 new celebs:

Just in case that video ever evaporates, here were the questions:
1. Levar Burton: In the Reading Rainbow theme song, following the words “I can” are a couple of two-word phrases. What are they? [We struggled on this one. Jonathan came up with “go twice as high”, but that’s not two two-word phrases. Still, nothing else we could come up with, so that’s what we put.]
2. Steve Inskeep: The day before Morning Edition came on the air, the Iran hostage crisis began. The hostages were held for a multiple of 111 days. How many days were they held for? [This felt like a real softball. We would have known it even without the “111 multiple” thing.]
3. Mondo Guerra: Every Project Runway designer is familiar with Tim Gunn’s famous three-word catchphrase, when he’s less than impressed with a design’s progress. Hint: it shares one word with RuPaul’s. What is it? [Brian knew that RuPaul’s catchphrase was, “You better work,” but from there we didn’t have much. I suggested “This doesn’t work,” and since nobody else had anything better, that was what we went with. Not big Project Runway watchers over here.]
4. Rich Sommer: The man who plays my boss is named Robert Morse. He first rose to fame in 1961, playing a window-washer who rises through the ranks to become a big business executive in what big Broadway musical? [Don knew this as soon as the guy said, “Robert Morse.”]
5. Jim O’Heir: Historically, the Pawnee people lived mostly along the North Platte river, in the territory that became what great plains state?
6. David Koechner: You might know me as Champ Kind from Anchorman, or Todd Packer from The Office, but I was also Uncle Earl, from what? [We were again clueless on this one. I knew he was an SNL cast member for a year, and that is the only thing any of us knew, so we put down SNL]
7. Elijah Wood: Alfred Hitchock’s North By Northwest and my early film North are both rightly hailed as classics of American cinema. How many years elapsed between the films’ release dates: 25, 35, or 45? [Larry knew exactly when North By Northwest was released, and Don knew North, so there you go.]
8. Jim Parsons: You probably remember me as a Medieval Times knight in Garden State. A few years earlier, Janeane Garofalo played a Medieval Times waitress in what film that Ben Stiller directed between Reality Bites and Zoolander?

[This was the toughest round for us. We ended up getting 5 correct, for a total score of 77.]
See the answers

Round 8: Random Knowledge
Round 8 of Geeks Who Drink is always a “random knowledge” round, and always worth 16 points. It’s a last chance to joker if a team hasn’t already, and kind of an equalizer in that it is a total potpourri. In the bar version, the points are all over the map — a question can be worth anywhere between 1 and 4 points. In Geek Bowl, it’s a little more stable: each question was worth two points.

1. Giorgio Moroder worked on the soundtracks of two different movies with “Top” in the title, one in 1986 and one in 1987. Name them both.
2. Adam is the first prophet of Islam. What two famous dudes are the last prophets of Islam?
3. Louis Sullivan was an American architect known as the “father of the skyscraper.” First, with what alliterative three-word phrase is he most closely associated? Second, what devoutly midwestern guy was Sullivan’s most famous protege?
4. What child development word comes from the Latin for “speechless”? Before babies leave the hospital, they are usually vaccinated against what form of hepatitis? [We felt good about our second answer, but struggled on the first. We put “aphasia”, since that does mean inability to speak, but had qualms about the fact that you couldn’t really call it a “child development word.”]
5. What subatomic particle was thought for a few months in 2011 to have been measured traveling faster than light? What is the name for the edge of the solar system, where the solar wind is stopped by the interstellar medium?
6. What monarch instituted the tradition of the white wedding dress by wearing a white lace dress at her 1840 wedding? What Romantic composer wrote the theme most of us know as “Here Comes The Bride”, or the “Wedding March”?
7. What old bearded man was the subject of Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Portrait Of A Man In Red Chalk”? Vincent Van Gogh’s “Man In A Red Beret” was a portrait of what other artist, who was involved in the ear-cutting incident? [Larry had a great pull on the Van Gogh question.]
8. Finally, here’s that Friends question you’ve all been wanting. Which two of the 6 central characters on Friends also worked as servers at Central Perk?

After those eight questions came probably the best innovation of Geek Bowl 8: the pre-emptive tiebreaker. In previous years, there would very frequently be a tie among some of the top-placing teams, and that was handled by giving them 5 additional questions, letting them huddle, and then breaking the tie based on who got more of them right. However, this method was logistically awkward, and involved a lot of sitting around waiting for everyone else in the audience. So this time, the Geeks asked this extremely convoluted question:

Pre-Emptive Tiebreaker: Take the number of years Facebook has been a company as of February, and add the number of years Hitler served as Fuehrer of Germany. Multiply the total by the year in which the Colosseum was built, and then subtract the resulting number from the actual population of Amityville, New York as of the 2010 census.

They simplified it a bit with this expression, projected onto the video screens:

Amityville 2010 – [(years of FB + Hitler as Fuehrer) x year of Colosseum] = ?

[We amazed me by getting 15 points in this round. The child development word was the only one we missed. So, combined with our 77 points so far, we had a final total of 92 points.]
See the answers

And there you have it, the questions of Geek Bowl VIII. Before we move on to the answers, let’s enjoy this awesome “In Memoriam” video which played at the Geek Bowl. WARNING: spoilers within for True Blood, Dexter, Downton Abbey, Sons Of Anarchy, The Walking Dead (so, so much), Game of Thrones, Homeland, Doctor Who, and especially Breaking Bad.

Geek Bowl VI question recap

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.

Ice Slowly Melting

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 PRUDENCESiouxsie 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 BEAUTYThe 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 SUNPaul 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 FAITHNew 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 LOVEStevie 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 ADOLESCENTSX-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 MOONHugh 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 OVERBilly 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 WINDOWBen 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. HELPLESSk.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 TWILIGHTThe 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 SETTLINGDeath 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, BABYKirsty 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 SANDThe 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 EFFORTThe 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…

M-m-m-my TCONA! [Days 2 and 3]

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:

  1. Name the three yellow properties in the standard American version of the board game Monopoly. (1 point, wrong)
  2. 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)
  3. Among other things, this film is known for G, A, F, (octave lower) F, C. (0, right)
  4. The holiest city of Zoroastrianism, Rhaga, is today known as Rey, a suburb of what western Asian city? (2, wrong)
  5. 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)
  6. 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:

  1. Daily Double wagering
  2. Picking a square
  3. Buzzing or not
  4. 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:

  1. Name the three yellow properties in the standard American version of the board game Monopoly. Atlantic Avenue, Ventnor Avenue, Marvin Gardens
  2. 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).
  3. Among other things, this film is known for G, A, F, (octave lower) F, C. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (This.)
  4. The holiest city of Zoroastrianism, Rhaga, is today known as Rey, a suburb of what western Asian city? Tehran
  5. 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.)
  6. 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.

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