Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Even reading the Washington Post every day as a child, I was not so thoroughly political when I lived in the epicenter of American politics, Washington D.C.. My brother and I attended the inauguration of Jimmy Carter, from afar, and got to see the new President and Vice President walk down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol Building to the White House. The oversized Carter/Mondale buttons we bought that day were attached to the curtains of my room for about the next decade. My parents’ progressive attitudes infused our lives in myriad subtle ways, but they did not result in our attending rallies or protests.
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As a college student, I did join protests against apartheid, and often visited the faux shanty town that was built on Marsh Plaza, next to the large statue commemorating the life and Boston University affiliations of Martin Luther King, Jr. We protesters were trying, largely unsuccessfully, to convince Boston University President John Silber to divest from South Africa, seemingly the focus of international racial prejudice. Frank Sinatra visited Sun City, South Africa, crossing the cultural blockade / picket line in 1981, and was rewarded two years later with a Kennedy Center Honor from President Reagan. Old Blue Eyes was heard less often in my house in the 1980s than in the 1970s, when our memories of Sinatra helping to desegregate Nevada hotels, and putting on benefit shows for Dr. King and his causes, were still fresh in my parents’ heads.
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When I lived a block and a half from the Russian Consulate on my same street, Tunlaw Road, in Washington D.C., we didn’t think to protest our cold war enemies. They were good neighbors, and we tried to be the same. This was decades before Californian anti-gay activist Scott Lively began his 2007 50-city speaking tour in Russia, where, according to the Huffington Post he called for the criminalization, in Russia as he had in the US, of "the public advocacy of homosexuality." Putin and other powerful Russians were evidently listening, for now many of Lively’s ideas have become law. Lively said in one of those speeches that "Russians, even after glasnost, are comfortable with an authoritarian style," lamenting that "That wouldn't work in the United States."
Evidently authoritarianism hasn’t taken root in nearby Sweden, either. Maybe you have seen the photograph of the rainbow that gay (or gay-allied) activists painted on the crosswalk outside the Russian consulate in Stockholm. Reflecting on my former neighbors at the Russian consulate in DC, I have found myself imagining what friends I might gather to engage in such a political prank, today. Perhaps it's time, after all these years, and the great distances that have scattered us, to reassemble my high school peer group, the Trendsetters. Although we are all (more) responsible members of society today, we knew how to make irreverent trouble back in the day, including with spray-painted banners. Wordsworth had daffodils, rather than best friends, in mind when he wrote, "A poet could not but be gay, / in such a jocund company," but the sentiment still applies when it comes to the company one keeps when protesting injustice and jingoistic prejudice.
Today’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on Florence, showers, phones, Dweezils, meditation, showers, men who were missing, statewide office, NFL records, Giants, towers, South American carnivores, apples, US Presidents, bad magazine trolls, overcoming doubt, British poets, bulges, Australian babies, names that start with S, moons, Spider-Man, the Irish economy, Ottoman Turks, polyatomic ions, hulled seeds, abbeys and Shakespeare.
This coming Thursday is Poetry Night in the city of Davis, and I hope you will join us for the fun. Lawrence Dinkins, also known as NSAA or EN-Sah-AA, is one of my favorite Sacramento poets. He is also the host of the Mahogany Urban Poetry Series and half the music and performance duo Electropoetic Coffee. We start Thursday at 8 at the John Natsoulas Gallery, with an open mic that starts at 9, and an after-party that starts at 10 at de Vere’s Irish Pub.
See you tonight at 7, or before if you’d like your choice of seating. I expect more than 30 teams.
Your Quizmaster
1. Internet Culture. Who is the “Rick” of the internet meme known as “Rickroll”?
2. Newspaper Headlines. The US, Britain, and France have all extended the closure of embassies in what country that starts with the letter Y?
3. Europe. Lombardy is the name of one of the richest regions in all of Europe, when measured by GDP per inhabitant. Name the country that is home to Lombardy.
4. Still Picking on Mitt Romney. Like Mitt Romney, the Mitt Romney impersonator on Saturday Night Live is not coming back in the fall. What is the name of that actor?
5. Pop Culture – Music. What Blues and Rock and Roll pioneer, an influencer of Buddy Holly and Elvis, a player of square guitars, was celebrated at the time of his 2008 death by the President of the US, and by every surviving rock and roll legend, including Little Richard, with whom he had had a 50-year friendship? Some people guessed, incorrectly, that it was Chuck Berry or Chubby Checker. They are both still alive and performing from time to time, he said gratefully.