Sponsor spotlight: The Fifth Annual Panorama Challenge

This, my friends, is big. Literally and figuratively.

One of the few NYC quiz events that can hold a light-up buzzer to the Big Quiz Thing, the Queens Museum of Art's Panorama Challenge, presents its fifth annual edition on Friday, February 10, from 7 to 10pm. If you've never been to the QMA—okay, yeah, it's far, but come on, you have a MetroCard—one of the highlights of that storied institution is the Panorama of the City of New York: a 9,335-square-foot, disturbingly accurate scale model of all five boroughs, including tens of thousands of individual buildings. Maddening. Details and photos here; I had no idea Robert Moses oversaw its construction (man, that guy did it all, including dislike people who looked different from him).
The Panorama Challenge, organized by crackerjack tour-guide company Levys' Unique New York, is a team geography quiz centering on the Panorama and utilizing handy-dandy laser pointers. You'll be asked queries on streets, bridges, rivers, etc., etc., for the glory of having your name inscribed on this kick-ass trophy:


Plus, you automatically earn 100,000 free votes in the next mayoral election (need to check about that last one). Not to mention free beer, courtesy Brooklyn Brewery, and a gratis shuttle bus from the 7 train. Your excuses have run out, map nerds.

Official press info here. It's Friday, February 10, 7 to 10pm, at the Queens Museum. Admission is a mere $10, which includes a beer. However, if you score at this Monday's Big Quiz Thing (at Hill Country, 7:30pm), you just may pick up a free pass or two. How's that for the NYC geek universe collapsing in on itself?

We're hiring!

Who says there are no jobs out there?

Publicity/marketing manager
The Big Quiz Thing, LLC, is looking for a publicist/marketer to join our team, and help spread the word about the country's No. 1 live quiz show. The ideal candidate will have experience in event publicity, and be aggressive and creative about telling the BQT's story to the public nationwide. Will work part-time, handling three to four live events per month, collaborating with the rest of the BQT team. Please e-mail info[at]bigquizthing.com with your résumé and pay requirements. For more about the Big Quiz Thing, visit bigquizthing.com.

Sponsorship-sales manager

Staging multiple highly attended events every month in various cities, the Big Quiz Thing presents a tremendous and unique sponsorship opportunity. We’re now in search of someone with experience in event and corporate sponsorship sales to help the BQT develop and refine its sponsorship strategy, and to make the necessary connections with relevant organizations, in both New York City and elsewhere, on a part-time basis. E-mail info[at]bigquizthing.com with your résumé, cover letter, any questions you have, and pay requirements.

2012 is going to be/already is your year, I can feel it!

Recap: Fuck Tim Tebow, Scooby-Doo!

A big, beautiful crowd at last night's Boston BQT. Thank you (and thanks to supreme venue Oberon, as always, and sponsor Cafe of India). And hey—the Quips weren't there! The team that has dominated the Big Quiz Thing like no other (a long string of Boston victories and even winning the one time they crashed NYC) just didn't show up tonight. Burnout? Fear? Had some other random prior commitment? I know which one I think is most likely…

But as I say, more than enough people took part in the festivities yesterday evening, featuring "The Classic Commercial Quiz" ("Excuse me, would you happen to have any BEEEEEP?") and the insanely-difficult-to-put-together-but-oh-so-fun-and-thanks-for-your-appreciation "The Palindrome Audio Round Audio Palindrome The." In honor of that—and the fact that we're all nerds—here's a video of the round's centerpiece, They Might Be Giants' second-best song, "I Palindrome I," made by someone probably even nerdier than you:

A great, great night for Smart-Ass Points: Bo Knows Steroids, it was strange that Mel Gussow wrote Elizabeth Taylor's obituary because he killed her, Pavement's "Cut Your Hair" ends with the singer repeating "…down there," David Bowie's superhero song was titled "Xena, Warrior Princess," Darrell Issa (R-CA) has the honor of being the whitest person in Congress (and Keith Ellison and Andre Carson are the only honest representatives ever), the rock star who pissed outside the Alamo was Davy Crockett, there was a book in the '70s titled Waldo Among the Jews, and the only two Best Picture Oscar nominees of the past ten years whose titles were complete sentences were I Know What You Did Last Summer and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Thanks for providing the jokes so that I don't have to.

Or at least not on purpose…B-Cutie Katie noticed that the first two answers of the Lightning Round gave you "Fuck Tim Tebow." Then I noticed that if you include the third answer, it's "Fuck Tim Tebow, Scooby-Doo." An Internet meme in the making, wouldn't you say?

And it came down to the finale: With no Quips to wreck the curve, we were left with the other two Boston dominators, the Monstrous Humanoids and Dan Evins Kicks Ass!! (really reaching there, Ass Kickers), along with first-time finale-sters, Percocet-Fueled Honey Badgers. And this one took a while: We made it ten questions with still no winner (well, if you don't count the audience, which was positively acing the round). One more and I would've been forced to whip out some of the material I custom-wrote for a drug company last month. See, here's the thing: No one was guessing. Players were just staring blankly. I know everyone's nervous about slamming the buzzer too hard and wrecking the whole delicate system upon which the BQT rests, but come on, give it a shot, man! (I was especially perturbed that no one even tried for "Which ‘04 Democratic presidential candidate once worked as a tour manager for James Brown?" I mean, which of the candidates wouldn't have gotten a laugh?)

But at last, when I lobbed forth the comparatively easy "What common dish retains its meaning and pronunciation when you add a 'te' to the end?" and tacked on the clue that you probably ate it much earlier in the day, the Ass Kickers made it happen.

The standings:
1. Dan Evins Kicks Ass!!
2. The Monstrous Humanoids/Percocet-Fueled Honey Badgers (tie)
4. The Unexpected Destruction of Elaborately Engineered Artifacts (T.U.D. of E.E.A.)
5. Naked in 30 Seconds or Less
6. Sexistential Dread
7. Zombie Brain Trust Fund Supports DJ Run DMX
8. Glandular Lansbury
9. Jon Huntsman's Hot Daughters
10. Let Us Play with Your Tips/Pony No Bueno

NEXT: Yes! February 20, Presidents' Day, we're back with our Hail to the Trivia Presidential Quiz Spectacular! All 43 chief executives! Some Vice Presidents! Fictional Presidents! Maybe a secretary of state or two! Still free, still $200 grand prize. Keep up on Facebook and Twitter; see you then.

Recap: Cruising for a quizzing

At tonight's fabulous Big Quiz Thing, we asked this question:

What’s the common description: Something that the average child begins doing at 12 months, and something that lots of men do in Christopher Street bars on Saturday nights?

(I noted that it is of the figureoutable persuasion. Here is your answer.)

This perturbed folks. Someone came up to me asked, "How exactly does a child cruise?" (I explained, using my years of child-rearing expertise.) Lots of people said, incorrectly, "crawling," and just now, BQT diehard Greg (of perennial contenders Strippers for Stephen Hawking) IMed me to say that he think "crawling" should count…though don't children start crawling a lot earlier? (Looks like yes.)

Lots of fun tonight, to start out the year in quizziness. Some great Smart-Ass Points, especially on that same question. The funniest wrong answers: "Having an oral fixation," "Eating solids," and—easily best of all—"Rejecting the breast." Bravo, comedians.

A note on the video puzzles, "Sports Logo-a-Go-Go": By far the toughest of the lot was this—
It's the Minnesota Lynx, and hardly anyone got it. But they're by no means an obscure team: They're the reigning Women's National Basketball Association champions. (Anyone? Anyone? [Crickets]) As for the audio round, "Okay, We'll Give You the Title"—that's what we did, playing the part of 20 songs that included the title, asking you only to name the artist—the hardest was this slice of early-'80s insanity:

The finale was interesting: After a kick-ass 2011, Incontinental New Year started the year strong, joined by Gerard Depardouche and the recently surging Hulk Hogan's Beefeaters (the name, apparently, because the team tonight was 30% British). Being a lifelong underdog myself, I was pulling for the Hulksters, but hey, fair is fair, and INY won it with this puzzler:

What three-letter abbreviation stands for an organization with a presence throughout NYC—when you reverse the order of the letters, you get an abbreviation seen on completely unrelated signs throughout NYC?

I mean, right?

The standings:
1. Incontinental New Year
2. Hulk Hogan's Beefeaters
3. Gerard Depardouche
4. Fantastic Fournicators
5. Strippers for Stephen Hawking
6. Ride the Santorum Wave
7. Oh Noah 2012 Edition
8. Sugah Titz
9. Cash Cab for Cutie
10. Jews Against Jesus

Big, big thanks for our sponsors: The Unemployed Philosophers Guild (gotta get that Theodore Roosevelt finger puppet) and Geek Treats. And of course, our fantastic venue, M1-5: I don't know what the number means, but it probably has something to do with delicious thin-crust pizza.

NEXT: Who knows? We'll let you know…

Tonight's NOT-SO-SECRET SECRET CLUE

Huzzah! The Big Quiz Thing is back for 2012, tonight, at the convenient-licious M1-5. Sports Logo-a-Go-Go, a mega-nifty new audio round, massive more amounts of fun, plus prizes from the Unemployed Philosophers Guild and Geek Treats, plus the $300 jackpot. And here's your special, special clue.

…even though lots of people believe no house actually is.

How's about that, friends? See you this evening…

A consumer-product tour of Berlin

Guten tag! Actually, I haven't been in Germany in ten days (unless you count my airport layover in Munich six days ago, en route from Switzerland), but forgive me, your quizmaster is still in New Year's catch-up mode. 'Cause I rock just that hard, yo. (Also, I was busy listening to 2011's "best" music for the very first time.)

As I do every time I visit an exotic or semi-exotic place, I like to enter a supermarket and photographically take note of novel and/or bizarre products, from my Amero-Canadian POV. On this blog I've discussed shopping adventures in Puerto Rico, Switzerland, and London, and now we come to Berlin. A four-day post-Xmas visit with family was extremely historically educational; there was something exceedingly historically gratifying about lighting the Hanukkah candles and reading Superman comics in the heart of the former Third Reich (especially while my bedtime reading was The Man in the High Castle). I think I determined that the Germans aren't that bizarre, despite what porno-obsessed stand-up comics might tell you, But still, here's what I found (sorry for the lousy photos, but the grocer was eying me suspiciously)…
It seems appropriately German to me that the English names for these generic cereals are so clinically descriptive: "Cinnamon Flavored Squares" and "Fruit Rings." Maybe we should start calling Rice Krispies "Oblong Dun-Colored Pellets of Crisped Rice Grain."

I am almost literally the farthest thing from a beer expert, but I don't think I've ever seen this before: loose bottles of beer (and whatever that vodka drink is) on an unrefrigerated shelf. Something seems really, really low-rent about it; I mean, even a frat house finds room for a crappy fridge. Yet these are the Germans were talking about, the world's beer authorities, mandating the quality of the beverage by law. So who are we to question their shelving techniques?

Speaking of lack of refrigeration…

These are packages of German-farm-fresh eggs, just sitting out there on the shelf, ready to go rotten or worse. (I also saw what looked like frozen dinner entrées exposed to the temperate world.) This made me slightly queasy—don't eggs go, like, instantly bad if they're not treated with the utmost care? Aren't you courting digestive death via omelette? Yet when I mentioned this apparent anamoly to my sister (a Swiss resident), she looked at me like I was crazy. "Oh, sure," she said. "They never do that anywhere in this part of Europe. We've taken to not refrigerating our eggs at home; it makes a lot more sense." Great, one year as a European resident and she already hates our American way of life.

I'm convinced there's a huge vein of untapped humor in the topic of toothpaste. From the Cavity Creeps to Triple Protection Aqua Fresh, no general product category has inspired more hilariously overblown and bizarre TV commercials over the past 60 years. Thus, I really dig the names of these German brands: Odol-med 3, Aronal, Elmex. I'm guessing those were rejected names for members of the Three Musketeers.

This made my heart skip a beat (almost literally)…

The USA may be the greatest country ever in the history of all time since the beginning of the universe, but you know what we don't have enough of? Breakfast cereals adapted from candy bars. We have Reese's Puffs, but that's all that comes to mind. Yet in Germany, not only did I spot Nestlé Crunch cereal (I can't imagine the deliciousness), but this: Lion Cereal. For the uninitiated, Lion Bars are very popular and indescribably tasty candy bars found throughout Europe; I discovered them when I spent a teenage summer in the U.K. and ate them pretty much nonstop (you can find them in NYC if you put in a little effort). I'm fascinated by the concept of beginning my day consuming a variant on the product. Now you know what to get me for Valentine's Day.

Finally, German is an inherently funny language. So on a side trip to a department store, these gave me 20 minutes of serious amusement:
I was about to write that I really, really want to know what Don Corleone sounds like in German, but then I thought I also want to hear Luca Brasi. And Jack Woltz. And fuck it, Fredo too.

POTA is one of my absolute favorite movies ever, but the one logical flaw that has always stuck in my craw is the fact that the apes speak English. No, even that is fine: It's that they speak English and Taylor doesn't find that strange (though the twist ending provides a plausible enough explanation). But if the apes are speaking German…well, now we're playing a whole different ball game, aren't we?

I'm guessing that Dynasty, or its closest German equivalent, just doesn't fly in German as indicating jet-setting glamor and intrigue among the super-rich of the 1980s. But does Der Denver Clan ("the Denver clan") really solve the problem. I mean, Denver? Doesn't quite have the cachet of Dallas, does it?

"Murder is her h0bby." Oh, boy. There's that great stat that considering the small size of Cabot Cove, Maine, over the entire 12-year run of Murder, She Wrote, a full 2% of the residents were killed. And that maybe the secret behind the series is that Jessica Fletcher is a serial killer (with some powers of mind control, enabling her to hypnotize others into confessing to her crimes). I guarantee this all seems so much more believable in German.

Where to next? Australia…I'm hoping (by the time I'm 40, I've been saying). Care to join me?

A (mostly) uninformed listening of the top 50 singles of 2011: 1–10

And now, after 41–50, 31–40, 21–30, and 11–20, we come to the end: the best of the best of the best of the year's singles, according to a few music geek manchildren sitting around a plush office on Sixth Avenue. And I missed out on almost all of them. So what do I think now, after their moments have passed? The world waits with bated breath…

10. “Don’t Carry It All” – The Decemberists

Several years back, I was dragged (well, not quite; I was offered a free ticket and accepted) to see the Decemberists at the Bowery Ballroom. I did not have a good time; in fact, during that show, something inside me snapped: The whole thing was just so sedate. I mean, the Decemberists were supposedly a rock & roll band, but in no conceivable way did they actually rock. It was like sitting around a campfire with a bunch of people I didn’t know, at a summer camp my parents forced me to go to. It was then that my frustration with modern “rock” firmly took root, and I vowed to stop caring about boringly introspective guitar-playing people with no discernable personality, and to start truly treasuring the music that really spoke to me.

This is to say that I admit a strong bias against the Decemberists, and while “Don’t Carry It All” has a perfectly lovely melody, I just can’t get excited about what sounds to me like 8 billion folk-pop tunes I’ve heard before, done better and less cloying. Maybe more to the point, there’s hardly an ounce of conviction here. Can someone tell me what’s special and/or exciting about this band?


9. “Six Foot Seven Foot” – Lil Wayne ft. Cory Gunz

I've seen the tattoos, I've read the police blotter, but this is the first time I’ve heard Lil Wayne’s voice. Well, the guy’s certainly talented, though even after reading the lyrics, I have no idea what he’s talking about (something having to do with llamas screaming, and he says “real G’s move in silence like lasagna”). One of the crude barometers I use to judge hip-hop is whether the sample interests me, or whether it makes me roll my eyes. This one—Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song” (cowritten by the Muppets)—definitely works, fitting perfectly into the general structure of the song. In sum, this song makes Weezy come off as a sharp, creative guy, if supremely sleazy. Not sure if that’s a miracle or par for the course.


8. “Countdown” – Beyoncé

Traditionally, I’ve been able to do without Beyoncé. Destiny’s Child struck me as supremely contrived—wow, you’re singing about being a survivor and dancing on a desert island while the entire country is transfixed by a TV show called Survivor featuring people on a desert island! I’ve always found something empty about her, an inch’s worth of star power on top of an attractive but empty vessel. A fine voice, but no soul.

That said, I’ve been warming up to her; maybe it’s the realization that she’s definitely here to stay. And this song/video helps. First of all, she’s smiling! Look at that, some personality. Also, I think as she gets older, Beyoncé’s voice develops a lot more character, expanding upon the robotic trilling and belting of the Whitney template (don’t get me started on her). Musically and compositionally, this is a great-sounding, exuberant song, throwing everything including the kitchen sink into a masterful blend of love-song goodness, and Beyoncé’s voice is right there with it from start to finish. Her energy and her personality never flag, something that simply can’t be said for 99 percent of performers in pop music right now. All right, she wins.


7. “The Edge of Glory” – Lady Gaga

I’m starting to think that Gaga just tries too hard. I’m sure people said this about Madonna 30 years ago and, I don’t know, Petula Clark 20 years before that. But every song with her has to be some big kind of statement from the depths of her soul. I know, this is emblematic of the confessional nature of so much music now, but for whatever reason, it takes on so much more drama when it comes from Lady Gaga, the singular pop music presence of our era. So let’s step back for a moment, and listen to “The Edge of Glory” and imagine it’s not by Lady Gaga, but by Faceless Cheesy Dance-Club Chanteuse No. 17. And…there ain’t much here. A decent sax solo—wow, that was Clarence Clemons's swan song—a pounding, easily programmable arena rhythm, and a belting but essentially lifeless vocal performance. Do you think Gaga really likes singing? Or is it just a means to a fame-obsessed end?

6. “Lotus Flower” – Radiohead

I swear to you, I’ve given Radiohead so many fucking chances. If one more person tells me to just listen to OK Computer one more time, because it’s fucking awesome, and if only I smoke a jay first then I'll really get it, I’m going to beat them over the head with a pair of bowling shoes.

Look, this song is exactly what you think it is (and what I thought it would be): Radiohead continues its steady mutation away from rock band to “musical project.” Thom Yorke is mewling about something unimportant while his bandmates are fiddling with their new software. It’s barely alive. Sorry, nope, not for me.


5. “Rewrite” – Paul Simon

A nice little story about a Vietnam vet trying to write a screenplay. Well-played acoustic guitar, some nicely placed whistling, very charming. But it strikes me as rather tossed-off, maybe consciously so. I imagine Simon would roll his eyes if he knew Rolling Stone was rating it so highly.

4. “These Days” – Foo Fighters

It's ironic that I hadn’t heard this one, since 2011 was finally the year that Foo Fighters broke through with me (in the '90s, I declared more than once that the band would never have gotten a record deal if Dave Grohl hadn’t been in Nirvana). But for whatever reason, last year, “Everlong” caught my ear at the right time and in the right place, and I finally realized what a fantastic, near-perfect rock song it is. So while I’m not a particular fan, finally, I get it.

My sister, however, is a tremendous Foos fan—her kids, seven-year-old twins, have followed suit, and even saw them last year as their first concert. (Mine was these guys, which I’m rather proud of.) So I want to like “These Days,” but it takes me right back to where I was for years with the Foo Fighters: a not-bad but middling rock song that can’t distinguish itself from 90% of the not-bad but middling rock songs that have been released in the past 50 years. Maybe it’ll grab me some other time.

3. “Till the World Ends” – Britney Spears

Britney Spears is a talentless, completely derivative excuse for a pop star. She has never done a single thing with an ounce of originality, and even after 12 years under the microscope, she is utterly lacking in star power; I saw her on the MTV Awards last summer, and she couldn’t even read a cue card (compare with the woman who introduced her, Lady Gaga, whose music may be no great shakes, but damn, she knows how to put on a show). Why millions of people idolize Britney is a riddle on par with Kaspar Hauser and the Chupacabra, and no, it’s not because she’s “hot”; there were a dozen girls in your high school class better-looking than Britney, and half of them probably put out.

“Till the World Ends” is a slice of Eurotrash junk, concocted in a sterile, soulless laboratory staffed by bean-counters and yes-men. Britney’s voice is completely processed; it could be Yoda singing the song, for all I know. It’s not that the song is bad—it is bad, but it’s bearable, and junk does not offend me in and of itself—it’s that it’s so completely devoid of spirit, you could hardly call it music. And this is one of the absolute best songs of the year? Human beings are supposed to feel passion for this? This is what’s wrong with the USA in the 21st century: Britney Spears is what we consider a superstar. Raise your standards.


2. “Niggas in Paris” – Jay-Z and Kanye West

More from the supposed collaboration for the ages, though this one I find a hell of a lot more interesting than "Welcome to the Jungle." The repeating synth line that grounds the entire track is simply mesmerizing, with a hypnotic, creepiness that keeps the entire thing on a razor’s edge. And Jay’s voice complements it—I always found his voice to have a strange, slightly detached element to it that works really well here to heighten the ookiness of the whole thing. Kanye seems a little less suited, but that guy can do anything, and his rhythm and personality are spot-on. The weirdly majestic breakdown three minutes only bolsters the whole thing. It’s not saying a whole lot coming from me, but this might be the best hip-hop song I’ve ever heard.

1. “Rolling in the Deep” – Adele

Yeah, no way I was going to miss this one this year. Everything I said about Adele re: No. 29 still stands. This song is fine, whatever, I have no problem with it being part of the pop-cultural firmament for the rest of my life. What’s next?

So now I’m all caught up, musically educated. Let’s do a little tale of the tape:
Songs I heard before this experiment: 4

Eight percent. Wow, what happened to you, Noah the Passionate Music Guy? But what did I think?

Songs I would say I liked: 13
Songs I would say I hated: 10
Songs I was pretty much neutral on: 27

Let’s see that visually:


So yeah, I basically don’t care. Noah the Passionate Music Guy had checked out once again in 2011. But whose fault is that—mine or the pop music industry? Something to consider in the next 12 months, before I start this exercise all over again.