August 31, 2008

I must share this with someone

…so how about you. I just discovered that I have been kicked out of the original location of T.G.I. Friday's. Oh, it wasn't Friday's anymore by the time they booted my ass onto the street; it was (is, I believe) the Baker Street Pub, on First Avenue and 63rd Street, in Manhattan. But apparently, this was the site of the world's very first T.G.I. Friday's, opened in 1965. The presence of brass rails facilitated its transformation into a British-style pub, thank the Lord.

(Incidentally, the reason I was kicked out is of some relevance here: It was in advance of the very first Big Quiz Thing, and I visited Baker Street during its weekly pub-quiz night, to hand out postcards and attract interest. The manager, an Irish stereotype straight out of a Hogan's Alley comic strip, didn't take kindly to what he considered my poaching of his customers, threatened to insert things where they aren't intended to be inserted, and very unkindly asked me to depart from his establishment.)

I discovered this factoid while foraging through Wikipedia, naturally. As it often does, trivia research randomly brought me to an unexpected place, in this case the T.G.I. Friday's entry. Setting aside whether I can trust anything I read there, I want to point out is this, a graphic found on the page.Purple denotes countries that contain T.G.I. Friday's locations. Read the backup data that accompanies this graphic, and you'll notice something amazing: This is not from the company's official website. Someone made this on his or her (fine, probably his) own, unpaid and basically unrecognized, presumably for Wikipedia specifically. Someone spent his free time designing this, a map of T.G.I. Friday's locations worldwide, just for the hell of it. Someone managed to beat the odds, outrace millions of other sperm to be born, grow up, become educated, eat and bathe (perhaps) every day, only to spend his time designing a map of T.G.I. Friday's locations worldwide. (Although it is mildly interesting that you can get potato skins and chicken wings in Saudi Arabia, but not France.)

But what I find even more amazing is that this guy spent the time to make this detailed map, and he couldn't even get the name of the restaurant right. I mean, look at the logo and everything else on the company's official site: They're pretty consistent about those three periods and that apostrophe. Details, details…

August 29, 2008

Crypto-critterin'

At last Monday's quiz, I discussed the biggest news of the past few weeks: They found Bigfoot. Yeah, yeah, sure, that article and every other one revealed that it was a hoax, but I am a true believer. Nothing will sway me from believing that this:Is the real thing. I mean, seriously, does it look any more fake than this? So I asked a four-part question, challenging players to name the cryptozoological entity I was describing. Some were puzzled. Here, explanations…

"a. Legendary winged horselike monster of the New Jersey Pine Barrens."

The answer is The Jersey Devil.I remember in fourth grade (in NJ, of course), I had to write a report about this thing. That's a quality education. Shortly thereafter, I convinced myself that I spotted the Devil on the side of the highway while driving home from a WWF event at the Meadowlands. Life was boring.

"b. The Loch Ness Monster’s New England cousin, inhabiting Lake Champlain on the New York/Canada border"

That's Champ (or "Champy").
I recently read a very good book that made an incredibly convincing argument that lake monsters do not exist, debunking the above photo in the process. God damn, I used to worship the Loch Ness Monster, dreamed (literally) of traveling to Scotland and glimpsing it for myself. The child in me has died. Or perhaps it was always a myth.

"c. Flying supernatural humanoid with glowing eyes, inspiration for a crappy 2002 movie starring Richard Gere."

This one's Mothman.
I have no fucking clue what to make of the Mothman story, other than further evidence for my profound belief that the world is completely insane, and there's some shit we will never, ever, ever fully understand. But the most notable aspect of the Mothman saga, for me, is that I always used to think it would make a great movie. I was wrong about the great part.

"d. Bigfoot variant spotted in the Southeast U.S., said to smell really bad and controversially photographed in the year 2000."

We got a lot of interesting wrong guesses on this one, but the proper term is The Skunk Ape.
I was disappointed that Team! The Musical was not present at the quiz, since one of its lead members, Marie Mundaca, is a huge Skunk Ape fan. (She's even got the early EPs.) As for what that's a photograph of… I don't know. It doesn't look like an orangutan to me, but it's been some time since I intimately studied primates.

You know what? I'm just going to go ahead and say that's an actual Skunk Ape. I believe in its existence, I believe in Champ, I believe in Bigfoot, there are dinosaurs in the Congo—I BELIEVE! I mean, really—why not? Who suffers because I accept the veracity of crap? It's good for some entertainment, and besides, more powerful people have believed worse.

Next time: Who was Jack the Ripper? In Search Of… investigates.


August 26, 2008

Continuing a theme…

…from last show's recap: You folks love the dirty humor when it comes to team names. So starting this week, I'm going to record the percentage of team names each show that incorporate some element of scatological/sexual juvenilia. This week…

50%
Half the teams last night kept it filthy in the moniker department. Brah-vo.

Now then, I was very pleased with the debut of "Movie + Movie + Movie = TV," and I've heard a lot of positive things from several of you. It shall return. I also find it amusing that the most difficult questions was No. 7: Dodgeball + Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) + Are We There Yet? = what TV show? It's a rare gathering of geeks where only one team can identify this program.

(Also, forgot to mention at the show: I pinched the video round, plus some bonus questions, for my latest trivia column in Time Out New York. On the stands now, or see the quiz online starting Thursday. End of corporate yet self-serving plug.)

I'm going to blog more soon about one of the big quadriquestions, the one about cryptozoology. For now, this week's standings.

1. Fantastic Fournicators (Second show in a row they won by a large margin. They're like the Getto Boys over here.)
2. Strippers for Stephen Hawking
3. Gerard Gaypardouche (A superteam, as it were. This week is all about unity, after all.)
4. Teen Laqueefah (the erstwhile yet now name-revolving Robin Hood and His Merry Meningitis)/The Incontinental Congress (tie)

We're back in three weeks, alas: September 15. We're going to have a little video fun with candy.

August 17, 2008

Voting matters; trivia about it doesn't

As I mentioned at the last show, I'm going to be teaming with Drinking Liberally for a couple of convention-watching parties, Wednesday 8/27 (during the DNC) and Tuesday 9/2 (during the annual meeting of the Secret Society of Super Villains…er, the RNC). Details here. I'll be hosting quick, game-show-style rounds of political trivia (with prizes) between speeches. Should be nostalgic; I still remember the summer of '94, when I was opening act to Kathy Sebelius's mentalist bit on the nightclub circuit.

This shit's straight up my alley: I am indeed a presidential-trivia lunatic, and I'm still ruefully bitter at the folks at Jeopardy! for springing zero President questions on me when I was a contestant (yeah, that's why I'm bitter). A couple years ago, bored and lonely, I obsessively consumed a number of books featuring concise profiles of the Presidents, short articles about each election, quick bios of the nobodies who served as Vice President. That's about as far as I went; I gave up on my plan to read a full biography of each chief executive, let alone my scheme to visit all of their burial sites. So my knowledge of the American presidency is a distinctly abbreviated one, but hey, I only claim to be a trivia genius, not an actual genius.

So because I love lists, here's how I see things…

BEST PRESIDENTS
1. George Washington: Simply, there would be no United States of America without the wisdom, strength, and interpersonal skill of George Washington. Beating the British was the easy; watch that John Adams miniseries.





2. Franklin Roosevelt: If you're getting nervous that we're living at the end of the American age, try to imagine what it was like in the early 1930s, when things were distinctly worse. FDR came along, and through effort, brains and one hell of an ego, he added a little water to the dessicated Play-Doh that was the U.S. government and bent it back into Fun Factory–ready consistency. Plus, he beat Hitler, universally recognized as the most evil character in the history of comic books. So I suppose the optimist in me sees Obama as the new FDR, with maybe being black as the modern equivalent of being in a wheelchair.

3. Theodore Roosevelt: My favorite President—this guys was nuts in all the best ways. An imperialist, yes, but the shit going down in this country 100 years ago, you can't even begin to believe. Most politicians of time couldn't believe it either, but TR got it. It's because of him that the 20th century was the American century, and not at the complete expense of the common man; trust me, Eugene Debs, you want to see some real working-class misery, visit the alternate universe where yet another Victorian hack was running things 1901–1909.

4. Abraham Lincoln: I get a little tired of Lincoln worship, since all he did was win the Civil War. But then I remember, Damn, that guy won the Civil War. Fourth best it is.





5. James K. Polk: Probably honorable mention, but whatever, I love this guy. Polk was pretty much a nobody (despite the fact that he'd been Speaker of the House and governor of Tennessee) when he was elected as a dark-horse candidate in 1844, basically because his opponent, Henry Clay, was the Bob Dole of his time. Get this: The motherfucker Polk took office, declared what he was planning to do (conquer the Oregon territory, establish the nation's first independent treasury, a couple other cool things), did it, didn't bother to run for reelection, then dropped dead a couple months later. When he took office, he was only 49 and looked like a cuter Kevin Spacey; when he left, his face had shriveled up like a month-old tangerine. This guy worked his tail off for America, and got shit done. That's what we need more of.

As for the worst Presidents: Oh, I'd say Dubya is making quite a challenge at Andrew Johnson, an honest-to-goodness douchebag who came awfully close to retroactively losing the Civil War. Kennedy's overrated; Wilson more so. Nixon wasn't so bad on most things; Harding was fairly harmless, certainly better than Coolidge.

Ask me nice and I'll tell you about the Vice Presidents. Or maybe if you ask me nice, I won't.

August 12, 2008

Minds dirty with trivia


First off, when it comes to team names, you people need to get your minds out of the septic tank. Last night, among the team names, we had one instance of titz, one douche, one fournicators, one poos, one fucking, and two queefs. Not to mention a team called "Elizabeth Edwards Cheat Strong Cancer Bracelet," which is just all kinds of wrong.

Regardless, it was a good night. I know I often regret it when I do, but I'm going to take a flying chance here and declare that last night was one of the best BQTs ever. Not this month, not this year: ever. I'm ready to suffer the consequences.

What made it so good?

(1) The Pop Music Thesaurus. Always a winner. And just because you seemed to enjoy it so much the first time, once again, tell me: Name the song whose opening line is as follows, after being run through my mental thesaurus: "I possess an interlarded beverage treat that draws the totality of the Y-chromosomed to the vast expanse, and the quality of them reigns amid a more lofty echelon to the quality of you." (God, I hate that song.)

(2) "Busting Blocks in the Summertime," which by the way, is one of my favorite titles of an audio round ever, struck the perfect balance of easy (name this incredibly huge movie that everyone's seen) and challenging (name the year it came out, most likely during a summer you spent stoned).

(3) I was truly honored that you all booed when I announced the quiz's screwy schedule for the next couple months. It made up for all that cheering when I announced the "Wait…you have a girlfriend?!?" Smart-Ass Point.

(4) I got to ask a Quadri-Question about apes. I love apes.

(5) We got a nice chant of "USA! USA!" going during the Olympics question.

(6) The undefinable special thing that happens when people get together and have a good time. Or maybe it's just that we gave away Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

Onto the standings. Weird scoring last night: Two of the titans of the BQT, Fantastic Fournicators and Gerard Depardouche, battled for first place, with the FF coming out on top by one point. But both were mighty competitors. How mighty? Third place was a full ten points behind the Douche.

1. Fantastic Fournicators (I know, I know, I'm sick of these guys winning too)
2. Gerard Depardouche
3. Team! The Musical
4. Incontinental Congress
5. Even Cowgirls Get the Poos

Back on the 25th. Soon after, some live political trivia–more details in this space soon.

August 5, 2008

Blow yourself down


We're just days away from the start of the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival, and I'm always a tremendous fan. Not that I go see very many of the 200 or so Fringe shows in the typical year—my average is about 0.8—but it's one of those things that I just appreciate the existence of. Each show is like one person's whacked-out little dream, that crazy idea you come up with while falling asleep after several hours of Nick at Nite, marijuana, and Entenmann's cookies. Most of us let these ideas pass into the ether of the night; I try to turn them into quiz video rounds. The people in the Fringe actually produce them as theater.

So a plug: I mentioned it at the last quiz, but one Fringe show I'm excited to see this year is Sailor Man. It's described as a "darkly comic look at a well-known animated sailor. Startlingly violent, it’s Saturday morning cartoons, delivered Sam Shepard-style"—basically, a live action Popeye cartoon, a lot more violent but no less surreal. (And notice how they can't legally use the name Popeye. Or, I'd imagine, the words goon and jeep.)

I'm intrigued for two reasons:

(1) I know some of the people involved (yeah, so, I use my pulpit as it were to promote friends. Deal).

(2) Like everyone else in our culture, I spent much of my childhood watching Popeye cartoons; I believe they were on a loop of one of the eight stations in the NYC area in the late 1970s. So it's hard to step back and see them with a critical eye, rather than regard them as yet more of the colorful wallpaper of American life. (Kind of like Star Wars—while I was growing up, Darth Vader and R2-D2 are like nursery rhyme characters, more icons than figures in a narrative. It was only when I rewatched those movies in high school that I even knew what the hell the plot was. Oh, and that Luke Skywalker is really a pathetic excuse for a hero.)

Anyway, when you really watch them, Popeye cartoons have a kind of amazing strangeness to them. (I watched a few at a Sailor Man fund-raiser recently.) Popeye and Bluto/Brutus are always squeezing each other in potbellied stoves, smacking each other over the head with live farm animals, bending each other into playable musical instruments. It's a very creative conception of violence, and it makes you wonder if the people behind those cartoons should've started going to therapy a smidge more often. True, you can see this kind of violence in a lot of cartoons—Tom and Jerry was all about that, and Ren and Stimpy was a flat-out parody of it. But Popeye benefited from the ace talents of the Fleischer brothers studios, among the best animators to ever work the medium. Seriously, these cartoons make Tom and Jerry look like you're staring into a zoetrope. An example:



Plus, there's pathos in Popeye; I mean, this never-ending narrative was kind of sad. Popeye is this pathetic drifter, a Navy man clearly no longer occupied by the Navy, muttering to himself incessantly. His only joy is the fickle attentions of a distinctly unpleasant woman who is no one's idea of a hot piece of ass, and she baits him into an endless series of meaninglessly violent encounters with a sadistic, alcoholic bruiser. Plus, there's a poorly supervised foundling child, and an obese man with a compulsive-eating problem. Oh, and the spinach: so Popeye's on the juice, too.

So I'm intrigued that someone is approaching this material from a more realistic standpoint, recognizing its value to be truly bizarre and disturbing (two of my favorite adjectives). And you, my fellow aficionados of the pop culture blender, might appreciate it too. Buy your Sailor Man tickets here; it opens Saturday, it's only $15, and you can actually say you went to a Fringe show after eight years of saying you really mean to.

UPDATE: I saw Sailor Man last night. It was very violent, very funny, and very good idea. Go see it. That is all.