Project MERCATOR
Friday night last saw the Firkin & Fox, a public house of local renown, host the 9th Annual History Quiz Night, a pub quiz-like affair put on about this time every year by the U.'s history department. I am both a history nerd & a trivia fan, even fancying myself something of a small-scale trivia master, so History Quiz Night is one of my favorite local fêtes. Last year, my team won the Quiz, & I may say not immodestly on the backs of yours truly & another fellow who had been a several-day winner on Jeopardy!. The two previous years, my teams had both finished second, & with yours truly being the paramount contributor of answers. All three of those squads were organized by The Outlaw, a pal who was the longtime honcho of the History Club. This year, The Outlaw did not take the time off work to organize a team & my invaluable services were in inexplicably scant demand. Several of my fellows in the Club said that I could join their teams, but only after they'd already found their maximum-allowed five official members, relegating me to "hanger-on" status. Do you people not know who I am? I was resigned to showing up to History Quiz Night & accepting a pity-driven invitation to be a hanger-on 'til the Wednesday prior, when I had a chance encounter with The Braggart, a most intolerable fellow with whom decorum dictates I maintain civil discourse. The Braggart didn't yet have a fully-formed squad & asked me to join his understaffed team. I accepted with trepidation, remembering two years earlier when The Braggart had been with me on The Outlaw's team; Pompous had started drinking heavily as soon as he arrived at the Firkin & Fox & was uselessly drunk by the time the Quiz got underway. Nonplussed, I agreed The Braggart's invitation, grasping at this seeming final chance not to be a hanger-on.

History Quiz Night arrived & I joined the motley crew The Braggart had assembled, composed of only four members, including his girlflesh, unexpectedly in town from metropolitan Detroit. At the next table sat the lion's share of my History Club chums, a massive team of Club members & hangers-on. I was not exceptional resentful, because my Club chums really are my chums, of whom I'm quite fond, but I do admit that there was some small desire to make them regret making me the last kid picked in kickball. As the Quiz got under way we were joined by The Interpreter, a former staff member in the History Department (as opposed to faculty member) & co-organizer of the Quiz Night whom I'd met the previous evening when she briefly stopped in to visit the Club's game night (during which I played the game of Risk detailed in Thursday's "Project MERCATOR" post). We bandied about several ideas for our team name, 'til I suggested we call ourselves the I.R.A., playing to The Braggart's Marxist Irish republican leanings; it brought a smile to my face to see The Braggart, a most boastful blighter, tremble at the thought of offending of the the professors who judged the Quiz. (I didn't code name him "The Braggart" because of any fondness for the fellow.) My mind still full of mischief, I next suggested we call ourselves "Dr. Ellis," after the Night's presiding Quizmaster. This was shortly modified to "Dr. Ellis's" & we were in business. Neither The Braggart's girlflesh nor The Interpreter were terribly helpful, though both were amusing, humorous conversationalists; the bald, wild-eyed fellow who was the third official member of the squad functioned as little more than secretary; winning the Quiz was left to The Braggart & your humble narrator. We blazed out to an early lead in the first round, earning sixteen points out of a possible nineteen. We maintained the overall lead after the second round, though our fourteen points was not enough to carry the round itself. We experienced a near collapse in the third round, scoring only eight of nineteen points. The second-place team finished with thirty-seven points, allowing our skin-of-our-teeth thirty-eight to win Quiz Night. Victory, two years in a row! How do you like me now, losers?

The most surprising part of this first half of the evening (the second half to be recounted in a forthcoming "Project PANDORA" post) was The Braggart. He wasn't useless! Sure, he didn't think Missouri was the slave state admitted to the Union as a result of the 1820 Missouri Comprise, but when the Quizmaster asked which modern city had once been named "Shahjahanabad" he correctly guessed Delhi. I did not know, but guessed Tehran, based solely on the shaky etymology that shah is the Persian word for "king." Point, The Braggart. I've never claimed that I could win History Quiz Night all by my lonesome, my contention had always been that I could be an invaluable part of a winning team. That was exactly the case last Friday, when I provided the lion's share of the answers (employing my most formidable trivia skill: educated guessing), but "Dr. Ellis's Own" (as Professor Ellis called us) could not have won without The Braggart. I really detested typing those words, but less than I'll love typing that for the second year in a row my team won History Quiz Night!

"Victory for ZIM!"

The Queue
A War Like No Other is not an exhaustive account of the Peloponnesian War, but a survey of that ancient civil war, organized not strictly chronologically but principally thematically, with sections which as "Chapter 1. Fear: Why Sparta Fought Athens (480-431)" & "Chapter 7. Horses: The Disaster at Sicily (415-413)." I wish to know more about the awful conflict, so much so that I'm entertaining the idea of reading Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, but this jones might well fade if not immediately sated; I am also considering reading Donald Kagan's Thucydides: The Reinvention of History.

Recently
Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War
various writers & artists, Dwight K. Albatross's The Goon: Noir

Currently
Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty

Presently
Rudyard Kipling, The Man who would be King and Other Stories
Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Gods of Mars
Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Warlord of Mars

The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day: SKApril
Nothing For Something, "Ska Kids" courtesy Ska Army (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary: The commencement of the R.B.D.S.O.T.D.'s celebration of "SKApril" yesterday coincided with April Fools' Day, a holiday which The Secret Base embraced ardently. How to reach an accommodation 'twixt such competing interests? Enter Pain, in the instance of "Jabberjaw (Running Underwater)" performing as The Neptunes. Pain was a third-wave ska band in deep denial of being a ska band. The described themselves as a punk band & were disdainful of ska; so, I suppose we might call them a punk band that just happened to play ska-punk music. So, we opened SKApril with a ska song, but honored April Fools' Day through the prank of presenting a non-ska band as if they were a ska band. Not as satisfying as an episode of "The Explorers' Club" concerning Bigfoot or "This Week in Motorsport" praising N.A.S.C.A.R., perhaps, but to mine way of thinking an adequate solution to a conundrum that only I perceived. (This blog, like all blogs, is an extensive exercise in naval gazing.)

We now continue SKApril will a song about ska music, "Ska Kids" by Nothing For Something. I was introduced to this song maybe six months hence, thanks to addition in The Loose Ties' set. "Ska Kids" is one of the finest covers they play, in part because they've made it their own in a way they haven't with The Mighty Mighty Bosstones' "Royal Oil" or the Reel Big Fish's "Beer." Like every good ska song, "Ska Kids" hits a little too close to home for comfort.

"But when I think about it,
Well, I think I understand.
Who'd want to kiss a guy like me?
Who'd want to hold my hand?

Well, many guys will leave the show tonight
With a little girl in tow (All right),
For us it's always just dance, dance, dance
And we never will get a chance,
'Cause ska kids (Hey!)
We never get laid,
And ska bands (Hey!)
They never get paid,
Oh no, oh no, oh no."

The self-deprecating punch to the gut that is "Ska Kids" is sharpened by The Loose Ties' cover, which is co-sung by Farr Afield, a girl of surpassing pulchritude. When she wags her finger as she sings, "Oh no, oh no, oh no," the joke stings that wee bit more.