August 10, 2007
Samuel Gompers
filed under: Idle ChatterDan and I scored a boys' night on Wednesday (thanks, girls), and ended up at his local bar/restaurant. It was, it turned out, Trivia Night. We had played trivia nights before, and done okay. And we were doing okay with this one, taking the lead with 12 points (2nd place had 11 and 3rd place had 9) at the break.
We had moved to the bar to hear better, but the sound system was terrible everywhere and the host was barely audible. When he began the recap, the guy sitting next to us started grumbling about the noise. He was a gigantic fellow with a pony tail who looked just like wrestling's Chris Jericho:
So the host is re-capping and this guy is grumbling, in one of those rock-grinder kind of voices. "What the hell is this guy talking about?" he's saying, to anyone who will listen. Finally, I leaned past Dan to explain what was going on. "Oh," says Chris Jericho, and lapses into a sullen silence.
Round Four starts, and it's a Potpourri round. The third question is "Who founded the American Federation of Labor, also known as the AFL?"
Dan and I, obviously, have no idea at all. Chris Jericho starts mumbling something. Dan says "what's that?"
And Chris Jericho leans over, puts one hand next to his mouth, and says "Samuel Gompers."
He was right. It was, in fact, Samuel Gompers. We flipped out.
So Chris Jericho (I don't *think* it was actually Chris Jericho, for the record) becomes an honorary member of Team Omar, and also correctly identifies the purchase price of Atlantic in Monopoly ($260, for those playing at home). Very nice, very bright guy, not into TV so no help in naming the members of the A-Team. Ah, well, everybody has their specialities. Apparently, Chris Jericho's is the early American labor movement.
Anyway, this is what happened, thanks to our oddball team of three:
SO proud.
Posted by rjt at August 10, 2007 05:20 PMDid you split it with Chris Jericho? (If so, why isn't he in the photo?) Or did you just hand the check right over to him, praying he wouldn't beat you into a bloody pulp using just his lats?
Posted by: KG at August 12, 2007 11:44 PMSadly, Chris Jericho had vacated the premises by the end of the competition. We won a bonus question, correctly identifying Amy Winehouse as the artist with the 2006 album "Back to Black," and got a free drink coupon for that, which we tried to press onto Chris Jericho in exchange for his Samuel Gompers prowess, but he decided to call it a night.
Posted by: rjt at August 13, 2007 10:01 AMSo where you gonna spend the swag? I understand $25 gets you two movie tickets in NYC--provided it's a kiddie matinée. However, if you go outside of town a bit you can get two and half hand forged plant hangers for that price -- um, some assembly required.
whenever there's a chance in hell of me asking this question, I do. So, if people are talking trivia and it strays a millimeter from just pop culture "name the facts of life girls", I pounce.
here it is.
Name the 14 accepted types of punctuation in the english language. Example, comma and period are two. But backslash \\\ is not. No cheating. try to do it without cheating. I'll post it tomorrow if no one gets all 14. but someone'll cheat, I know it.
Posted by: Perj at August 14, 2007 08:12 PMI've got 13 . , ? " ' ( ) & ! : ; - ...
Could maybe fudge it to 14 by including both em-dash and en-dash, i.e., hyphen vs. long dash. Is that how you're doing it, you sneaky bastige?
Posted by: rjt at August 15, 2007 12:25 PM". , ? " ' ( ) & ! : ; - ..." reads like one drawn out swear word. (Perhaps it's the Southern version of "&$#%*!!!!"?)
Posted by: KG at August 15, 2007 02:23 PMokay, as verified by a 2002 almanac that was just lying around:
Period .
Comma,
Dash –
Hy-phen
Colon:
Semicolon;
Exclamation!
Question?
Parenthses()
Brackets[]
Braces{}
Apostrophe’
“Quotation”
Ellipses…
and the one that goes "ping"!
I have no idea where that leave slashes, ampersands, and the like. I assume the list will have to be expanded due to the "computer age".
"OT": Hey, I know it was a long time ago, but:
remember this post: http://procrastinet.com/archives/000185.html
[sorry, your preview says no HTML here, as far as I can tell]?
I was the guy who wrote that cryptic comment about blogging being the new punk rock, etc., and linking to the portable defibrillator. No, really.
No, I'm not going to tell you who I am. But anyway, still waiting for Bush's and/or Cheney's ticker to kick. Especially Bush, enlarged heart being a common consequence of drug/alcohol abuse, etc.
But: it still hasn't happened. God only knows what kind of weird non-publically-available drugs those guys are on.
hum. carry on.