Your "It Is An Honor I Dream Not Of" Quizo Update

A couple quick things before we get to the meat of today's missive.

- Attendance last week was excellent. Keep it up.

- Inasmuch as tonight is Game 4 of the NLCS, I'm not sure what the crowd situation is going to be like at the pub. If it gets stupid crowded with non-Quizo Phillies fans we can move to one of the other rooms, surely. My preference is for the Rigger Bar since I'm pretty sure that we will still want to watch the game as well and the TV coverage in there is much better than the restaurant.

- However, if vast numbers of teams are not coming tonight, PLEASE let me know so that plans can be made accordingly.

- On the good news front, it's been a very big couple days for Oprah's Book Club. Nick and Regina got married on Saturday (to each other, I mean, more on that in a bit) and today is Palestra Jon's (of the rule which bears his name) anniversary. To Oprah's from all of us at Dark Horse Quizo, congratulations, good luck, mazel tov, may the Force be with you, whatever benediction you prefer. I'm a fan of the Mandalorian "shoot straight and run fast," but that may not be quite the feeling we're after here. But, all in all, good on them.

Now, then, to our main attraction:

Since, as we all know, the motto here at Quizo Central is and has always been "Safety First," we're going to return today to our occasional series of seminars on drastic and dangerous life events.

This week's topic is "how to survive going to two weddings in one day."

- Firstly and most importantly - this really cannot be stressed enough - do not wait until the day you are attending two weddings to buy the shoes you are planning on wearing to two weddings. For while your brand-new shoes may be very impressive in their own right, and when combined with your brand-new suit and shirt and tie, all selected and coordinated specifically for the two-wedding day, make you resemble nothing so much as the reincarnation of Burt Lancaster himself, and we're talking like vintage 1955 "I just got finished sleeping with Ava Gardner AND Lana Turner and, my oh my, what's your name, sweetheart?" Burt Lancaster, wearing brand-new shoes to two weddings in one day is a CATASTROPHICALLY BAD IDEA. Doing so will cause your resemblance to Burt Lancaster to rapidly erode, as it is a known fact that Burt Lancaster was in possession of both his feet, and after a couple hours of wearing brand-new wingtips the only thought in your entire head - overriding your base, lizard-brain lusting after food, sex, lower taxes and oxygen - will be a burning desire to chop off your own feet with a rusty axe.

- Have backup. This is valuable in several respects. If, for instance, you tear the price tag off your brand-new tie a little too vigorously and rip out one of the moorings of the little tie-holder-label-thingy, while driving to the first wedding you can call your backup and say, "you got any safety pins? What do you mean you threw out all your safety pins? How the fuck can you throw away anything as fantastically useful as safety pins? (This exact sentence was actually spoken by me.) Fabric glue? Will that set in time? Okay, fine, bring that." Or, when partway through the first of two weddings in one day, you can say to your father, "if you don't get me a pair of golf shoes that look like wingtips I'm going to chop my feet off with a rusty axe." If your backup gets snippy, you can remind them that pain overrides family and that once you start chopping off body parts it can be very hard to stop.

- While buying nice new Burt Lancaster-izing clothing for two weddings in one day is endorsed, if you are buying your clothing at someplace you have never shopped before be sure that you actually look at the prices of the clothes you're buying, so you can avoid situations such as tearing the price tag off your brand-new tie a little too vigorously and, while wondering how you're going to fix the little tie-holder-label-thingy, glancing at the too-vigorously-removed price tag and realizing that you have paid more for a tie than you normally do for a shirt, and that you normally pay pretty handsomely for shirts to begin with. This realization is closely followed by a feeling of growing horror while you try to calculate how much you paid for the new shirt from this place, then wondering whether the guy at the gas station on the way to work on Monday morning will accept the change from your cup holders as payment.

- While the bucolic location for the first reception might make you think that everyone will be very relaxed and easygoing, always remember to be very, very careful when surrounded by large groups of Germans. This advice applies pretty much anywhere, really. And for god's sake, whatever you do, don't mention the war.

- Your desire to end the lives of certain guests at the reception is not something you should vocalize.

- At the first reception, if your father has been hopelessly addicted to the bride's grandmother's pastries for the last 40 years, telling your father that the dessert tray is a collection of pastries made by the bride's grandmother and that they are out and ready to be eaten is a surefire way to guarantee that you do not get to eat any of said pastries.

- Silk suspenders do not have the same kind of "give" in them as the cheaper, elastic suspenders you may have worn in the past. This means that things like going to the bathroom take exponentially longer as you will spend several minutes trying, Houdini-like, to extricate yourself from them, since after you realize that you could have made a car payment for what you inadvertently paid for said silk suspenders you will find breaking your own back preferable to doing any damage to the goddamn things.

- Wearing contact lenses for the first time in almost a year is recommended if the first reception is outside on a beautiful sunny day, as it makes the wearing of sunglasses possible. Trying to drive from one reception to another in the dusk of twilight while wearing contact lenses for the first time in almost a year is not recommended, as the combination of your eyes adjusting to your slightly-different vision and the tricky, shifting light of the immediate post-sunset period will make driving in under-lit suburbs much more exciting than it really needs to be.

- When arriving at your friend's parents' house for the second reception, do not trip over the SAME GODDAMN TRICK DOORSTEP THAT YOU HAVE TRIPPED OVER EVERY ONE OF THE HUNDREDS OF TIMES YOU'VE GONE INTO THAT HOUSE FOR THE LAST TWENTY FUCKING YEARS! Seriously, don't do that.

- No matter how much your new clothing makes you resemble Burt Lancaster, the sentence, "you look so much like my ex-girlfriend that I really thought you were her, but when you walked past and didn't punch me in the face I realized you weren't" is, despite how 100% true it may be, not the first thing you want to say to someone you've just met. Even at a nighttime, outdoor reception, where the darkness makes you resemble Burt Lancaster that much more, saying things like this clearly mark you as "not relationship material."

- Get your friend who lives out of town and is thus marrying a woman you haven't met yet to introduce you to his new wife BEFORE he is drunk.

- If you once watched one of your friends drink 26 beers in one night, offer him a ride home BEFORE people start playing beer pong if you want to leave the party any time soon.

- And, finally - whether your belief tends toward Jehovah, Vishnu or the Lords of Kobol, never let anyone think that you don't thank God every day that you have the friends you have.

JLK

By the by...

Despite - or perhaps because of - yesterday's events I will still be wearing my Chelsea kit tonight.

Why? Fuck you, that's why.

JLK

Your March Madness Quizo Update

It's that time of year again, the time of year when I inexplicably put money on Kansas winning the NCAA Tournament and Kansas remembers, "hey, we're Kansas, and we can't make it past the second round ever." This year I am bucking the trend by actually betting that Kansas will LOSE in the second round, thus insuring them a national championship. It's like I always say: it isn't spring until I've lost money on Kansas.

It's weird because I don't really bet on sports. Actually I pretty much don't ever bet on sports. Aside from the occasional "hey, five bucks says my team beats your team" with my friends which is much more about being right than it is about betting or winning money, the only sporting event I have ever put any sort of remotely serious money on - and by remotely serious I'm talking that one year I think I spent a grand total of $80 on four different entries - is the tournament. I'm not one of those guys who relentlessly scours the Vegas Line section of the newspaper looking for the sure thing or the sucker line or whatever (though I can certainly identify such things), I don't sweat games between two teams I don't care about hoping one team covers, and I don't obsessively track my win/loss/profit ratio. But I have done a bracket (or two, or three, or four) every year since at least 6th grade, and I've put money on it since... well, actually, since about 6th grade, now that I think about it.

I used to actually be pretty good at these tournament things - back in high school when I was a whole hell of a lot more into college basketball than I am now I actually won a couple - but my interest has been dwindling the last few years and I think we may be at a point this year where I don't even do a serious bracket. Feels kinda strange, honestly. It would be nice to see Kansas pull it out this year, but we all know that isn't going to happen. Why? They're Fucking Kansas.

By the way, Christopher, North Carolina = biggest joke 1 seed ever. BIGGEST FUCKING JOKE EVER. UNC is the new Kansas. Enjoy the 2nd round. Sons of bitches. God I hate North Carolina.

Does anyone know what the purpose of the little buttons on your shirt sleeves is? I don't mean the buttons on your cuffs - that's fairly obvious - I mean the little ones below the cuffs that, like, keep your forearms airtight. I was wrestling with one this morning and finally just started yelling (at my desk, I guess) "what the hell is this thing FOR anyway?" Frankly, given some of the questions I thought rhetorical and unanswerable I've put in these e-mail and gotten answers to, I expect someone to come through with this one.

And finally, the main lesson I learned this weekend is that pissing off Spartans is never a good idea. They are a prickly bunch. And that 300 is the most awesome movie ever, but if you think it "isn't violent enough" you have serious psychological problems.

JLK

Your Quizo Update, A Day Late and a Dollar Short

I hope everyone has enjoyed the holiday weekend. I know I did.

For Christmas I received the gift of warmth.

I mean this quite literally.

Christmas morning with the fam (aka "my parents"), we're opening gifts and I get to one of mine in a largish box. I rip the paper off and open her up to find a lovely Izod golf jacket, perfect for those early spring days. Not that I would ever actually PLAY golf in it, as whatever golf gene allowed both of my parents to coach the sport did not get passed on to me. While I can rip a 58 at St. Andrew's on Tiger Woods 2006, my actual golf skill is quite limited, and by quite limited I mean largely nonexistent.

(That reminds me; I need to pick up Tiger Woods 2007.)

Later on in the gift opening extravaganza I come across another large box, and upon opening it find a nice winter coat in a beautiful deep crimson.

"Your leather jacket isn't warm enough when it gets REALLY cold," my mother says. Fair enough. Quite thoughtful.

Towards the end of the present line I have one more large box left. Off goes the paper and the box lid and I find...

Another winter coat. Navy blue this time.

Now there are two interesting things about this coat:

1) The coat is made by a company the owners of which are guys I have, on occasion, played poker with in Atlantic City.

2) It is, by all observations, a second winter coat and third coat overall on the same Christmas morning.

I express my confusion.

"That's in case the first one doesn't fit you," my father says. "Plus, it's from a company called Double Down. That's funny. Because, you know, you play poker. And your mother's right, that leather jacket isn't warm enough when it gets super cold out."

It occurs to me at this point that the guys who make this coat, while nice and reasonably good manufacturers of clothing, are terrible card players. It also occurs to me that my parents are so worried that I will catch the vapors walking the mean winter streets of Philadelphia that they felt it necessary to get me not one, not two, but THREE coats for Christmas this year.

I then realize, after examination of the discarded wrapping paper and noticing the truly wretched wrapping job done on the boxes that my father actually got all three, so Inadvertent Parental Gift Duplication Theory does not apply here.

Funny old world sometimes, ain't it?

There were other gifts as well, all wonderful, but none frankly as funny as three coats.

Then the Eagles absolutely beat the living shit out of the Cowboys, which is about as nice a close to a Christmas as one could ask.

And HERE'S something of interest to at least two or three people. Tonight and tonight only I am honored - HONORED, I say - to be filling in for Quizo Legend Johnny Goodtimes whilst he vacations. I'll be taking over trivia duties at O'Neals (2nd and South) at 8 and The Bard's (20th and Walnut) at 10. I've never done two Quizos in one night, so this should be interesting, inasmuch as me going crazy would probably be something worth watching for sheer entertainment value.

If I don't see you tonight (or somewhere else along the line) everyone have a good New Year's weekend. We're off again Monday, so I'll see everyone in two weeks at the Dark Horse. Drive safe, be good, avoid evil.

JLK