Your Lucky Shirt Quizo Update

It worked! My lucky Kansas shirt worked!

Oh, and, there's the Tournament finals tonight, or something like that. Whatever.

MY LUCKY SHIRT WORKED! FINAL FOUR BABY!

JLK

Your Big Weekend Semi-Quizo Update

A quick little infodump to ease you into the weekend:

The finals of the Dark Horse Quizo Tournament of Champions are, of course, this coming Monday night in the restaurant. The teams competing for the top prize of a significant sum of money are Das Boot, Oprah's Book Club, Alias Pseudonym Undercover, Rod Torfelsen's Armada, and Filipino Grigio. There will also be a bunch of other stuff given away - check the website and scroll down to the original rules post to see just what. I expect funtastic things.

Secondly, tomorrow night (aka "Saturday") is quizmaster extraordinaire Johnny Goodtimes' Quizzo [sic] Bowl IV. It's at the Blue Horizon on Broad Street, which I can say at the very least is a great place to watch boxing. I also expect it to be a great time and am mildly displeased that I'm not going to be there.

The Dark Horse is sending a juiced-up squad of players selected from a bunch of our own teams - seriously, they asked me for steroids - appropriately named the Dark Horse All-Stars. I don't know if their team is full yet - I believe at last count they had 6 of the required 8 - but if you want to find out I recommend e-mailing Dr. Dan at danieltnevin@yahoo.com. At this point I know they have folks from Das Boot, Oprah's and Alias, so this is already a high-powered team. They're like the Avengers, though I believe they still might need a Hank Pym. Ask Dan.

If you want to cheer them on or even enter your own upstart team, hit up JGT himself at johnnygoodtimes@hotmail.com or head for his site, aptly named www.johnnygoodtimes.com, and get yourself some tickets.

I expect a full report on the action come Monday.

As always, should you or any members of your Quizo team completely choke the Dark Horse will disavow any knowledge of your supposed trivia skills.

This message will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Dan.

JLK

Your Frightening Implications Quizo Update

Aaaaaaaaand... we're back.

Did anyone actually go to the Dark Horse (or any other bar, for that matter) on St. Patrick's Day? I certainly hope not. I like to think we're all smarter than that.

It's tournament time, and after two rounds of play Kansas has not successfully choked yet. Ordinarily you would think this a good thing. It is not. All this means is that Kansas can choke that much closer to the actual championship, which makes it more painful. In my bracket - which Yahoo inconveniently lost my final four picks on, curse their black souls - I had Kansas playing UCLA in the final and, in what can only be described as a mercy killing of whatever common sense I have left, winning 87-81. After my strategy last year of betting AGAINST Kansas to win managed to not backfire until the regional finals, I have this year gone with the novel plan of not betting any money whatsoever. My rationale: if I can't win money betting on Kansas, and I can't win money betting against Kansas, perhaps the only way for Kansas to win the tournament again is for me to have no opportunity to win money whatsoever.

Of course, this year's chance for heartbreak will come this weekend when Kansas plays Villanova. It's a good thing the Big East sent 8 teams to the tournament. I mean, of those 8, including the aforementioned Wildcats who didn't even deserve to be there in the first place - I should think losing to LaSalle would mean an automatic NIT invite - a whopping 2 teams from the Big East made it out of the first two rounds. Yeah, they deserved 7 at-large bids. Jerks.

Speaking of basketball tournaments, for championship weekend last week I was in New York City to see Chelsea beat Sunderland at Nevada Smith's and to hang out with some of my New York people. A good time was had by all, to be sure, but at one point we were at one of the four bars we ended up hitting over the course of the day and I said to my friends, "you know, if you had said to me five years ago that on St. Patrick's Day weekend in five years I would be in New York watching college basketball at a Welsh bar talking about starting engineering school, I probably would have said you were crazy."

My friend Matt said, "you complain all the time about us being crazy. You always have."

I said, "shut up, Matt."

The last bar of the night that Saturday was supposed to be one of the faux Irish pubs across the street from Penn Station - if you never knew this, on 33rd Street across from what used to be the Hotel Pennsylvania there are 4 "Irish Pubs" right in a row - to watch the US team in the CONCACAF Under-23s (aka Olympic soccer qualifiers) but as we got to the pub I got a text from one of my friends up there saying she wasn't going to be able to meet us. We're standing outside smoking and I look inside to find that, after the somewhat absurd results of the conference tournament, the entire pub is filled with angry Big East alumni working very hard at getting drunk, and the streets outside are thick with angry Big East alumni working very hard at trying to sell tickets to a championship game that no one now wants to go to.

I'm taking in this scene and thinking that it might be time to pack it in on home when the bouncers standing by the door start talking about sniper rifles.

I'm not talking like, "hey, sniper rifles are really neat," or, "wouldn't it be cool if I had a sniper rifle?" Oh no. I'm standing there and the one guy says, "well, you know, the M21 has great stopping power, but the Dragunov has loads better range and is way more accurate," and the other guy says, "fuck no, man, when it comes to sniper rifles it's Remington all the way, baby. One shot one kill, oh yeah!"

I turned to Tim and said, "I think it's time for us to leave."

Walking away Tim said, "they're probably talking about Call of Duty 4."

I said, "we HOPE they're talking about Call of Duty 4."

Quick tournament note: once again this week I'll be handing out update sheets at the beginning of the game. In terms of scheduling, tonight will be Week 8 of the tournament, and the finals will be next Monday. Please note that if you want someone to play on your team in the finals who has not done so already they must play tonight, else no dice.

I know that next Monday is Opening Day for the Phillies and that we had some problems last year, but this has been taken care of. I spoke to James the Bossman after the Chelsea game yesterday (2-1 MOTHERFUCKERS OH YEAH!) and we're all set to have the Tournament of Champions finale in the restaurant. So don't say I never did anything for you.

JLK

It's just a kiss away. It's just a kiss away.

Can't talk now. Rock Band.

Team Name	Total Overall Points	Total Overall Quizo Points
Das Boot	26	212
Alias Psuedonym Undercover	23	209
Filipino Grigio	20	205
Oprah's Book Club	18	199
Rod Thorgelson's Armada	16	187
Two and a Half Years of Quizo Down the Drain	6	154
Built Kozempel Tough	5	91
The Pros From Dover	4	73
Darg Whores	2	37
The Apes of Wrath	2	22
Midgets In Heat	1	27
Girls On The Corner	1	23
We Put The Zero in Quizo	1	13
Cum From Behind	0	75
That's What Happens To Gay Cowboys	0	50
Ever The Twain Shall Meet	0	36
Up The Creek Without Droogle	0	34
That's What She said	0	20
Reed Knives	0	14

JLK

FUCKING SPURS!

Too depressed about the League Cup final to do an big explanatory post this week. Just the table.

Fucking Spurs...

After Week 4:

Team Name	Total Overall Points	Total Overall Quizo Points
Das Boot	19	165
Filipino Grigio	17	165
Alias Psuedonym Undercover	17	164
Oprah's Book Club	14	155
Rod Thorgelson's Armada	14	149
The Pros From Dover	4	73
Built Kozempel Tough	4	63
Two and a Half Years of Quizo Down the Drain	3	112
Darg Whores	2	37
The Apes of Wrath	2	22
Midgets In Heat	1	27
Girls On The Corner	1	23
We Put The Zero in Quizo	1	13
That's What Happens To Gay Cowboys	0	50
Cum From Behind	0	37
Ever The Twain Shall Meet	0	36
That's What She said	0	20
Reed Knives	0	14

I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine.

Here we go with this week's Tournament of Champions score update.

On the extra point front:

- Built Kozempel Tough, Oprah's Book Club, Rod Thorgelson's Armada and Midgets in Heat all get an extra point for playing shorthanded.

- Best Wrong Answer goes to Built Kozempel Tough for their belief in the existence of the Detroit Penguins hockey team.

- Bonus points for scoring perfect 10's went to Alias Pseudonym Undercover, Das Boot, Filipino Grigio, Oprah's Book Club, and Rod Thorgelson's Armada.

- There was no bonus point this week for Best Map. None of the maps I got really impressed me much. Seems now people are trying TOO hard.

- Finally, this week's discretionary bonus point goes to Built Kozempel Tough, both for their blatant sucking-up in their choice of tournament team name - I may explain it at some point - and what I wrote in my notes on the spreadsheet I'm keeping scores with as "bizarre knowledge." This is a team that consistently puts up bricks like "the Detroit Penguins" and, my personal favorite, "that black guy," but also consistently gets every Scrabble question right and knows extraordinarily obscure history and geography questions (they were the only team to know the Washington-Versailles thing a couple weeks ago).

So, after three weeks, the table looks like this:

Team Name	Total Overall Points	Total Overall Quizo Points
Alias Psuedonym Undercover	16	129
Das Boot	14	125
Oprah's Book Club	11	120
Filipino Grigio	10	117
Rod Thorgelson's Armada	10	109
The Pros From Dover	4	73
Built Kozempel Tough	4	63
Two and a Half Years of Quizo Down the Drain	3	81
Darg Whores	2	37
The Apes of Wrath	2	22
Midgets In Heat	1	27
Girls On The Corner	1	23
That's What Happens To Gay Cowboys	0	50
Ever The Twain Shall Meet	0	36

And we're back for week 4 Monday night.

JLK

A slight service interruption...

I'll be posting the week 3 Tournament of Champions results tonight. I'll do it before Lost. I promise.

For now, though, I have a request:

Does anyone out there work in HR? I have some... questions. I could use some discreet answers.

During the working day get in touch with me at my new work e-mail - access to GMail is blocked here as a fairly understandable security precaution - which is my firstname.lastname@lmco.com, and after 5PM you can get me on my regular GMail.

Any help is appreciated. I may even give points for it.

JLK

Your "This Station WILL Be Completed On Schedule" Quizo Update

Very little this week again, I'm afraid. And I know the tournament results haven't been posted yet. I will bring them tonight and give them out to everyone. There is a reason for all this, though.

The reason is that I learned last week that I got a new job, starting this morning, at Lockheed Martin. Something to do with making spaceships and satellites and such. Yes, it's true, now I will finally have access to the orbital death lasers I have been threatening people with. As one person put it, "you'll be fine at work as long as you don't push the red button." Good timing, too, as I was just starting to get sick of playing poker so much. But the mad preparations for said job transition have taken up pretty much all of the last few days.

I will make up for these egregious errors in some way. Probably by bribing you all with candy. You seem to enjoy that. And rightfully so. Candy is quite delicious, after all.

Very quick tournament update: Alias Pseudonym Undercover is currently in first place, followed by Das Boot, followed by Oprah's Book Club. More details tonight.

All right, then, I'm off to build the Death Star. Gotta remember to mention that whole "exhaust port" thing in my first meeting.

JLK

For some reason...

I got a bunch of bounces on the e-mail today from people with Hotmail addresses. Perhaps I have been identified as a spammer. That would be vaguely amusing, I suppose. So let's hope you're checking the website if you have hotmail.

Also, a friend of mine who doesn't actually play our Quizo but reads the site asked: "do the teams that finish at the bottom of the table at the end of the tournament get relegated?" An interesting thought. I don't know what relegation from Dark Horse Quizo would entail necessarily. Perhaps the two bottom-finishing teams should be forced to play in the Quizo at Smoke Eaters in Mayfair, which I went to once and found to be so awful my team left after getting a 10 in the first round. It was so bad we couldn't even stand to complete it.

JLK

Your "So, That Happened" Quizo Update

Well now.

We certainly can't say the last few days have been.... INTERESTING, at the least.

Thursday saw the long-awaited return of Lost, even if it is - at the moment - for a shortened eight-episode mini-season. There is talk now that this may not be the case much longer, that the WGA strike may in fact end as early as this week. It's too late to save most of the admittedly-limited television that I watch - even a settlement tomorrow would probably mean there wouldn't be new episodes of Lost or 24 until the summer at the earliest, more likely fall - but a resolution soon should save Battlestar Galactica (which doesn't start airing until March) and when it comes to television as long as Galactica finishes its run everything else can fuck off.

But that premiere on Thursday! Great googly moogly. When Lost is on its game - which is still most of the time - it's no worse than the second- or third-best show on television, the the fourth-season premiere shows it. The show has so many levels of awesomeness it's oftentimes hard to keep up with them. It's the little things that make a difference. For instance: when Hurley is hallucinating in the police station, his vision of Charlie swimming in the mirror puts his hand on the glass and it says "THEY NEED YOU." Or when Jack and Hurley are playing basketball and Jack only gets as far as H-O, which are the 8th and 15th letters of the alphabet (c.f. also Charlie "standing next to the Ho-Ho's").

Did you also happen to notice - I did not until my second viewing - that in the scene in the cabin it's Jack's father in the rocking chair? Oh yes.

Admittedly if you don't watch Lost this not only doesn't make sense but probably sounds pretty silly, but if you do watch it's FUCKING HUGE.

[Soccer content ahead]

Saturday saw some... well, I would say something like "quality soccer action," and the games themselves were great, but the results kinda pissed me off. Spurs (aka "fucking Spurs...") scored early against Manchester United and then actually played defense for almost an entire game, something relatively unheard of. Of course, the key word in that sentence is "almost" as they allowed a goal at the very end of the game, preventing Chelsea from closing the gap on United and Arsenal.

And, of course, Chelsea also chose not to help themselves in that regard, with an absolutely gorgeous goal from Nicolas Anelka - really, you should try to find it, it's quite something - cancelled out by giving up a soft one to Jermain Defoe, meaning that instead of us winning and United drawing and getting closer to first place, Chelsea drew when United drew and Arsenal won, meaning that by the end of the weekend we're actually FARTHER off the pace now. Of course, we are in the League Cup final in a few weeks and Arsenal is, let's say, decidedly not, so that's something.

[End soccer content]

Then there was the Super Bowl yesterday, which was... yeah.

Even the most ardent football fan has to admit that yesterday's game was three quarters of utter garbage. I mean, really, ugh. However, as I semi-predicted two weeks ago, some combination of a) whatever hideous black magic the Giants have wrought, and b) the expiration on Saturday of Tom Brady's Faustian pact meant that the New York Football Giants once again managed to eke out a win against a clearly-superior team and - inexplicably - win a Super Bowl in the process. Suffice it to say I don't think anyone really saw that coming, as the odds against either or both of those things happening had to be slim at best. Of course, revelations that the Patriots, hereafter referred to as "Cheaty McCheaterson," had been plying their rules-snubbing trade as far back as the Super Bowl in 2001 could, I suppose, have had something to do with it on some cosmic level. Karma's a bitch, yo.

Round 2 of the Tournament of Champions tonight. Results from last week are on the website. Let me tell you how much fun compiling all THAT was...

JLK

Your To The Point Quizo Update

Not much this week, folks - hardly anything at all, in fact - just a reminder that the Tournament of Champions starts tonight. If for some reason you're not fully briefed on the rules and all, you can go ahead and check out the website (http://quizo.blogspot.com) and you'll find what you need there.

If anyone caught the NHL All-Star game last night please let me know how it went, since it was on a channel that I am not sure actually exists, much less one I get.

JLK

Your Special Quizo Tournament of Champions Rules Update

As promised.

The rules of the tournament will go thusly:

Each week for 8 weeks the teams that finish in the top 5 will get points, from 5 points for first place to 1 point for fifth place. In the ninth week, the teams that finish in the top 5 in point totals will compete in a Final Trivia Battle for the majority of the prize pool. There will still be normal Quizo in the week of the Final Trivia Battle, with the added bonus that the winner of said Final Trivia Battle will not actually be eligible for the normal Quizo prizes.

The prize pool will be generated through teams competing in the tournament donating $5 per team, per week into said prize pool. Unless people want to make it $10. I'm certainly not averse to the idea. Note that even if you are convinced that you can't possibly win the whole thing it is in your interest to contribute to the pool every week for reasons I shall get into shortly.

In addition to earning Tournament points for finishing in the top five, bonus points can be obtained in the following ways, even if your team doesn't finish in the top five:

- 1 bonus point for playing on a team with 3 or fewer people. 2 bonus points for playing solo. Note that you still get this if you're normally on a team with 6 people but in some given week you're the only one who shows up. (Meaning that even if your team can't make it some week, at least send one person.)

- 1 bonus point for the team with the "best wrong answer" every week, decided arbitrarily by me.

- 1 bonus point for getting a 10 in any non-money round on each night, which will be especially useful when I pull out the really ridiculous speed rounds, which I will. (you can only get 1 of these per week)

- 1 bonus point for, in weeks with a particularly interesting geography question, the team that draws the "best map" on an answer sheet, also arbitrarily chosen by me. This does not necessarily mean the most geographically accurate map, as you've probably guessed.

- 1 bonus point for being the only team in the bar to get any single question right (again, limited to 1 per week).

- Other bonus points distributed by me under exceptional circumstances, again determined arbitrarily and, quite possibly, unfairly. There was talk of rewards for "lightening my mood" but I have Vicodin for that, which is much more reliable.

The team limit, as per normal operating procedure, is 6 people in any given week. However, over the course of the Tournament of Champions you may have as many as 8 different people in total on your team (that is to say, if someone can't make it one or two weeks you can swap a different person in). You can still only have 6 people on your team in the final, though, and for the final all 6 must have played at least once in the Tournament.

At the end of the competition, in addition to awarding the team that wins the Final Trivia Battle the majority of the collected prize money, numerous other awards will be given out, NHL-style. These include but are not necessarily limited to:

- The "Mr. Consistency" Award: to the team whose individual nonzero scores over the course of the tournament have the lowest standard deviation (look it up if you don't know what it means).

- The "Alias Pseudonym Undercover" Award: to the team who, over the course of the tournament, has the highest ratio of points (regular Quizo game points) scored to team members each week.

- The "My Freaking Ears" Award: to the team that finishes individual games above Das Boot the most times, thus preventing you-know-what.

- The "Who The Fuck Are You" Award: to the team full of people no one has ever seen before who are only showing up these 9 weeks for the money and stupidly think there's any chance I'm going to let them win the actual prize.

- The "Blast From The Past" Award: to the team that finishes the highest in the final standings out of the group of teams we haven't seen in a while but who will show up again for this. Darg Whores, Delicious Bass, Gym Shorts No Underwear, Dr. Seydow and others, I'm looking at you.

- The "Dirty Godless Whores" Award: to the team that wins the money round the most times over the course of the tournament.

- The "Put The Book Down And For Chrissakes Go Outside" Award: to the team with the highest aggregate point total (regular Quizo game points) over the course of the tournament.

- Anything else I can think of that seems vaguely amusing at the time.

Awards may range from cash to candy to whatever the hell I think of when it comes down to it.

That's all I can think of at the moment. If anyone has any questions let me know.

Monday night, then, the Tournament of Champions begins!

JLK