Getting Biblical On Your Asses, Continued

There was more hue and cry than I thought over one particular prize last week: the paddle with the quote from Leviticus on it that someone had left behind (get it? "Left Behind?" Ha! I stone me!).

Well, if we need more paddles, turns out we can get more paddles.

(I've looked at that site for the last three days, and I'm not sure how serious it is. I suspect it's your basic olde-style pro-spanking thing, but unless I missed something, there was no mention of grownups messing about with other grownups in what the racier magazines now call good, clean fun. So, y'know, proceed at your own risk.)

[via, vidio, vici]

Podcast Update (or, Cart Before Goat)

I finished off the first official podcast this week. It's swell, and I'm pretty sure you'll dig it.

Thing is, I don't have a regular webspace fully set up to park it in yet. I could up the mp3, but the idea is to have a place to subscribe to it. Blogger's fine for text, and Flickr is good for pictures, but I've been putting this off for the last two months, and really, now's the time.

I'm going to try and get this fixed today. Watch this space for updates.

It's gonna be great, I swear.

3-04 - 1/24 Recap: For My Next Trick, I'll Need A Volunteer

Yesterday started with Janet being a guest on Howard Stern, and ended with closest Scrabble Solution near-tie ever, in two wild guesses as to the distance from Uranus (2,735,555,035 km = 1,699,795,070 miles) that were less than 9,000 miles apart. Yow.

Last night's celebrity spotting: A man who used to make sure Warren Zevon's bottle was always full while on stage. And on Warren's birthday and everything! (More on that below.) Yes, the Charlie Hodge to Warren's Elvis Presley, his Vodka Fluffer, was in the hizzy last night. Right On.

That said. This week's rounds:

1. On This Day - Big ups to Yakov Smirnoff and Ray Stevens, as well as the Emperor Hadrian (who turns 1,931 today) and his childhood buddy, The Great Ernest Borgnine.

2. Audio Round: Warren Zevon's Collaborators - a compilation of acts with whom Warren has collaborated, from the Everly Brothers and the Turtles to Steve Winwood and REM. (And someone asked about this, and I wasn't sure, so I had to look it up: John Waite ["Missing You"] was a guest vocalist on Zevon's farewell LP, The Wind. It's not the closest connection, but it counts.)

3. Burn - You know who did well on this round? Your mom. She says hi. Burrrrrrn!

4. Earthquakes - Earthquake, the standup comic? He's not bad, actually.



5. Name 3's - Three soles, three vampire movies, three kinds of sleeves, and something about a dirndl.

I'm noticing the team names get better and worse like the stock market. Team name futures are way up this week, so sell high:

• 1st Place: The Harpo Marxists


• 2nd Place: The ACLU (personal to you guys: are you actually with the ACLU?)


• 3rd place: Hold Me Closer, Tony Danza! (Which always reminds me of the WKRP episode where the Russian defector communicates his forbidden love for Bailey Quarters through an Elton John song. Och, I'm tearing up.)
  
  
  
  Followed by (in no particular order):


• The Remanders


• Hillary and Obama: Jungle Fever! Do The Right Thing!


• The Brain Machine


• The Resolvers


• Rob Torfleson's Armada Featuring Herman Menderchuck!


• Please Don't Call (845) 641-[last 4 digits redacted], that's (845) 641-[last 4 digits redacted]! (If he gets any actual phone calls, they're from someone at the party last night. I can't help you with that part, my friend.)


• The No-Tards! (a solo act for most of the night, she finished tied for 12th, which is pretty solid)


• Touched By An Uncle (who would have won best team name but they booked as the final scores were being read. Stay to the end, people. You'll win stuff.)


• The State Of The Onions


• Hokey Birds (whom I didn't mention the first time around, which was good, because they moved up four spots by the next reading round)


• The Fart Sandwiches (who drew the best doodles of the week; scans to come)


• The Twinsters


• Are You There, God? It's Me, Pirate.


• Wonder


• The Penis Mightier


• Nice & Thrifty!


• The Comeback Kids.

Prizes this week included a paddle with LEVITICUS 20 written on it, as well as a few different special items from TV Guide, including a commemorative Elvis interactive CD-ROM and a portable trivia gameboy-type thing.

Some new pictures taken by Vidiot have been added to the DSO Flickr group already, so have a look, and bring your camera next week!

Podcast and potential new sponsor information (!) coming up.

I know there was more. What did I miss?

Purty Pitchers

Come To Trivia Or We'll Punch This Host

I've put up some pics from last week to the DSO Flickr Group. If you have a flickr! account, go ahead and join that group, and if you add me as a friend I shall shurely call back in kind.

3-03: 1/17 Recap - It's The New 'Golly'

I'm not sure if it was the sudden and way overdue explosion of cold, or the impending State Of The Union Address, or a collective hangover from watching the Golden Globes (I feel like I'm one of five people walking the Earth who didn't see them; I had no idea), but it seemed like a relatively chill room last night. Usually you rowdy freaks bring a mighty noise, but you were almost... well behaved.

That was unnerving. Please don't.

Also, I was thinking about changing the way I read the scores. It takes a lot of time to read the scores by rank, and we're running later and later these days, which is not the direction Janet & I want to go with this. Would it bother anyone if I took a page out of these recaps (and the Last Exit playbook) and gave the top three scorers in order and then just gave everyone else's team name and score? When it was a tiny, close-knit group back when we started this, it wasn't a big deal, but nowadays it's kind of become an issue.

Let me know what you think. If you like hearing the rankings in order, I'm fine with keeping on with it. It just feels unnecessarily long, is all.

That said. This week's rounds:

1. On This Day - Happy birthday to Vidal Sassoon, the late great Andy Kaufman, and fellow baldy Don Zimmer.

2. Audio Round: Pleased To Meet Me - I tried to balance off the Kenny Loggins clip with Sam Cooke and Death Cab For Cutie (a band I'm still warming to), but god, what a terrible song. That somehow many of you got anyway. Seriously, it's like I don't even know who you are sometimes.

3. Monkey Business - Not just the Marx Brothers movie and Gary Hart's yacht, but a question about marmosets. Marmosets! Who says we don't stretch your minds, even just a tiny bit!

4. Let's Talk About Chicks, Man. - Questions about Chickens, chicks, cocks, cock-a-leekie soup, and the album that hatched the single "You Never Met A Motherfucker Quite Like Me." (I don't even think of "motherfucker" as a cuss word anymore. To me, it's the new "golly.")

5. Name 3's - In which I gave you the three all-time best-selling Chick Tracts, three Beethoven symphonies, three Rockys, and something about the Pineapple Express.

Team names were better this week:

• 1st Place: Pluto Nash Won A Golden Globe? It Should Have Been A Grammy For "Party All The Time!"


• 2nd Place: Hurricane Brangelina


• 3rd place: π(RATE)ARRRGH² (I had to look up the right codes to get this to render right. You're welcome.)
  
  
  
  Followed by (in no particular order):


• Googies


• How The Hotter Half Lives


• If It Wasn't For My Horse, I Wouldn't Have Spent Those Two Years In College


• Hamster Huey & The Gooey Kablooey


• MDIXM37UT* (they changed their name to "Please Count Our Score" after the first round)


• Kick Your Ass


• Norfolk & Chance (this name has been used before, both times by a team visiting from the UK. Is this some kind of British in-joke I don't know about? I mean, I get the pun, but is there any more than that to this?)


• Mango Chutney (good job on the scrabble solution question, guys)


• Sexual Chocolate VIII (don't assume there were seven before you, baby. You're the only Sexual Chocolate this party's ever seen, gurl, you know it's true.)


• Silver Fox


• Penguins Don't Surge!


• IOWA (where they were actually from. geographical shout-outs always rock)


• I'm Missing Top Chef For This?


• Run Obama Run! (later, Run Osama Run!)


• Schindler's Lisp


• Disheveled


• The Gordon Shumways (later, the Smashing Shumways)


• The Resolvers


• Army Of Brians (and Matt)

Prizes this week included a special prize pack from the show 24, consisting of a large photo-album book with an accompanying DVD.

I ate all the pizza. Sorry.

Pictures will be uploaded to the DSO Flickr group tonight, as soon as I can pull them out of my camera.

What else? Any thoughts, ideas, input, something I missed?

My First Pass At A DSO Podcast

As a first-anniversary present (if you can call this a present; I feel a little like I'm buying you a bowling ball with my name on it, and then letting you know in advance, but still), I was thinking about putting together a weekly podcast, to try and, I don't know, spread the word or something. Anyway, to say I took advantage of the MLK holiday to work on the dream I have, a dream where every child, no matter their color, creed, sexual orientation, country of origin, proximity to New York, ability to hold their liquor or make friends, literacy level, current level of incarceration or severity of medication needed to function in society, every child could participate in Janet's and my stupid little trivia thing... to say that? That would be kinda messed up.

I've posted to my personal blogspace the first pass at what I think I could do every week without going apeshit. I don't listen to podcasts barely at all, so especially those of you who do, if you could give this a listen and let me know what you think is missing or clunky, I'd be most grateful.

This is not where it'll ultimately be hosted from week to week, so you can't subscribe to it there. I'll let you know about those kind of details as I work them out. But yeah, please, feedback if you have it would be so very welcomed.

That's When Stephen Colbert Said: "Don't Dis My Homies!"

Turns out Ken Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch (great friends of the DSO) made an appearance on The Colbert Report last night. He performed admirably under the withering attacks of America's Sharpest Pundit.

UPDATE: It's up, and here it is. (Thanks, AJB!)


* * * * *

As a placeholder until this video made it online, I included one of my favorite Mr. Show bits, just because it's Friday before a long weekend and like I need another reason.

This has nothing to do with Gitmo or HRW, but still. Enjoy the sublime greatness that is Van Hammersly, Pool Shark:

3-02: 1/10 Recap: I Wish I Could Write My Own Prescriptions Too

Okay, I figured that since it was the week after the holidays, and all the reveller types who'd come home to the city for a nice meal and a knees-up with their mates had come down and made the holiday versions of the DSO into such a killerdiller success had gone back out into the world to make their fortune or whatever, that this would have been a nice quiet week. Seriously, I was preparing for it. But it wound up being pretty rowdy. I just celebrated my birthday this week, and your presence was a wonderful present.

Oh, great. Now I'm getting vaklempt. I need a moment.

Okay. This week's rounds:

1. On This Day - Happy birthday to Linda Lovelace, George Foreman, Rasputin, Tintin and one-half of Steely Dan.

2. Audio Round: Little Things - A counterpart to the Big Things round of last week, in which we heard the Replacements, Otis Redding, Prince, Jay and the Americans, and the only Don Ho song most of you will ever need to know.

3. Buffalo - In which Janet asked about Buffalo Wings (having been to the Anchor Bar, I can vouch for that buffalo wings were actually a good idea once), Buffalo Girls, and the amazingly awful superstud-for-hire Vincent Gallo.

4. Let's Play Doctor! - In which you were to know about the dock at which the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum normally is moored, what Dock Ellis was on when he threw his 1970 no-hitter, who currently occupies the seat once held by Doc Severinsen, and how well you know the lyrics to "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay."

5. Name 3's - Three choreographers, three sopranos, three parts of a shoe, and three beans, one of which shared its name with a prominent goof-deathcore band.

There were a lot of teams (not a record size, but pretty close). If you finished in the top ten, you really accomplished something. This week, you were:

• 1st Place: Saving Pirate Ryan
  
• 2nd Place: Yvonne de Carlo Ponti of No Return (a shoutout to the two celebrity deaths of this week, and maybe just a little too clever by half. Still.)
  
• 3rd place: The Mighty Mice
  
  
  
  Followed by (in no particular order):
  
• ÖRPS


• Hokey Birds


• At Least We're Not Sitting On The Floor! (or, Boy These Chairs Are Comfy!)


• New Jersey: Smelt It, Dealt It!


• Headband Masterplan


• I Don't Particularly Like Trivia; I Just Don't Want To Hear Bush's Speech


• We Wish We Had A Clever Team Name


• Go Tard '06 Overstock


• New Jersey Natural Gas


• The Bolsheviks


• Team Schaboma


• The Surge!


• The Team Formerly Known As...


• The Gordon Shumways


• Hell In A Handbasket


• Axe Wound


• The Moustache Ride


• Dutchboys & Dikes


• NYC Air Quality Control


• Shiney McShine & the Dreams

Prizes this week included some fridge magnets (not just from our friends at the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, but also a novelty set for doctoring fridged-photos), a suction-cup battery-operated fan shaped like a little airplane, and packs of Tally-Ho playing cards, in case we weren't enough gameplay for you for the week.

Janet & I really appreciate you coming out to this thing every week. Thanks, as always.

What else happened? I was kind of busy and may have missed something.

DSO 3-01 - 1/3 Recap: How Much For An "Around The World?"

Normally, the two people from San Francisco would be newsworthy as having travelled the farthest (even with Amanda driving up from Baltimore that afternoon to come and play). But they picked the week that a fmaily flew up from Western Australia, just to come to Dempsey's and play with us. I'm assuming nothing else was happening here in New York, but I'm really glad they decided to come all the way around the allegedly round world to sit in a pub with their infant child and answer a bunch of questions about why Carnegie Hall was built and the three counties in New Jersey.

Hello, world. It's good to meet youse.

This week's rounds:

1. On This Day

2. Audio Round: Big Things - A round of songs about big stuff, including tracks from Peter Gabriel & Big Country, though not Mr. Big, Biggie Smalls, or Big Audio Dynamite. Room ain't that big, holmes.

3. Old & New

4. People From Berlin - Peaches is one of those people whom I knew back when she was this cute little jewish kid named Merrill who had an arty band called Fancypants hoodlum. Glad all that energy's going somewhere.

5. Name 3's - In which I namedropped Lily Munster, not knowing she was going to die the next week.

The team sizes were a little big this week, which we didn't really enforce (keep it to five or six at the most), but spirits were high, so what the hell. The team names:

• 1st Place: Fun + Fun = More Fun (formerly Fun^2)
  
• 2nd Place: Lucy In The Sky With Pirates
  
• 3rd place: Tek Jansen & the Ladies' Nocturne
  
  
  
  Followed by, in no particular order:
  
• Kirsten & the Bad Ass Rabid Ants


• Ryan Seacrest's Ball Finally Dropped


• The Iraqi Hangmen


• HRW Pot Ate Toe Soup


• Sonic Death Monkey


• The Team Formerly Known As Begun


• Tard, Go!


• Big Dick In A Big Box


• The Rejected Students From Oprah's New School


• Purple Hazen

What else?

Cautionary Tale

From today's Chicago Sun-Times:

A 21-year-old woman was hospitalized for intoxication over the weekend after "continually providing wrong answers" during a game of Trivial Pursuit where participants drank alcohol and did drugs when they answered incorrectly.

According to the story, she was the yellow piece, and it provides helpful information about what a "blunt" is, in case you didn't already know.

This just goes to show that what you people do every week is special. Don't take your drinking and thinking responsibilities lightly, especially the day before New Year's Eve. This is a cruddy reason to miss the social event of the season.

(Note: New Year's Eve isn't the year's greatest party for everyone, I know. But if you're the kind of person to drink & toke yourself into oblivion over a Trivial Pursuit game, then it's a safe bet there are photos of you in a party hat with your tongue out somewhere on the interwebs already. Just a hunch.)