More On Banksy

In the Faces round last week, I asked about who defaced Paris Hilton's album by putting 500 copies of a remixed version into record stores, with new art and songs like "Why Am I Famous?" and "What Have I Done?".

It was, of course, this guy. Here's an excellent piece from Channel 4 about his graffiti campaign along the West Bank of Palestine (showing rare footage of him actually doing his thing):



[via Joey Skaggs]

Good. Friday.

I am a pud.

I don't know what I was thinking yesterday. I took the scoresheets, questions and notes out of my bag and then left them at the office, so there shall be no recap until Monday. A thousand apologies to the various stock markets around the world who peg their indexes to the number of teams and quality of the puns in the team names (best team name this week was "...Off In The Shower," as they finished last, so on Wednesday last, everyone beat ...Off In The Shower.)

As a feeble replacement, here's a Seattle Times article with some background on the interview process to get on shows like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, Deal Or No Deal and the Big J. The entry process is straightforward, but there are a lot of people looking to get on the teevee and get their asses kicked by midwestern College Professors. You might have guessed that.

[via the quite-relevant-to-this-blog Bob Harris]

This Week: Fish! For Real This Time!

Tonight's Prize
Originally uploaded by Chico Bangs.

My skills are many, but being a prolonged and effective tease is not one of them. Some days I can withhold and entice pleasure with the best of them, and then others, well, I'm a big old suck who couldn't deny Marty Scorcese an Oscar, even if he didn't really deserve it.

(Note to those who are reading this via archive or google search: This metaphor may be not quite apt, but it is at least relatively current as of this typing.)

What I'm trying to say is, after a couple of weeks of back problems and carrying-too-much-crap-around issues, I will be bringing this special Discovery Kids! Exploration Aquarium ("great for goldfish, bettas and guppies!") as a prize for one special fishionista tonight.

(It comes with a special carrying bag, and it's not actually all that heavy. Certainly you can have your standard night out and bring it home without difficulty. I wouldn't bring anything you can't drop out of a moving cab while hammered at 2:30 in the morning on a school night. Promise.)

We also have some special books (including one about a movie star who left this world last year and yet didn't make the Oscars' grief reel at all, those ungrateful bastards).

See you tonight.

A Scoring Change For Make Glorious Nation Of Smartass Futures!

One of the things I occasionally mess up (I know, I know, I never make mistakes, but oh-crappertunities just sounds so damn corny) is that I will miss a team when reading the scores on the fly in order.

So to stop that from happening, I'm going to read out everyone's score, just not in order. I'm not going to stop doing the rankings, I'll just not go from bottom to top. Maybe I'll read the top three, and then everyone else, and certainly, everyone's name and score will be read aloud after rounds 2, 4 and 5, but yeah, there's no need for you guys to stare at me while I scratch my beer-addled head trying to figure out if there actually is an eighth place team that I just can't see on the page, or a three way tie for sixth.

It feels like it takes a lot of extra time, and the breaks are long enough as it is.

Does anyone have a problem with this?

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.

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.

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.

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?

Tonight: Season Two Finale!

If there was any question as to whether we are on tonight, it is going down like the Hindenberg, like the US Dollar against the Euro, like Jessica Simpson's sales figures, like yo momma.

Hope y'all had a good holiday and stuff, and that your family didn't drive you to homicide.

In honor of the Godfather of Soul, we'll be listening to this excellent record between the rounds.

[Programming Note: Tonight is the twenty-first and final episode of Season Two, but we won't be skipping a week or anything before we begin Season Three next Wednesday, January 3. (For reasons that hopefully will bear fruit later, I'm going to start counting these weeks as episodes; DSO Season One had 25 episodes between February and the August hiatus, and Season Two ran from August 2 until tonight).]

One Of The Prizes This Evening

...will be a firearm. For reals.

Also, knowing what city Gertrude Stein was referring to when she mentioned that "There is no 'there' there" might be useful to you.

And... Yes,

I'm fussing with the template of this blog. I know it's taking long to load, and I'm sorry about that. The hamster is tired today, and isn't running that wheel fast enough to generate the proper power.

Post a comment if you find any problems with the new layouts. I'm no genius, but I'm not afraid to tinker with the thing to make it look good.

Of Ass-Butts, Assclowns, Ass-Gards, Ass-Guys, Asshats, Assmasters, Assmunches, Asstards, Ass-heads, Assbags, oh yeah and Dingo's Kidneys

I've been a very bad boy.

Instead of faithfully rendering recaps of the last few weeks' worth of hijinks, I've been tryiong to hold down a job and working on a screenplay. Apparently, everyone has a screenplay. (It's about the death of CBGB's and the end of punk as we know it. I'll be playing the Vincent Gallo part, and Christina Ricci will... probably not be involved.)

But the least I can do is to show you the source of the round on made-up swear words last week. There are some doozies there.

Expand your vocabularies, and I'll see you tonight.

I Like The Spite in You

There will be a little something extra in all your pay packets this week, seeing as I missed last week's recap window (I'll put an abbreviated one in this weekend, I promise) and I know you guys need a little something-something to get by.

But I will say this, to the lovely group who complained about there being questions about the Clash so many weeks in a row:

I actually looked this up, and in the month-plus since we've come back from hiatus, we've had a grand total of three questions (or audio clues) about, regarding, or somehow related to the Clash. That may be a lot, but I wouldn't call it excessive. (I know you would, and I understand, but it is what it is.)

We have, however, asked four (four!) questions about Duran Duran in that same time. That's a far more egregious misuse of our trivia-making abilities, and I humbly and abjectly apologize for that.

Still, spite being the most powerful force on earth and all, I shall provide you readers of this fine blog with a little tip: I'll be doing an entire ten-question round of clash-related questions next Wednesday. C-O-N, Control.

In other news:

• We have taped segments for two separate public access TV shows in the last two weeks, so the odds of us seeing airtime are pretty high. (Watch this space or email me for details as we find out what the deal is).
  
  
• And I'm thinking about putting together a podcast. We have the means to record and host mp3s, but anyone know how to get in with iTunes?
  

Preview

Prizes tonight will include:

• Japanese snacks (back by popular demand), as well as...


• books by a certain over-the-top CNN Host and someone named Ruby Ann Boxcar (*turn your speakers down, midi alert!) who's apparently been dispensing wisdom from her trailer park for years. Who knew? (Also, she looks fabulous!)

Also, a birthday boy will figure prominently in tonight's festivities. That's a hint. Now, go have fun.

Reminder/Fair Warning

**CORRECTION: This is happening next week, not this week. That mistake is all mine. Everything runs regularly this week. Shop as usual, and avoid panic buying.

We're going to be hosting a private trivia-related function earlier next Wednesday afternoon (May 17th) which, as far as I know, is supposed to end around 7:30. If you get there early enough (6:30 or so), you might be able to kindasorta play along with an extra few questions, but there'll be a full house of people, some (but not all) of whom will be staying over.

It's gonna be a weird night, but it could wind up being very cool.