And the winner ...

... for the oddest call of the week thus far - Mr. Elliot of Los Angeles.

The call went as follows:

<ring ring>
Me: Dan Jones
Him: Hello, my name is Mr. Elliot. I'm not sure where I got this number, but is Dan Jones still the mayor of Sterling.
Me: No, that is Larry Fetzer.
Him: So he was just elected?
Me: No, about a year and a half ago.
Him: How long is the mayoral term?
Me: Two years.
Him: Oh!
Him: You're probably wondering why I called? Well, we are playing a trivia game here in LA and we needed those answers. Thank you. Bye.
<click>

Which leaves me with questions:

• Why play trivia during the day?
• Why ask obscure questions about small rural Colorado town when playing trivia in LA?
• Why not go to the Sterling city website and look up the answers? After all, you did enough searching to associate me and find my number - why not finish the job.

Oh well, I can now say that I have officially been a part of a trivia question and answer from half a continent away. Can you say that?

Trivia Time

Have you ever been on the cover of a magazine? I have, several times. But the most recent is from the December Issue of a magazine you may not read. Remember back to this post when I chaired my last meeting as President of District 1 of the Colorado Municipal League? The meeting was held at the arch rival town up the road because they wanted to show off their renovation project. Well, the project ribbon cutting they celebrated pre-meeting made the cover of Colorado Municipalities magazine:

Can you spot me in the picture? Remember that I was the mayor of the arch-rival city at the time, so don't look for me in the front ribbon cutting row. {*grin*} (I apologize for the graying the glossy paper caused in the scan, but if you click to see the picture full size it is a bit clearer.)

While you ponder away, I'll resume watching the football game. Let me know when you give up.

Football game is over. Give up now?

Finally ready to give up? Well look at this version of the cover with my fine artistic modifications:

The two bodies so blatantly outlined in red are my city manager and myself. I am the big one on the right side.

Okay, okay. I admit it was sort of a hoax to say I was on the the cover of this issue, but it piqued your curiosity didn't it?

Fun and Curses

This weekend was interesting, in the sense of "May you live in interesting times" form of the old Chinese proverb.

(If you are really curious, that phrase is reputed to be the mildest of three canonical Chinese curses. In order of increasing severity:

• May you live in interesting times
• May you come to the attention of those in authority
• May you find what you are looking for

For the convoluted history, check out "May you live in interesting times" from Wikipedia.)

Saturday night was the Ninth Annual Community Caring Hands Trivia Contest. Our team was the defending champion and we won going away again Saturday. That makes if 3 out of the last 3 years and 6 of the last 8. Proof positive that we are indeed trivial. Our team consists of a CPA, lawyer, surgeon, a home schooled jack of all trades, a school teacher, and myself. The school teacher was a sub for our retired librarian - she was off at a family reunion in Lincoln and so couldn't join us this year.

The contest is always fun and is a fund raising event for Community Caring Hands, a local group formed when we were informed that we we too small an area to support a Habitat for Humanity branch. A retired professor from the local community college presides in full academic robes. (He has written a newspaper trivia column for the last 20 years, so he has an amazing amount of trivia to hand.)  There are between 15 and 25 teams each year with each team consisting of 6 members. The master of ceremonies reads each question aloud and the teams have 30 seconds to write their answers on a slip of paper and give them to the runners when time is called. The contest is divided into 9 groups of 8 questions each, with each group concentrating on a specific broad areas. Some of the groups are Science, Entertainment, Literature, Geography, TV, etc. Prizes are also awarded for the most amusing (and incorrect) answers in each group.

To give a flavor of the questions, here are a couple that stuck with me form this years contest:

• What was the given name of the Joker from Batman Comics?
• What geographic feature known to the Lakota as the Six Grandfathers was renamed after a lawyer as punishment to the Lakota?
• What astronaut flew in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs?
• The travelers in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales were served by someone with the same title as a U.S. Navy rank. What is that rank?
  

(The answers are in the first comment - no peeking!)

That was the fun part of weekend. The cursed interesting part is that the dryer quit heating on Sunday. So that means that today I have it disassembled all over the laundry room to see if it is one of the thermostats or the heating element that has departed these earthly realms. Fortunately it warmed up a bit outside today and is windy and in the fifties so I could hang all the damp and wet clothes out to dry in the breeze.

Which in turn reminded me of my childhood. I can remember hanging bedding out to dry in the winter when I was a kid and letting it freeze dry. I always thought that was neat, especially going out and bringing in the sheets as the sun went down. They'd be these big stiff crackly things that expired their last bit of moisture as they thawed entering the warm house. Now that I am no longer a kid, the whole thing seems no where near as neat now.

So what was your weekend like?

Wacky Wednesday

This morning was the normal weekly radio show. I didn't have a lot to say since the main topic for the week has been water rights. The EPA forced treatment of our water under the new standards will force us to waste (not use in any constructive way) at least 15% of the water we pump from the ground. That means that although we thought we had sufficient water rights to cover the projected growth in usage for the next 35 years, we now need to begin looking for more water to buy to cover our depletions much sooner. I know that people who don't live in the water short American West don't have a clue what I'm moaning about. Those who do are going "yup, been there and been burned by stupidity of easterner's laws before too."

One of the nice things about doing the radio show is that things here in "small town" have been pretty calm, so I don't get the raving lunatics calling in. It's more the attack of the rabidly apathetic - you can't get them to call for any reason. That means I get to blither on about topics of my own choosing. Sort of like rambling to your self on a blog - you don't know until later who was listening/reading and only then when they comment on it. For small market radio, the rule of thumb is that if you have 100 listeners, you will get around one comment in the next week. I wonder if there is a similar rule of thumb for comments on blogs. Have you heard of one?

Time to get on with cleaning up the kitchen. I left the dishes after supper and now have to do them before bed. I find that when I'm batching it, I have a tendency not to do things like the laundry and dishes if I don't do them right away. On the other hand, I'm enough of a neatnik that I can't stand having the mess sitting around. So I have this internal dialog going on in my head between the angel of neatness and the imp of sloppiness. Add to that the trio of me, myself, and I all babbling at each other and the conversations gets a bit hard to get a word in edgewise. And of course Molly the dog feels free to contribute here two barks as well. Which might explain why I'm so incoherent at times! {*grin*}

Speaking of raving lunatics, what is the one thing least likely to happen to a U.S. citizen on May 22? That was the question we used to give away the dozen donuts on the trivia show that follows my meandering on the radio. My pre-air prediction was < 3 minutes and 2 callers. I hit it on the nose. Leave your guess of the answer in the comments. I will include the answer in tomorrows blog entry.

We Won!

We won the trivia contest again. This year the format was adjusted a bit and the questions were divided into nine categories. The categories were:

• General Knowledge
  
• Music
  
• Geography
  
• Literature
  
• Sports & Leisure
  
• Movies
  
• History
  
• TV
  
• Science
  

We did well in most categories and were perfect in Literature, Movies, and Science. TV came close to smoking our posteriors. Nothing like none of us having a clue. The team this year was the same as last year, so we had a CPA, a lawyer, a surgeon, a retired librarian, the young guy, and myself. Not a one of us watches TV other than for some sports or old movies. So when one of the questions was "What was the name of the coffee shop the characters in Friends often visited?", we shared the blank look. We couldn't even think of a good crowd pleaser for an answer. (The answer was "Central Perk".)

It was a close battle this year. A new team (The Cracker Jacks) from a small town about 40 miles to south of here was in the competition for the first time and they came on strong to tie us at the end of regulation. It was the first tie in the history of the event at the end of regulation. So the moderator finally got a chance to ask his tie breaking questions. He had had them sealed in his Funk and Wagonall's Mayo jar for at least 8 years. Our team and the other team both got the first three tie breakers correct. The tie breaking questions included such tidbits as:

• What is the shortest verse in the King James translation of the Bible? ("Jesus wept")
  
• What are the colors of the three rooms on the first floor of the White House? (Red, Blue, Green)
  
• If a plane travels 300 yds in 10 seconds, how many feet will it travel in 1/5 of a second? (18)
  
• What were the names of the seven original Mercury Astronauts? (Glenn, Grissom, Shepard, Carpenter, Slayton, Schirra, and Cooper)
  

When the final tie breaking question "What were the names of all seven original Mercury program astronauts?" was asked, we scribbled like mad on our answer pad. We came up with all but Schirra . We could not for the life of us think of who the seventh astronaut was. We finally guessed Young, but that was wrong as he was a Gemini and later astronaut. Fortunately for us, the other team could only come up with 5 names to our 6, so we won! Yea us!

On the "crowd pleasing" side, one of the better answers was given to the question "Who is Angelina Jolie's Oscar winning father?" (Jon Voight) One of the teams who was stumped supplied the answer "Shrek".

On the "stump people" side, the best question was "What is the name of the one state whose name does not appear in the name of a university? I.e. there is the University of Colorado and the University of Hawaii and ... Which state isn't in that list?" I don't think anyone got that one correct. (New Jersey - Rutgers is the State University of New Jersey)

All in all a fun evening. This year there were several new teams, including one organized by my grand-niece composed of seventh graders. I say grand-niece because she refers to me as uncle XXX, but the real relationship is that her mother is my cousin. It made me glad to see the new blood participating this year - there were 19 or 20 teams and all the entry fees go towards supporting Community Caring Hands.

By the way, just in case you wondered, CCH was originally founded to be a part of Habitat for Humanity, but we were too short on population out here to qualify for a chapter. Thus CCH was born to carry on the work out here in the rural boonies.

So once more our names will be engraved on the trophy and we'll be able to show it off for the next year. Well maybe rub it in people's faces, but you didn't hear that here ...

Trivia Contest

This weekend is the Community Caring Hands Trivia Bowl. It is one of the more fun charity events to support the local CCH group. For those who aren't familiar with CCH, they are a non-profit which does services for the elderly and poor in the community such as window repair and handicapped ramps and ... Basically home improvements and repair for those who can't do them without help.

The Trivia Bowl was started by a faculty group from the local community college many moons ago. It grew from a game they played over the lunch hour that is much akin to a team version of Trivial Pursuit. The way the local version works is that you get together a 4-6 person team, enter, and have fun.  Each team is assigned a table in the Elks Ballroom. A local retired faculty member and author of many trivia books is the Moderator. The normal flow is:

• Moderator asks a question
  
• Moderator starts the 60 second clock
  
• Your team writes its answer on a slip of paper
  
• Clock expires and the slips of paper are collected by the runners
  
• Runners give the slips to the panel of judges
  
• Your team is awarded a point for each correct answer
  

The winner is the team with the most points after all 6-8 categories of human knowledge have been exhausted.
What makes the event fun is that every one is heckling everyone else between questions and there is food and drink for all teams. Not to mention the audience in the galleries is hooting and hollering, especially when the judges announce a particularly inane answer to the crowd. You score crowd points but no game points by making up a Rube Goldberg style answer to any question you have no clue about.

Needless to say, it is a couple of hours of fun. Teams spend a lot of time visiting and talking between rounds, so it is a social event as well as a trivia contest. Teams seem to persist for years as a team. The team I am on has been competing for some years now with changes in personnel when schedules prevent some of us from participating. Our leader is an old high school classmate and former CPA. He is a bit obsessive, to the point of analyzing any question we missed in the previous year, etc. Another of our team is local lawyer who was also a high school classmate. Finally, to round out the core of our team, we have a youngster (he might be 27 by now) so that we can cover the youth trend questions. Some years we add a local surgeon or doctor or teacher or movie writer or ... It all depends on who we can recruit.

We usually get a rousing round of boos at the start of the contest as the teams are announced - both because I am the mayor and because we have been the champions 3 out of the last 4 years. (We were sub-par one year and lost to the local community college faculty team. *gasp*) Most years there are 120 questions divided into 6 categories. We usually end up getting 110-115 correct. Second place is usually around 105-110 correct and then there always seems to be a gap before a cluster of other teams. But the real fun is the ones where you have no clue and so can go for the crowd points.

So think of me tomorrow night as I trivialize my way down the road ... I'll try to remember a few good questions and put them up here after the contest.

Monday'ish Wednesdays

Why did today feel like a Monday all day? It just had that feel. Started off cool and damp from the melt of yesterdays snow flurry. Then warmed up and turned a bit windy. For some reason it just felt like a Monday all day long.

The walk down to the radio station for the weekly show was uneventful and the report of yesterdays council meeting was short and to the point. Only a few items on the agenda. The trivia question was surprisingly hard for people to guess in spite of the numerous hints we gave. The question was: "10% of men have never done this, what is it?" The answer is in the first comment.

This afternoon was a disaster of sorts. I had an abrasion on my leg start bleeding again and it wouldn't stop so I could put on long pants to go to a meeting. Nothing like a little squishy blood in your sock to make the day complete! It was just a little nick, but it had that annoying drip ... drip ... drip persistence at a time when I was already in a hurry.

In other news, I finally got my wife's old laptop at least partially resurrected from the dead. Even as I write this, the poor beast is doing a backup of all it's contents to one of my servers. That way if it heads to the land of the dead again, we'll at least have all the information from it in an accessible form. I suspect that it is more than just one problem with this machine, so the current revival may not be one for the long run. I had forgotten just how painful Windows 98 was to work with and network. Guess I have just gotten to used to XP, Linux, and Solaris. It did remind of the old days of Windows 95 and even {*gasp*} Windows 3.x. I may actually be one of the few people willing to admit that saw and even attempted to use a copy of Windows 1.x back in the 80's. Now that really lets you know you're getting old.

Off to prepare for my chance to be a pundit tomorrow. What *will be* the implications of the elections results. It will be interesting because this area is one of the few in Colorado that voted overwhelmingly for McCain and Schaeffer. Almost everywhere else went for the Democratic candidates of Obama and Udall. (It is amusing that blogger's spell checker thinks Obama is wrong, but has no suggestions of a better word. Is blogger a closet Republican?) Ta-ta.