Quick Notes

Scoreboard will be up Monday. Two weeks left to go in the JGTAI, and I will start handing out invites next week to teams who have qualified. Teams who have not qualified, here is a golden opportunity! I am giving bonus points for you posting photos of yourself in your Halloween costumes. Best Halloween outfit posted on the wall earns you a bonus 3 points!

In sports, here’s my latest podcast with Lee Russakoff…is Instant Replay hurting the NFL? This is a pretty funny one. In the “In case you missed it category”, I highly recommend the poem about Ryan Howard’s last at bat.

And finally, in the “Most interesting thing I’ve read lately on the 3 blogs I semi-regularly check” category, here is a highly entertaining piece from Joey Sweeney at Philebrity about his time spent working in the porn industry. Sort of.

Perfection, Inception, and Rejection: The Week That Was

A wild, wild, Spooktacular week. Steak Em Up finishes 3rd twice, Satan’s Minions (above) get a perfect score, I blow a tie breaker at O’Neals, and two new teams win for the first time ever.

We start at O’Neals, where I didn’t realize until I was announcing final scores that we had a tie. I ran over to Insert Topical Team Name Here and said “When was Dracula born?” Not knowing that it was the tiebreaker, one of them started looking it up on his phone. They were disqualified. Bad call by the ref: In a rush, I had neglected to tell them it was a tiebreaker. Savage Ear got the win. A tough loss, but the fact that they tied means they only lost one point on the JGTAI. Also getting a win on Tuesday night? The Tubular Two, whose City Tap House win was their first ever victory.

No tiebreakers needed at the Black Sheep the next night, as Satan’s Minions went 40 questions up, 40 questions down to record a perfect 120. Remarkably, after 7 years and over 350 quizzes without a single perfect game ever at the Black Sheep, we’ve had two in the month of October (Duane’s WOrld had one a few weeks ago.) It’s a funny sport.

Earlier in the night, 1022 kept their incredible hot streak going. Through September 10th, these Rendezvous regulars had won three times all season, and hadn’t won since early June. In the last 6 games, they’ve won 5 times.

Onto Thursday, where the serial killer wild card round was an instant classic (The Ghost Movie Speed Round, on the other hand, not so much. A fair amount of anger over what constitutes a ghost). And when the dust settled, the Exhausted Nihilists were the 2nd team this week that won their first ever quizzo.

Then to a packed Bards, where incredibly 4 teams finished within two points of each other. Eschaton escaped with the win. Lots of surprises in the Halloween Spooktacular. Going to be interesting to see how the standings shake down on Monday.

1022 Wins at Vous

First Place: 1022 104

2nd Place: Inglorious Barristers 95

3rd Place: The Jams 91

The Tubular Two Win at City Tap House

First Place: The Tubular Two 92

2nd Place: The Basil Cartel 81

3rd Place: L. Ron Hubbard’s Diabetics 75

The Savage Ear Wins at O’Neals

First Place: The Savage Ear 102

2nd Place: Insert Topical Team Name Here 102

3rd Place: Different Name Every Week 96

Atlantic City in the 1920s: The Real Boardwalk Empire

I’ve been watching Boardwalk Empire for the past few weeks, and I gotta say it’s the best show I’ve seen in a while. (Even better than the Jersey Shore). Started a little slow, but has quickly picked up, and the scene this past week with Al Capone bringing Jimmy those steaks was terrific. If you haven’t been watching, I highly recommend it. You can watch it On Demand if you get HBO. Anyways, I spent some of the day looking at some photos, reading some stories, and looking at some video of AC in the 1920s, and thought I’d share.

Here’s a bunch of old AC photos put together as a montage by the AC Visitors Bureau. You’ll notice plenty of the landmarks from the show.

Recently Philly Mob guru George Anastasia has gone out to Atlantic City to do a couple of shorts about Nucky Johnson. Here’s one of them.

Meanwhile, though it’s not from exactly the same time, you’ll see many of the landmarks from the show in this family video taken in 1932.

A short but informative piece in the AC Weekly about all of the entertainment that went on in AC in the 1920s. Among the nightclubs that existed back then were the Paradise Club on Illinois Avenue, which was billed as the oldest nightclub in America and the first to host “breakfast shows.” The talent was largely black (and the audience largely white), and many of the artists who performed would take their place among the greatest in history like Count Basie, Ethel Waters, Nat King Cole, Lena Horne and Duke Ellington. The Paradise later merged with A.C.’s famed Club Harlem, which was created in 1935. Babette’s was a club established in the early 1920s by singer/entertainer Blanche Babette, and featured such stars of that era as Velma and Buddy Ebsen, Rudy Vallee, the Three Stooges and Milton Berle.

A great gallery of 1920s AC photos from the NY Daily News.

All New Questions for the Final Night of the Spooktacular

The first two nights contained a perfect score, a bad call by the referee (me, at O’Neals) and a hot streak continue at the Vous. More wild action tonight at the Ugly American at 8 p.m. A great chance to get your team in the mix, and eat yourself some one dollar corn dogs. Also $2 Lagers and $3 Kenzos. Then on to the Bards at 10:15 p.m. Tonight’s questions will be very loosely based on Halloween. Expect more plays on Halloween words than anything. However, I did hear a complaint the other night that there weren’t enough serial killer questions. I will do my best to correct that tonight.

George Washington: More Politics as Usual

After watching the mockery-of-themselves attack ads on TV the last couple weeks, I started thinking: what if there had been TV 220 years ago? This is what attack ads probably would have looked like.

The Halloween Spooktacular Rolls on Tonight!

That’s right folks, gonna be great to see all of your shining faces again this week after a week off at Locust Rendezvous and Black Sheep. And what better way to reacquaint ourselves with each other than through questions about ghouls, ghosts, and horror films? Gonna be a lot of fun, and everyone gets Halloween candy! We kick it off at the Rendezvous at 6:15 p.m. Then we move to the Black Sheep at 8 p.m. Play the Spooktacular tonight…if you dare. Brawhahahaha!

Denver Starts Talking Smack Early (NSFW)

Geek Bowl isn’t until January, but that doesn’t mean ~~those idiots~~ our friends in Denver haven’t started talking trash already. Several of our regular teams are called out here. But good news, Philly. As you saw last week when a writer in San Fran dissed our city, I am a badass when it comes to flame wars. I mean, seriously, I was raised on hip-hop and pro wrestling. I can talk some s***. You can expect a heated response by early next week. It will be ruthless, and people will cry.

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