Quizzo at the Tradesman last week was awesome, a great space and a friendly staff. And tonight looks spectacular. Let’s get it. The quiz starts at 7 PM.
Dock Street returns at 8 PM on Wednesday. This week: tornado free, guaranteed!
Carl is back at Birra on Thursday at 8 PM. And next week we kick off our new season of the Fall Brawl! See ya this week!
As many of you know, I send out a lighthearted Friday Five newsletter each week. It’s really become a highlight of the week for me, as it encourages me to try, watch, and read new things. But I also send out an occasional VIP newsletter that’s a bit heavier on quizzo stuff. Sort of a State of the Union type thing. With several things happening, gonna send the next one of those out tomorrow. If you wanna receive it, just sign up here.
(And if you’ve signed up for either newsletter but haven’t been receiving them, be sure to check your promotions folder. Sometimes this kinda stuff lands there. Move it over to your main folder.)
We’re back, baby, and we’re better than ever!* Fall Brawl II kicks off on September 13th, and we can’t wait to see you nerds onscreen again. Sign-ups begin today! You can register here. We had a whopping 50 teams vie for the title last year, and despite our ever-so-slight return to “normal”, we know there are at least a few dozen who still prefer the virtual format. For the others of you who have returned to live quizzing, worry not….you’ll have the opportunity to do both.
For those unfamiliar- your team plays weekly in a private 45-minute Zoom session with a JGT-certified host, giving you a chance to interact with friends near and far while playing your favorite brand of trivia. Sessions are available Mon-Thurs between 7 and 10:45 PM Eastern.
Other details-
SCHEDULE: Season starts the week of September 13th. 8-week regular season followed by 2 weeks of playoffs/consolation games. 9 games guaranteed to all teams.
LEAGUE FORMAT: Depending on how many teams we end up with, it’ll either be broken into divisions with “head-to-head” matchups each week, or kept as an overall seeding format with a tournament bracket for the playoffs.
PRICE: $425 per team, with $25 of that going to charity (PPERC). $200 deposit due by 9/13, balance due by 10/4.
Sign up today! See you in September!
*Possibly, no guarantees
We kick off a new quiz on Tuesday night at 7 PM! We’ll be outdoors at Tradesman’s, a BBQ, bourbon and beer bar at 13th and Chestnut. Excited to start a new quiz, and happy to be outdoors. That makes our current schedule as follows:
TUESDAY
WEDNESDAY
THURSDAY
We raised over $150 for kids school uniforms at quizzo last night, and we’re back at it tonight!
Carl is back at Birra at 8 PM, and we’re bringing back the 50-50 raffle for a great cause. As most of you know, we’re always doing things to raise money for PPERHC, who work tirelessly with Philly’s most vulnerable residents. Tonight we’ll be raising money to help kids get new school uniforms. $5 a ticket, venmo accepted, winner gets half.
Want to help and can’t make quizzo? Another thing that would be a huge help would be to buy the kids some school supplies. To do so, just order something off of this wish list. It can be one pack of pencils, it can be 10 bookbags. Whatever makes sense for you. Then have it mailed to:
PPEHRC
1505 West Allegheny Ave.
Philadelphia, PA 19132
Thank you, and see ya tonight!
On June 8th, 2007, a wild storm blew into Denver while the Phillies were playing the Colorado Rockies.
The Rockies grounds crew tried to put the tarp down, but the wind was gusting uncontrollably, and the tarp flipped over and started whipping wildly, the men getting knocked around by it. Then suddenly the Phillies team came galloping out of the dugout, grabbing the corners of the tarp, allowing the grounds crew members who were stuck under it to escape, and making it possible for the crew to get things back under control. (You can see the video here).
The display showed them not to be out of touch wealthy athletes, but human beings rushing to help their fellow man in need. And when the team got hot later that season, and made a furious run to overtake the Mets and win the division, it was made all the sweeter by the fact that we really, really liked these guys.
The Phillies are once again in the mix with the Mets for the Division, but it’s almost impossible to imagine this year’s team lifting a finger to help anyone. Marcus Hayes reported a few weeks ago that about half of the 2021 Phillies were vaccinated, a jaw-droppingly pathetic number that meant the Phillies lagged behind essentially every other team in Major League Baseball. As Matt Gelb wrote in the Athletic:
“…there is a contingent of Phillies players who have hardline stances against taking the vaccine no matter how much management encourages the shot.”
A hardline stance against helping to lower the r0 number that will in turn help the fans whose support pays their enormous salaries. A hardline stance against decidedly overwhelming science, a hardline stance for know-nothingism. It is depressingly dumb and stunningly selfish, this ignorant insistence to treat the people who pay to come to the games like garbage. Their excuses just made it worse. Aaron Nola, the team’s star pitcher, said that not getting vaccinated was a “personal decision” (which was supported by Joe Girardi). Nonsense. Choosing to not get vaccinated is as “personal” as sending your kid to school with the measles or holding up a 7-11. It is reckless, it is anti-social, and it is potentially deadly. The Phillies don’t care.
There is a dark humor to the fact that the Phillies started winning, for basically the first time in a decade, almost immediately after the vaccine story broke. And it leads us to our current and rather unique conundrum. After a year in which we sacrificed for each other, a year in which we stayed out of the ballpark, what could be better than being together and experiencing the communal joy inherent in rooting for America’s Pasttime together? But how can we do so when the very team we’re rooting for is so anti-social that that they have no interest in our health? How can we root for a team that is quite willing to lose players down the stretch to COVID, making it clear that they are losers who would rather blow the division than get a simple shot in their arms? We root for our athletes to win, and our team has flat out declared that they don’t care about winning, they only care about the pseudo-scientific nonsense that they read in memes.
One of the lessons we should have learned in 2020 was that role models tend to work in hospitals, not on baseball diamonds. As much as I love baseball (and I do), at the end of the day these men get paid a lot of money to excel at something rather arbitrary, and perhaps expecting them to do so much as lifting a finger otherwise is asking too much. Nonetheless, baseball players, like all people, are capable of showing great displays of humanity. The 2007 team did that, running onto the field in a storm to save the day. When the proverbial winds started howling in 2021, the Phillies did the opposite. When the opportunity came to help their fellow man, they did less than nothing.
So I’ll watch the games sporadically, and I suppose I’ll still cheer for the Mudville 9, albeit with less enthusiasm than I did before. Watching them tank the past two nights to the worse team in baseball while in the midst of a division race sure doesn’t carry the sting it would have before I knew how much they hated their fans.
Regardless of what they do on the field for the final 40 games, their legacy is now secure. When the time came to be a part of the community in the midst of the greatest challenge to America in our lifetimes, they failed. Miserably. They are simply mercenaries in baseball uniforms, men paid to wear the letter P on their hats. The Philadelphia Phillies are absolutely, positively, not one of us.
We had a question at quizzo last week, “Who did Prince Felix Yuspov kill in 1916?” The answer was Grigori Rasputin, and he’s one of my favorite figures of the 20th century. The fact that such a bizarre charlatan could completely (and largely inadvertently) change the history of the world never fails to boggle my mind. This week on the Worthless Knowledge podcast, Nat and I dug into Rasputin’s past, and had some fun with it as well. Like when Nat asked me if I had ever been offered sexual favors for quizzo answers, and what a spectacular scandal would ensue if I answered “Yes.” If you enjoy the pod, please rate it. If you love it, please leave a review. Thanks!
The Phoenix are not going to the playoffs this year. So this, then, is essentially our playoff game, against the New York Empire. Speaking personally, I don’t like the New York Empire. They’re arrogant, they’re obnoxious, and they were impossible to work with when we had to reschedule this game. And you know what else? I like not liking them. I like seeing them as our rivals. I like the fact that this game is more than just another frisbee game. This is our Cowboys game, the one that will determine if we can call the season a “success”.
And it’s gonna be damn fun. It’s Taco Night, and we’ll have delicious tacos from Tacos Los Catrines, mariachi singer El Mau, and a halftime pinata for the kids. Tickets are extremely reasonable ($12 ahead of time, $14 at the door) and the action is fast paced and fun. If you haven’t been to a game yet, come to this one. We need a big and loud crowd if we’ve got any hope of beating New York. Doors at 6, game at 7. See ya Friday night!
We start on Wednesday, with a quiz in Wayne at 7:30 and the weekly Dock Street quiz (hosted by Carl) at 8 PM. The Wayne quiz has been a hit. On to Birra on Thursday at 8 PM. (I’ll be hosting at the Fitler Club). Next week I’m on vacation, but Carl will be rocking out at Dock Street and Birra.
I am still trying to line up two more weekly quizzes, and have some very interesting coals in the fire, but TBH the extreme shortage of staff at pretty much every bar in the city is a killer for quizzo. I’m hoping that the fall will bring some semblance of normalcy to the situation. BUT even if it doesn’t, we’ve got some good news; Fall Brawl II is coming in September. We’ll have details coming soon, but a similar deal to last year. Divisions, head to head matchups, the whole works. I’m getting excited about it. It’s like fantasy football except we’re the players.
And of course we are always available for birthday parties, wedding parties, and special events, either virtual or in person. Click here to learn more.
Hope to see ya this week!
Been doing a lot of podcasting lately. We’ve taken a bit of a break from The Philly Blunt but are planning to launch a new season in September. However, I actually talked to Chip twice last week, had some fun with Nat talking about a question from our quizzo two weeks ago, and had a great time talking to Upton Bell, son of Eagles founder Bert Bell.
Went on Chip’s “I Love Rock n Roll” show to discuss Phil Spector. This was a lot of fun. I sorta knew who Spector was, but mostly I just knew that he made some great music and then showed up for his murder trial with a giant afro. Turns out he was an awful, awful guy. A genius but a psycho too.
I also went on Chip’s Junk Miles show last week to talk about my bizarre career. From dolphin training to quizzo to t-shirts to ultimate frisbee. This is the most in depth interview I’ve ever done about this stuff, so if you wanna know how what dolphin training was like or how I stumbled into quizzo, this is worth a listen.
Nat and I have started back on our Worthless Knowledge podcast, where we do a deep dive on a quizzo question each week. For our latest one we talked about the only man to win a gold medal in both the Summer and Winter Olympics. Eddie Eagan grew up poor, married into the Colgate family, boxed his way around the world, and decided on a whim to join the 1932 Olympic bobsled team. Crazy story.
Over at Shibe, I had the honor of sitting down with Upton Bell, the son of Eagles founder Burt Bell. This was a rollicking good time, as Upton had stories for days about the early days of the league. One fun fact we learned; it was really his mother, a vaudeville star, who made the Eagles a reality moreso than his father.
