The Invitational kicks off tonight at the Westbury, where a last place finish last week due to a Musical Theatre Round led to the round of my choice this week. Here’s the details, from quizmaster Mike Minion.

Once again, JGT put together a team to play my quizzo last week, and once again, the result was , shall we say, less than spectacular.  After all, last place is “less than spectacular”, is it not?  The upshot is that he and his cronies got to pick this week’s theme round. Being the highbrow intellectuals that they are, they chose a topic that virtually defines the literati -PRO WRESTING.  So put down your glass of merlot, pick up a PBR, and come on over to The Westbury tonight for a round of wrasslin’.   The steel-cage brain slam starts at 10:30.   For you wrestling fans, that’s when the little hand is between the 10 and the 11 and the big hand is straight down.  Oh, and make sure the sun is down, because the clock looks like that TWICE a day.  Anyway, prizes are $40 for first and $20 for second, and (as usual) there will be plenty of good beer specials.   Hope to see you there.  P.S. Don’t tell anyone, but I actually LOVE pro wrestling. But let’s just keep that between us, shall we?

The biggest Big Money Tuesday ever goes down tonight. We start at O’Neals at 8 p.m., where the winner walks with the biggest first place gift certificate on the circuit, $50. 2nd Place gets $25. Lots of parity at O’Neals, with three different winners in the last three weeks, so your team’s got just a good a shot as any to take the crown.

On to the Bards, where I have doubled the bounty on Steak Em Up. That’s right, anyone who can knock off Steak Em Up tonight walks with a $40 gift certificate and $40 cash. Action starts at 10:15 p.m. Oh, and I’d expect a beer question or two this week due to Beer Week.

As for last night, quizzo at the POPE was awesome. Packed house, fun quiz, and my first ever joker quiz. I’ll post some of the questions tomorrow. I would have done it today but I got a little too tipsy last night and had to sleep in. If you ever see me doing a shot of Jameson’s in the future, please advise me to put it down and just go the hell home. Your cooperation is appreciated in advance.

Now here is a holiday we can get behind. May 20th in Cambodia is their National Day of Hatred (also translated as “Day of Maintaining Rage”.) It makes total sense, as it is a day when intellectual Cambodians pretty much just hate on Pol Pot. However, we think that this holiday should extend to the United States. We want to kick off the celebration with a short list of things we hate, and ask that you please celebrate this holiday by posting things you hate in the comments. It’s kind of like the airing of grievances in Festivus. 

• Jose Reyes
• Celine Dion
• The movie “Step-Brothers”
• skinny jeans (on guys)
• House music
• The Fox and Hound (the bar, not the movie. We love the movie.)
• The Philadelphia Parking Authority
• Red Sox fans
• Scones
• Sean Hannity

That’s right folks, following the success of I Heart the 80s Week in January, we’re busting out a decade later, with an I Heart the 90s Week. Expect questions about O.J., Monica, Jordan, and Right Said Fred. All 90s questions, all the time, with a few surprises to keep you honest. Should be a fun one. And you all lived through it, so no whining and no excuses! And if you don’t know the 90s, don’t sweat it: I went to the Dollar Store yesterday and stocked up on last place prizes.

UPDATE: Uh, whoops. Due to various substances I ingested in the 1990s, I seem to have lost my short term memory. We did do a 90s Round in January, not an 80s round. Oh well, what the hell, let’s do it again. And this time, it’s all the 90s. 1790s, 1890s, 1990s, etc. We’ll do an 80s round next month, after I finish the “80s Project” I am working on. Btw, I am still looking for props for the 80s project if you have any.

 
Had a good discussion with some members of one of the teams at the Vous yesterday about “kids today” and decided to do a little research today on whether “kids today” are smarter than ever or destined to lead the world on the highway to hell due to their sheer stupidity. There are, needless to say, various theories on this topic. One comes from a 2007 article in the San Francisco Gate. The friend the writer mentions is a teacher.

We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon…It’s gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.

However, a recent article in the New York Times seems to think that we are smarter than ever, though acknowledging that IQ is in a large part determined by our surroundings. 

Another indication of malleability is that I.Q. has risen sharply over time. Indeed, the average I.Q. of a person in 1917 would amount to only 73 on today’s I.Q. test. Half the population of 1917 would be considered mentally retarded by today’s measurements, Professor Nisbett says.

This leads us to another professor, a man in New Zealand named James Flynn, who wrote  a book in which he explains what is commonly called the Flynn effect:

Your IQ is likely to be higher than those of your parents, and your children’s IQs is likely to be higher than yours.

“Our advantage over our ancestors is relatively uniform at all ages from the cradle to the grave,” says Flynn. Nobody knows if the gains will persist, but “there is no doubt that they dominated the 20th century and that their existence and size were quite unexpected.”

So what do you think? Do you think that mankind is getting smarter or dumber? Do you think that the generation behind us is way dumber than we are or way smarter than we are? Or are public education and IQ completely unrelated, and that those who are raised by caring parents have IQs are rising exponentially from generation to generation while those who have uneducated, absentee parents have IQs that remain stagnant from generation to generation? Interested to see what you guys think.  

RELATED: A more detailed account of this debate was in a 2003 article in Skeptic Magazine. 

This song was also turned into one of the worst covers in music history, by “Da Real One” in 1998.

There was a time in my life when I thought that Whitesnake was as cool as it got. In hindsight, nobody with hair like that should take a photo where they’re trying to look tough. Whatever, it’s time for your Monday Sweet Jam. I used to play this song and perform amazing dunks on my Nerf Hoop. Yeah, I was pretty cool.

Some of you might be wondering…what is the best day of the entire year to seduce sluts?According to our good friend Dimitri the Lover, today is the day: Bearing these keen observations in mind and integrating them with over 15 years of epidemiological slut seduction study data, Dimitri The Lover has found that THE DAY AFTER VALENTINE’S DAY is by far the best single day out of each year to seduce sluts …FORGET trying to pick up sluts  ON VALENTINE’S DAY, in that their expectations are WAY TOO UNREALISTICALLY HIGH.  However, every year on February 15th, Dimitri The Lover collects dozens of telephone numbers and books his lovemaking schedule well into the spring. And luckily this year the 15th falls on a MONDAY, so any slut that did not have herROMANTIC expectations fulfilled on the weekend will have the negative psychological effects greatly exacerbated by the impact of waking up to the dreaded MONDAY start to her work or school week, right in the middle of high season for SEASONAL AFFECTIVE DISORDER!

Often the most spiritually wounded of these ROMANTIC WALKING DEAD will mope around in a robotic state for weeks, exclaiming to their closest friends and co-workers that they have “given up on men”. This extended pathological rumination period makes them especially vulnerable to being systematically picked apart by whatDimitri The Lover sinisterly (yet lovingly) refers to as a“ROMANCE VULTURE”…Once the ROMANCE VULTURE has encircled the pre-qualified crowd, his talons armed with the most powerful set of seduction tools known to mankind, he can easily identify his prey by the stench of her ROTTING DEAD HEART. 

Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that a documentary about Dimitri is coming out soon. A new trailer for the movie is out, and it is astounding (and NSFW). Porno snowmen, and romance vultures seducing sluts. What in the hell is happening to this once proud website?

A strangely captivating short 1963 film called snow.