JGT Power Rankings for Week of November 1st

After the wildest week in JGT quizzo history, things are all sorts of insane. Not a single team in last week’s Top 12 won this week, and only four of them even finished in the top 3. Here are the latest rankings.

1. Vacant. There simply is no-one to put here after last week. All of our top teams should be happy about this, as the position is obviously cursed. The Top ranked team has lost every single week following their #1 ranking so far.

2. L. Ron Hubbard’s Diabetics. (Ugly American) No-way they can keep the title after losing by 9 points, but their 2nd place finish at least keeps them in 2nd on the big board. Last week: #1

3. Duane’s World. (Black Sheep) Hard to believe that a 3rd place finish could move a team up in the rankings, but compared to how our other perennial champs did, it was a major victory. Last week: #4

4. Madame Butterface (The Vous). Came into the Vous on Wednesday and sent a message at our toughest bar, loud and clear. Was it a flash in the pan, or is this team for real? We’ll find out soon enough. Last week: NR

5. Wet Bandits. (O’Neals). Dominate at O’Neals with a 116. As with all of the teams this week, hard to know if they’re for real or all about the 2 G’s. Last week: NR

6. Million Dollar Robot Baby (City Tap House). Stay put in the rankings thanks to a mere 8-point loss and 2nd place finish at CTH. Last week: #6

7. Steak Em Up (Bards). Not even a Top 3 finish. They get in on name recognition alone. Last week: #3

8. Do It Live (City Tap House). Who are they? Why are they here? I have no idea, but I’d like to see them play again to see if there is a new powerhouse at CTH. Last week: NR

9. The Jams (Rendezvous). Normally a 109 has you closer to the top of the list. This week, it just got the Jams a 7 point loss. Last week: #11

10. That’s Just How Quizzo Go. (Black Sheep). That’s just how quizzo went last week. A huge win at the Sheep. Last week: NR

11. Queen of Hearts is a Nice Piece of Ace (Bards). Love teams like this. Been playing forever, never took home top prize, and finally on one night, all of the stars aligned and they win at a packed bar. Awesome. Last week: NR

12. Mustard Gives Me Gas (Ugly American). Look damn impressive, a 3-player team knocking off the #1 Diabetics. On a normal week, they’d be even higher, but last week wasn’t a normal week. Last week: NR

13. We Got Fracked (North Star). Another team with its first ever win after playing for a long time, they take home the trophy at the North Star bar and move into our power rankings for the first time ever. Will #13 be lucky for Fracked? Last week: NR

TV and Movie Week

After the week of sheer insanity that was “2000s Week”, we’ll see if things come back down to earth this week with TV and Movie Week. Of course, this covers a ton of ground, from the Lumiere Brothers to Paranormal Activity 3, from Vladimir Zworkyin to 3 1/2 Men. So it should be interesting to see how it shakes out. Action starts at O’Neals tonight at 8 p.m. We move to City Tap House at 10:15 p.m. $50 gift certificate for the winner at O’Neals, and definitely the best place to get a win right now. $100 gift certificate for the winners at City tap House. Hope to see ya tonight!

That’s So Raven: the Bird that Inspired Edgar Allan and an Interview with the Poe Guy

I did a piece for the Philly Post today (Philly Mag’s daily blog) about the bird that inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. It’s a pretty cool piece. Check it out, and if you dig it, please spread the word by clicking recommend at the top of it or retweeting it. Thanks!

Doing this piece gave me a chance to interview Edward Pettit (above), the self proclaimed “Philly Poe Guy” that I mention in the piece. There was a lot of cool stuff in the interview that didn’t really work itself into the fairly narrow scope of the piece, but I thought some of you might find it interesting, so I’m going to include a bit of it here.

JGT: Poe met with Dickens for a short while in Philadelphia, in 1842 at the US Hotel. What did they talk about?

PETTIT: They had a lot in common to talk about regarding copywrite. The laws were so loose, and the authors wanted their money. And of course, Poe is looking for a favor. He wants Dickens to talk to publishers in England and try to get published over there. Dickens tried and failed. That was probably Poe’s real motive for talking to Dickens.

JGT: Was Poe the kind of guy who wrote in a fury, or did he sort of write as it came to him?

PETTIT: He was simply writing all of the time. We know he had a problem with drinking, but there is no way he was an alcoholic. He was writing every single day. If he was a total drunk, he could not have written as much as he did. Not in a maniacal fury, just doggedly pursuing it every day. Just writing. He sits down every day, and works and corrects things he wrote.

JGT: Had his wife gotten ill by the time he spoke with Dickens? (Poe’s wife, Virginia Clemm Poe, contracted TB in 1842 and died of it in 1847).

PETTIT: She had just become ill. The poetical topic in the world is the death of a beautiful woman. His mother ides when he’s young. His foster mother dies of tuberculosis. His wife comes down with TB and dies. If you’re a woman and Poe loves you, you’re doomed. That really affects what he writes. You can see all these beautiful young women in his stories dying.

They had a very successful, very loving marriage. He devoted his life trying to take care of her.

JGT: You are working on a book about how Philadelphia shaped Poe’s works. How did Philly affect Poe?

PETTIT: I believe the time he spent in Philadelphia was crucial. He would not have written some of his greatest works had he not been in Philadelphia. There was a literary culture here that I call Philadelphia gothic. People talk about American gothic, well gothic culture is from Philadelphia. Poe is very aware of Charles Brockton Brown. Great novel called Weiland. Real dark, nasty stories. They are the first dark gothic works in America. European gothic tradition is all about aristocrats, the supernatural, and ancestral curses. In American gothic you don’t have to worry about the spirits of some ancestor coming to murder you, you have to worry about your crazy husband killing you, or the serial killer next door. There are more American gothic works published in Philadelphia than anywhere else in America.

Poe is writing Gothic stories before coming to Phialdelphia in the European tradition. All of a sudden, Poe lives in Philly for about a year or two, and his stories begin to change. They are no longer supernatural , the threat could be domestic. Even William Wilson, the threat comes from within the guys own self. Had he settled in New York, where he went to after Philly, I don’t think he would have started in this strain. That tradition wasn’t up there in New York. It’s here in Philadelphia.

9th Annual Halloween Spooktacular Halloween Night!

One night only, JGT is bustin out his annual Halloween spooktacular, the oldest tradition in the JGT empire. It’s gonna be at North Star bar on Halloween night, October 31st. If you want to play, and still want to play later in the week, feel free. All questions will be about demons, murder, and mayhem. And of course as always a few about Edgar Allan Poe. Hope to see ya at the North Star at 7 p.m. Gonna be a fun way to spend Halloween without almost getting your ass kicked by a bunch of douchebags dressed up like a SWAT team.

Good News/Bad News

The good news is that we quite possibly just had our wildest week of quizzo ever. I don’t ever remember every single top team at every single bar losing on the same week, and we’ve definitely never had this many teams who have played for a while and never won before all win on the same week. Add to that that every bar was packed and it was honestly one of the best weeks of quizzo I can ever remember hosting.

The bad news is that I upgraded my phone on Thursday, and when I did so, it somehow erased my photos from Tuesday and Wednesday. Yeah, I’m a jerk. However, as long as your team shows up at quizzo next week I will get your photo and post it on the site. I promise. Furthermore, your team will be included in the power rankings this week. So sorry about the screw up. Thanks -jgt

The Original iPod…in 1979

We had a question at quizzo this week about a device that was invented in 2001 and had sold 300 million copies, but which looked eerily similar to a device that was invented in 1979 by Kane Kramer. The answer is of course the iPod. Here’s a bit of the backstory to that question.

You fans of The Wire surely remember the scene where DeAngelo explains that the guy who invented the Chicken Nugget isn’t rich, but working in a basement for Mr. McDonald for minimum wage. Well, his tale of Mr. Nugget is similar to that of Kane Kramer. Kramer was the 23 year old inventor who, in 1979, came up with the concept of the mp3 player. In fact, he built a working model at that time. But like the computer and Charles Babbage, there was very little technology at the time to support his invention. He could have stored 3.5 minutes of music on the device. He was unable to get the money keep his patent, which Apple later scooped up and used to help create their iPod. Kramer is none the richer, despite the fact that he’s the father of one of the most popular devices of the past decade. Here’s some more info from Wired.com:

Kramer came up with the idea for a pocket-sized, portable solid state music player with a friend, James Campbell. Kramer was 23, Campbell 21. The IXI System had a display screen and buttons for four-way navigation. In a report presented to investors in 1979, the IXI was described as being the size of a cigarette packet. Is this sounding familiar yet?

Back in 1979, a memory chip would store a paltry three and a half minutes of music. Kramer fully expected this to improve, and confidently foresaw a market for reliable, high quality digital music players which would be popular with both consumers and the record labels. It could actually be argued that he was still ahead of Apple after the firat iPod went on sale — that had a hard drive and Kramer had moved onto flash memory years earlier.

Much has been made of Apple somehow “stealing” the technology. But the patent did what all patents do, whether used or not. It lapsed, and whether Apple took the idea from there or from somewhere else, it was all perfectly legitimate. In fact, when Apple was suing (and counter-sued by) Burst.com in 2006 it cited the invention as “prior art” to dispute Burst’s patents. Apple even called Kramer in to give evidence.

But anyone can dream up a magic futuristic gadget. That’s where James Campbell came in. Campbell was an electronics whizz and between them the men came up with four prototypes. According to Kramer’s website, a fifth, pre-production unit actually went on sale at the APRS exhibition at Earls Court, London.

Here’s some more cool stuff from Kramer’s pitch to potential investors. This was written in 1979:

Record albums and/or singles issued by recording companies are fed in digital form into a computerised Central Data Bank. This data bank is connected by telephone lines to all retailers. The computer holds this digital information and upon receipt of coded instructions from retailers terminal, will transmit the requested music instantaneously to the terminal, where it is then programmed onto a blank IXI CHIP. It calculates and bills the retailers account, splits the relative apportionments of PRS, Artists Royalties, writers and record companies share, all in a matter of seconds.