Trivia NYC/DSO Media

(This was the text of an emailer that went out this morning. Get on the TriviaNYC email list by subscribing in the box at the upper right.)

Dear bookish bombshell,Just a heads-up: tomorrow night, March 17th, the Drunken Smartass Olympics Trivia Night at Dempsey’s is taking the night off for St. Patrick’s Day. We figure it’s better to let the amateurs do their thing and not fight the wave of revellers who haven’t been out since New Year’s Eve, and who want to get their green beer & Jager on. You kids have your fun.

Tonight’s Fast 50 Trivia at Slainte is still very much on, though! If you need to get your trivia on, tonight’s your night. Come on out!

And with the extra free time this week, I’ve relaunched the TriviaNYC Podcast! Episode #27 (”Haimageddon, Crystals & Throat Yogurt”) is up at here. (Subscribe to the podcast via RSS by using this link.)

So come on out tonight, relax your mind tomorrow, and I’ll see you guys around. Grease for peace.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Dear sexy nerd,

Just a heads-up: tomorrow night, February 23rd, the Tuesday Fast 50 Trivia at Slainte will be pre-empted for a movie wrap party.

I consider this to be just one more way Hollywood is destroying America, but really, it’s just the one night, and I understand. Maybe we’ll crash it and start asking random questions of movie stars or something. (I imagine, oh, Jennifer Love Hewitt smiling transparently at some what’s-the-capital-of-France type question I spring on her and telling me drunkenly, “Now why on Earth would I need to know that.”)

In my extra free time this week, I’m planning to bring back some features that have lain dormant for the last year or so. Watch this space (or the Facebook & Twitter feeds) for more info. It’ll be good, I promise.

And the Wednesday Drunken Smartass Olympics is on as usual, so come down and get your fix at our flagship operation. We’re back next Tuesday too, so this week, kick back & watch a little ice dancing. Play some bongos, you know, chill out.

Popularity: 29% [?]

After who-knows-how-long being down, this site is back up again.

Pardon the cobwebs, as a lot has happened since the last entry. For one thing, there will soon be two separate weekly nights for your triviaing pleasure.

The Wednesday Drunken Smartass Olympics has been going great guns at Dempsey’s Pub and will of course continue apace, with all the reckless hijinks, killer audio rounds and rampant Match Game fetishism you’ve come to expect from Janet and I. It’s the flagship operation, and the one of which everyone concerned is most proud.

But starting March 23rd, there will be a brand new night as well. We’re going to call it Green Mondays, in honor of the fact that it’s happening every Monday night at Shades of Green (125 E. 15th Street, across the street from Irving Plaza, ~100 yards from Union Square). It’s a nice place, and the format will be a little different. I have some ideas.

Also, we’ve soft-pedaled this in the past, but now that I’m looking to turn pro at this, let me restate: we are available for corporate shows and private trivia functions. If your department has lost a few people and you want a relatively inexpensive team-building exercise or bonding experience, and the yearly retreat or group trip to the day spa isn’t in the budget anymore, well, we have packages that are more than reasonable and more than worth the deal. We’re highly portable and extremely adaptible; we can custom-write questions for your group if you like, and we can do it anywhere you like, from your corporate boardroom or your home’s basement to any establishment in town to a field outdoors. Whatever works. Try us. Let us surprise you.

There’s more, but that’s the beginning of it. Thanks for continuing to watch this space. Let me know if you need anything.

Popularity: 17% [?]

With the first warming up of the large hadron collier today, soon those scientists in Switzerland are going to be re-creating the big bang, just to see what happens. This smacks of those times in my childhood when I & my brother would put our hamster, Herman, in the fridge until he went into hibernation, and then pop him in the oven to “thaw him out.”

Okay, we never did that. Also, I am not just saying that for plausible deniability.

Anyway, back on topic for a second. When they warm this LHC contraption up and start introducing protons into it in the next few days, then at some point, and even the people in charge don’t know where that point is, it may actually start a similar chain reaction to the one that started the universe the last time, however many billions of years ago (sorry, 6,000 years ago, as written in Genesis). Said reaction would be irreversible, and may cause the universe as we know it to close in upon itself. And humanity, the Earth, the universe, the Obamas, the Kardashians, bacon, Michael Phelps’ posse, the Milky Way galaxy, all future orgasms you and everyone you’ve been with will ever have, and your entire collection of Slayer albums, will all cease to exist without a trace.

Life is short. The human race is doomed to become extinct at some point. It’s astounding. Time is fleeting. Come on out to trivia tonight. Your mother and I miss you terribly.

Note: I Did Not Torture Hamsters As A Child. Seriously.

= = = =

Update: Keep checking this site for updates - http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

Popularity: 27% [?]

Yeah. eviltwinclassic.blogspot.com is up.

This DSO project is the second blog I’ve really put an effort into maintaining (if you can call this “effort” and “maintaining”). In 2000, I started a blog called The Evil Twin Theory, from the name of the band I left in Toronto to move to New York. I had another blog before that, but it was the one I made mistakes on, and even the Internet Wayback Machine doesn’t have complete copies of it. Which is just as well.

So the old template was awful, because I’m not a programmer now and certainly was less of one then, but the writing itself was a lot better than I thought it would be when I cracked the seal on the stuff this weekend, so I figured I’d at least remount it at eviltwinclassic.blogspot.com.

If you’re laid up in traction or otherwise incapacitated, or if you’ve finished all the Proust & Tolstoy in the house, give it a read. I’ll poke through it and if there’s anything relevant I’ll mention it, but at least it’s up.

Popularity: 16% [?]

A bunch of things that don’t merit their own blog entry:

• I finally managed to get my grubby little mittens on tonyhightower.com. I had it for years; it was where the old blog was. Now I have to find a place to park those old entries. They go back to the Pleistocene Era. Those entries can’t all be embarrassing. Can they?

• John McCain can’t seem to complete a sentence properly, and he has about as much of a grasp of the machinations of the American economy as I do, but he’s still virtually tied with the guy who not only can speak volumes on the subject, but who has had answers for everything, be it foreign, domestic, military, policy, economic or racial, everything that’s come up in the last couple of years. Isn’t that the kind of person we want as President? Someone who, y’know, knows what they’re doing? I mean, has the player-hater complex really become that much a part of the national character?

• I am a bad person because I don’t care about a missing two-year-old. Yes, I know. I never claimed to be all-knowing, and certainly I’m nowhere near all-caring. I’m sorry, World Of News. My attention is elsewhere. Besides, I’m guessing the press is running with this because there’s footage of a cute kid with a cute (and pottymouthed! ooh!) mom, and the JonBenet Ramsey case has gone cold. Seriously, people. Unless you’re involved with the case or you live in the area, this is not an ongoing national story. This is porn. Send out the APBs and then move on. It’s not like there’s nothing else to cover.

• Although I know it probably was a copyright violation and they had been operating without an agreement with the Hasbro Corporation: yes, I’m missing Scrabulous. It was why I joined Facebook in the first place. I’m not buying yet another version of Scrabble. I have two versions of it in the house, and I haven’t cracked them in years. That application got me playing the game again. If this is just someone forcing someone’s legal hand, well, that’s fine, but I really hope they work it out. These are two smart sets of minds with two solid ideas that dovetail nicely.

• On the personal front, I’m wondering if I know how to apply for a job correctly. I keep getting told I’m either (a) overqualified or (b) hideously overqualified for every job I’ve applied for, and yet no one seems to want me around. I’m happy to commit to a job that pays me a living wage so I can maintain the trivia thing at night and write this friggin’ book. That’s the life I want. I’ll give you 40 hours a week, if you’ll let me.

• Speaking of which, I’m very excited about one of the jobs I applied for yesterday. I’m sure it’s a long shot, but I know I’d be good at it, and it would feed every other part of my life. The hardest part is trying to stay positive. And, apparently, keep writing. If you have extra get-hired vibes you could point my way, I could use them.

Popularity: 16% [?]

After trying since Thursday to upload the new audio round (not continuously, but regularly), I finally managed to get the most recent audio round up at DSOTrivia.muxtape.com.

I think I have a decent setup for it now. Every week (Thursdays, hopefully), I’ll upload that Wednesday’s 10-clip audio round, plus an 11th song that I could never use in an actual audio round, but which I either thin is cool or feel is otherwise worth the trouble.

I’ll post the answers in the comments on Tuesday. You’ll have until then to listen and work it out.

Popularity: 13% [?]

In a move that should have happened many, many years ago, I’ve finally procured http://DSOTrivia.com and directed it to point to this page.

Talk about something that was way overdue. The record label is still going to happen, I swear, but given what’s been going on the last couple of years, the trivia arm of Drunken Smartass Omnimedia has received severely short appellative shrift. This should fix that. (I’ll change the header soon.)

I’m slowly looking to reclaim a lot of old domains that I let slide through neglect and… well, mostly neglect. But this is a start.

Popularity: 7% [?]

(Note: Edited to reflect the new and way more appropriate address.)

It was never my intention to let this place go to rot (and so help me, it still isn’t), but in case you weren’t clear, I’m at heart a lazy bastard, and any opening in my day where I can sit and stare at a wall is one I’m going to take. I don’t like doing nothing all day, but man, am I ever good at it. So this last week since I left my day gig, I dropped everything but the writing of this book proposal, and even work on that has slowed down as I’ve gotten close to finishing it. I guess I’m just short on personal terror lately, but that’s gonna come back. Hell, I already feel it.

That said, I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, and it was very simple.

I wanted to figure out a way to archive some examples of the last few audio rounds, for all kinds of reasons (I want to post a few samples of all the little bits we do on Wednesdays, and there are some people who might find a pattern in the songs I pick every week, which will be a good incentive to keep making sure I don’t follow predictable patterns in the songs I pick every week), and I really like the idea of Muxtape but haven’t figured out how to use it, so in that light, the last few weeks’ worth of audio rounds are now archived at dsotrivia.muxtape.com.

(If you haven’t come out on a Wednesday and you’re thinking about it, well, here’s how it works: we ask 51 questions a week, 41 of which are regular trivia-question-type questions, and ten of which comprise the audio round, examples of which are now shown above. Give one or two of them a listen and see how you do on a given week. (For results closest to the regular Wednesday experience, listen with three or four friends, and also be drunk.))

If there’s interest in doing so, I’ll be happy to link each new audio round as I upload them to a discussion thread here. But only if I’m forced to.

See you tonight. Same bat-time, same bat-channel. Apologies for some of the questions in advance.

Popularity: 18% [?]

If you’ve been following my twitter stream or have spoken with me in the last day or two, you’ll know that I lost my job this week, which really sucks on one level, but on another seems to have opened up a door or two.

To wit: If anyone has some samples of a good book proposal they could share with me, I would really appreciate it. I have to write one this weekend, and it could be a reasonably lucrative thing (for me and for those around me) if I do it right.

After I walk out of this place tomorrow afternoon, I plan on going out with anyone who’s around and interested for two-three-nineteen drinks, and then sleeping until I wake up, and then getting back to work all weekend on this project.

There’s also a few other things I’ve been sitting on until I had some time, and well, now’s the time:

• I do want to restart the trivia podcast, but in video form. It seems to make more sense than just the audio, even though audio is what I know. I know some people who have way more expertise in this than I do, but if you have any ideas, now’s the time to chime in & let me know what you’d like to see or what you might be able to do. I have some ideas myself, but they’re not quite the kind of thing I can do by myself anymore. Frankly, that’s a jump that scares me.

• I wouldn’t mind expanding the website a little bit. We’ve been doing the (very occasional) corporate trivia gig, and I wouldn’t mind standardizing and organizing that, and there is the next album of music just sitting there, aobut 75% finished, on my multitrack recorder. I wouldn’t mind just getting it off the convyor belt, at least. Because that’s what quality is all about, right? Shoveling crap out the front door just to make room for the next thing.

• During the stretches where I don’t have a regular job, I know my discipline changes into some seriously unmanageable beast. I find I obsess over things that don’t matter while the meaningful and important parts of my life go directly to shit. I’m going to need help from you (yes, you) to keep me going. I can provide more than the same in return; I’m a sweet and thoughtful guy, and despite the fact that I seem to not be able to keep a job, my loyalty and generosity are beyond cavil. I think.

Leave a comment, or email me. Take advantage of my misfortune and current situation as much as I’m trying to. Buy me low. Sell me high.

Popularity: 15% [?]