Welcome Spring with a quiz

Tuesday, March 9, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: COMPARATIVE RELIGION 101

Wednesday, March 10, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: TERRIBLE PEOPLE

Thursday, March 11
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
THE BAR IS CLOSED FOR SPRING BREAK; SEE YOU NEXT WEEK!

Fear and loathing of the Academy Awards

I generally pay a small amount of attention to the Oscars because 90% of what Hollywood craps out is lousy and I usually haven't seen more than one or two nominated films in any given year. Of course doing this job I have my head in the Oscars section of the almanac all the time, so I always catch up to who won what a year or two later. AA questions make for good trivia questions because they have definitive answers, and there's a certain level of movie fame implicit in an Oscar. It's hard for anyone to complain that I'm going too obscure if a movie won something.

I expected an oversized suckfest this year because I expected Avatar to win 63 awards, including Best Picture Titled Avatar, based in the size of the budget and the take. I had no intention of seeing Avatar and I still haven't. The initial turn-off was the constant commercials ruining the Phillies' playoff run, most irritatingly the attempt to tie the movie in directly with MLB literally while the games were being played. Next was the CGI-based nature of the movie. CGI still sucks and still looks like a bad cartoon. Give me Ray Harryhausen any day. Finally, I love good sci-fi... but good sci-fi is story-driven and usually contains some powerful parables about present-day Earth. Retooling the condescending Dances with Wolves story in space is not good storytelling. They spent $500 million on special effects and seem to have left the plot to whoever would work for tips.

Decent sci-fi starts with solid sci, which is to say that some of the presumptions in the film should make sense. Among the things that don't make sense in this film are creatures that move by flapping their wings flying in between asteroids held in place by a relative lack of gravity. Huh?

Much was made of the movie having created a language for the aliens. All I have to say to that is Klaatu barada nikto. Hasn't Star Trek been doing this since the mid-'60s as well?

Suffice it to say I wanted just about anything to bump Avatar from center stage. Unfortunately, just about anything did. The Hurt Locker is another film I wanted to avoid, and did. Any war movie that focuses on the invading occupier to the point that the people who live in the wartorn land are a mixture of afterthought and nuisance is a highly misleading piece of shit. Add to this that the movie was made while the war is still ongoing, and an apparently conscious decision was made to avoid any historicality by not attempting to provide any context for why the invaders are there, or why the locals are trying to kill them with IEDs to begin with... well, at that point, the filmmakers are pretty much in league with Satan. Over at Rotten Tomatoes, THL got 97% positive reviews, the other 3% of the reviewers questioning how it could be possible to make a movie ostensibly about the Iraq war which could have been set in a SWAT unit back home for all it said about Iraq. A couple of reviewers noted that the only social impact of the movie would be as a more subtle than usual "men jus' doin' their job" Pentagon tool for recruitment. "Liberal" Hollywood does it again!

You could tell that the screenplay was from an embedded "journalist." The plain fact of the matter is that it's a lot more dangerous to be an 10 year old kid in Iraq than it is to be an American disposing IEDs there (IEDs which, incidentally, probably wouldn't be there if you weren't). Who has potable water, nutritious and clean food, free medical care, body armor, military training, all the advantages of modern technology and is backed by a force of 200,000+? And who has none of those things and has to deal with a religious war backed by American bribery? Make a movie about that kid, you'll deserve an Oscar. Make an Army recruitment commercial, you deserve a contract for a detergent commercial or an ambulance chaser or used car dealer, whatever comes down the pipe next.

Apparently now too we have the pseudo-liberal bait and switch in which a woman is awarded an Oscar because she's not only a woman but the ex-wife of the guy with the blockbuster film. Giving her an award for this is somehow supposed to be a victory for all women, although I see it as setting women back a few decades. Alimony awards... literally? Ironically among the few negative reviews a couple noted that there were no female members of the military depicted in the film and there was no indication by that nor anything else that a woman was in charge of the movie and brought any new perspective to the genre. That the impact of the war on Iraqi women - far more severe than that on American men - went completely ignored to the point of invisibility is so obvious that so far as I know no one else has bothered stating that explicitly.

The movie was praised for the action sequences if nothing else. According to Iraq combat vets, those were laughably unrealistic.

Special revulsion is reserved for Precious, a film which African-American social critic Ishmael Reed is getting pounded for correctly having criticized as a psychological assault. Only American
pseudo-"liberals" - i.e., people who think that electing a half-African man for a "change" to suck off Wall Street and ramp up the war budget for four years is somehow progressive - could smugly congratulate themselves for enjoying a film depicting two morbidly obese welfare recipients getting dicked over literally and figuratively by brutal sex-crazed Sambo, and then on top of that congratulate themselves specifically for being so damn compassionate.

Reed points out that there isn't any particular pandemic of daddy-rape in the black community, and that the film would get praised for "bringing attention" to a fake crisis involving black men not being able to hold back from daughter-fucking is kinda sick. He points out that what we actually have is one instance of this, and that instance is purely fictional. Not a good base for social policy. I mean, there have been five Chucky movies and where's the outcry against possessed murder dollies? I demand to know!

Things got more perverse when uni-nomenclatured Mo'Nique - how's that name for breaking stereotypes... and am I supposed to pronounce the apostrophe as a glottal stop? - invoked Hattie McDaniel's name and "what she had to endure." According to Ms. McDaniel, she'd rather have played a maid for $7000 a week than been a maid for $7 a week. The one racial incident that she seems to have suffered was being barred from the Atlanta premier of Gone with the Wind, and when Clark Gable offered to boycott the premier in protest she insisted he go.

McDaniel was a resourceful daughter of slaves who actually worked as a maid in the early years of the Great Depression, and was able to have a four-decade showbiz career, a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1939, a US postage stamp in 2006 (consider you need to be dead for a decade to get one, and the USPS wasn't doing actors 50 years ago when she died... this isn't as delayed as it reads at first glance), her own radio and TV shows and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. That's what the woman "had to endure." How is playing a maid worse than being one? And what's the shame in being a working person?

Ironically southern audiences were scandalized by the fact that she played sassy, disrespectful
maids who were deemed too familar with the white stars of the film. This was pretty much the most dignified work a black actress could get at the time. I say this is ironic because the black family depicted in Precious may as well have come out of a KKK newsletter comic strip, and seems to me to do far more harm to the majority image of black folks in America than the maid thing.

In this case it's the condescending pseudo-liberal notion of class problems actually being race problems. America loves to talk about race - we especially like to claim we never talk about race - because the "solution" is for individuals to "open their minds" and "be nice" and "have a positive mental attitude." Somehow poor people get more responsibility in this scenario! Families like the one depicted have class problems, which would require a retooling of government, business, tax and social priorities, and would require people like rich Hollwood fucks to lose many of their privileges. Thus we'll keep the proles talking about race and rapey black men, and keep voting for California's suicidal property tax breaks for billionaires.

Mo'Nique made the stunning claim that the Oscar was a triumph of substance over "politics", as if every decision made by the voting members of the Academy isn't exactly just that. Presumably her performance (as a racial stereotype no less) was so awesome that racism could be the only way she would have lost..? Is that seriously what she was saying? If I were up for that award too I'd tell her to go fuck herself.

The Oscars have become all about pseudo-liberals assuaging guilt by awarding themselves for playing the roles of other people with serious problems. The problems themselves go unsolved.

In an episode of the hilarious British comedy Extras, Ricky Gervais and Kate Winslet have a great little interlude stating that Holocaust films get you Oscars.


Needless to say, Winset later did do a Holocaust film and won an Oscar for it. Nazi depictions are best for Best Supporting Actor Oscars, as we saw again last night. The moment I saw the nominated documentary short subjects clips, I figured the one with the African in a wheelchair was the winner, because African + wheelchair = Oscar. You'd need something on the order of a breast cancer + Holocaust survivor + lesbian to trump that one. Of course the documentary maker isn't solving the problem and for the most part isn't even addressing the structural problems of African poverty in a world economy... but hey, their career is taking off. Make a film about a wheelchair in Zimbabwe (and make no mistake, the film was all about the wheelchair and not the person in it), win an Oscar. Zimbabwe itself remains fucked.

I mention all of this because of Mo'Nique's farcical assertion that "politics was left out" of giving her an award. Was politics left out of calling Morgan Freeman (who I still think of as Easy Reader) the lead actor in a movie in which Matt Damon was clearly the lead, and Freeman played a supporting role? If Freeman played anyone other than Nelson Mandela, would that have happened? This coming from a bunch of movie studios that probably had money invested in Krugerrands until 1985.


A country whose dream factory can't crank out better than this is on the shitslide to being the next Britain, a class-divided post-colonial has-been state filled with a decaying terrible history, misremembered as a charming, fun empire for foreign tourists. "See you at the movies... save me the aisle seat!"

Removed once again from the Wikipedia "Quizzo" entry... and self-reinstated

For about the fifth time in the past couple of years, the link to this URL in the External Links section of the Wikipedia entry for quizzo was removed. I'm usually targeted for removal by the National Trivia Association because I'm the only web presence who periodically points out that the NTA is not national, is not an association, and sucks at generating trivia.

I check once every few months and, when I remember to do so, the link to this blog is usually missing. This time I caught it after a week, but sometimes the link goes missing for months. I simply don't have the kind of time to undo the NTA's douchebaggery that they have to enact it. The high irony here is that the current, coherent entry with correct spelling and full English-language sentences you see today was largely my work. If any of you folks are Wiki-regulars, I'd appreciate the restoration of the link to here if you check in on "Quizzo" every now and again. QuizmasterChris does exist here in the city where American quizzo started, I have maintained this blog for 3 years, I have played and/or hosted the game regularly in this city since 1996 and goddamn it, I have the tiniest of promotional links here due.

March into the future with a quiz

Tuesday, March 2, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: 1990s MOVIES

Wednesday, March 3, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: MARINE LIFE

Thursday, March 4, 9pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
Subject Round: MOVIES OF THE DECADE WE NEVER CAME TO AN AGREEMENT ABOUT NAMING, 2000-2009

Be a mind-sticker

Hey ladies, enjoy this self-image-destroying Tab commercial from c. 1970.

Bring a friend or relative to a quiz this week

Tuesday, February 23, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: MONEY MONEY MONEY

Wednesday, February 24, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: CARS

Thursday, February 25, 9pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
Subject Round: CARTOONS

Slack off with a quiz this week

Tuesday, February 16, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: FEBRUARY HISTORICAL EVENTS

Wednesday, February 17, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: COUNTRIES THAT AREN'T THERE ANYMORE

Thursday, February 18, 9pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
Subject Round: BIRTHDAY TRIVIA

We're going to try and do all of the quizzes this week regardless of weather

Tuesday, February 9, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: BEGINS WITH 'B'

Wednesday, February 10, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: ALL THINGS SNOW-RELATED

Thursday, February 11, 9pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
Subject Round: NEW JERSEY

My Super Bowl prediction was off by one point...

... and, er, off by one team.

Congrats to the Saints. I was hoping they'd win but obviously didn't see them pulling it off.

The one downside was Jeremy Shockey winning the SB. I really can't stand that d-bag.

Is it just me, or did the commercials bite the proverbial large one this year? The best I recall was the Betty White/Abe Vigoda (still alive!) bit. About 20 tied for worst, including a good 15 or so which tried to convince me that it's tough to be a man, and the best route to manhood would be through maintaining my testosterone-fueled individuality, which is done by consuming the products I'm instructed to while literally - in two consecutive commercials - wearing pants when so many others choose not to do so. Talking babies: unfunny, kinda creepy. Babies talking about their stockbrokers: unfunny, make me want to import shake-prone British nannies by the boatload. Where's Sudden Infant Death Syndrome when you need it?

Quizmasterchris' Super Bowl pick

You read it here first, folks.

I would like to see the Saints win their first Super Bowl, what with the team never having won one, what with the post-Hurricane Katrina mess and seeing as they are an NFC team.

On top of this, the Colts franchise did win a Super Bowl pretty recently, and the team did move out of Baltimore in the middle of the night, which is about as terrible a thing as a franchise can do to a fanbase.

All that said, Quizmasterchris peers into the future and sees:

Indianapolis 30, New Orleans 17

Feel free to bet your grandchildren's life savings on that. You could do far worse, you could invest it with an American commercial bank...

Must to enjoy!

Treat the lady of the house to a night out at a quiz!

Tuesday, February 2, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: SIT-COM FAMILIES

Wednesday, February 3, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: THE 1920s

Thursday, February 4, 9pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
Subject Round: 20th CENTURY SCANDALS

Pudding Pudding Pudding Pudding Giga Pudding!!!

Hey Sunshine, it's this week's quiz schedule!

Tuesday, January 26, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: CLASSICAL MUSIC

Wednesday, January 27, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: THE PSYCHEDELIC PSIXTIES

Thursday, January 28, 9pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
No quiz this week so that the bar can have another darn snowboarding promotional event. See you next Thursday.

Blog hits 40,000 visitors

So it looks like we've hit the 40,000 visitor mark. That's over 40,000 distinct IP addresses regardless of the number of visits, which is some multiple of that higher. Thanks for your continued support the past few years.

Hits have come in from more than 130 countries and territories. It took me a few weeks to even engage a counter, so the numbers are even a bit higher than that.

Quiz returns to The Draught Horse this week; general schedule for the week below

Tuesday, January 18, 9:00pm
El Camino Real
1040 N. 2nd St.
(2nd St. below Girard Ave.)
Subject Round: FAMOUS FIRST LINES

Wednesday, January 19, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.
Subject Round: MYSTERIES (AS IN THE FICTION VARIETY)

Thursday, January 20, 9pm
The Draught Horse
Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore Ave.
(Temple University campus)
Subject Round: 2009: YEAR IN REVIEW

South Philly Review prints a correction

This week's edition of the South Philly Review came out this week, and they printed a correction on my response to last week's 'person on the street' interview. Good.

It's always worth it to talk back to the media. The idea isn't just to correct the past record, but more vital it might make the writers and editors think a little harder about the consequences of what gets printed, why and how.

More on the background of Haiti's troubles

Political scribe Ashley Smith has written a great brief synopsis of Haiti's sad recent history, and direct US involvement in it. Below find the meat of that piece.

For a fuller understanding I'd highly recommend reading up on the IMF/World Bank system and how rolling Third World debt essentially transferred wealth equivalent to six Marshall Plans from the poor countries to the richer ones. Great places to start would be the books of Graham Hancock and Susan George.

Remember to check out the post immediately below to donate a little something to the Haitian relief effort. Obama pledged $100 million over an unspecified period to some sort of relief effort from the US, but I imagine most of those funds are going to be spent in federal contracts for American businesses and consultants; that should in no way be accounted as a $100M transfer of wealth from here to there. Keep in mind also that we're spending 7400 times that on next fiscal year's wars. As is always the case when these things happen, individual American donations will dwarf official aid. In this case it'll just take 10 million people giving $10 each. In fact Angelina Jolie just pledged $1 million bucks all by herself.
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"The media coverage of the earthquake is marked by an almost complete divorce of the disaster from the social and political history of Haiti," Canadian Haiti Solidarity Activist Yves Engler said in an interview. "They repeatedly state that the government was completely unprepared to deal with the crisis. This is true. But they left out why."

Why were 60 percent of the buildings in Port-au-Prince shoddily constructed and unsafe in normal circumstances, according to the city's mayor? Why are there no building regulations in a city that sits on a fault line? Why has Port-au-Prince swelled from a small town of 50,000 in the 1950s to a population of 2 million desperately poor people today? Why was the state completely overwhelmed by the disaster?

To understand these facts, we have to look at a second fault line--U.S. imperial policy toward Haiti. The U.S. government, the UN, and other powers have aided the Haitian elite in subjecting the country to neoliberal economic plans that have impoverished the masses, deforested the land, wrecked the infrastructure and incapacitated the government.

The fault line of U.S. imperialism interacted with the geological one to turn the natural disaster into a social catastrophe.

During the Cold War, the U.S. supported the dictatorships of Papa Doc Duvalier and then Baby Doc Duvalier - which ruled the country from 1957 to 1986 - as an anti-communist counter-weight to Castro's Cuba nearby.

Under guidance from Washington, Baby Doc Duvalier opened the Haitian economy up to U.S. capital in the 1970s and 1980s. Floods of U.S. agricultural imports destroyed peasant agriculture. As a result, hundred of thousands of people flocked to the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince to labor for pitifully low wages in sweatshops located in U.S. export processing zones.

In the 1980s, masses of Haitians rose up to drive the Duvaliers from power--later, they elected reformer Jean-Bertrand Aristide to be president on a platform of land reform, aid to peasants, reforestation, investment in infrastructure for the people, and increased wages and union rights for sweatshop workers.

The U.S. in turn backed a coup that drove Aristide from power in 1991. Eventually, the elected president was restored to power in 1994 when Bill Clinton sent U.S. troops to the island--but on the condition that he implement the U.S. neoliberal plan--which Haitians called the "plan of death."

Aristide resisted parts of the U.S. program for Haiti, but implemented other provisions, undermining his hoped-for reforms. Eventually, though, the U.S. grew impatient with Aristide's failure to obey completely, especially when he demanded $21 billion in reparations during his final year in office. The U.S. imposed an economic embargo that strangled the country, driving peasants and workers even deeper into poverty.

In 2004, Washington collaborated with Haiti's ruling elite to back death squads that toppled the government, kidnapped and deported Aristide. The United Nations sent troops to occupy the country, and the puppet government of Gérard Latortue was installed to continue Washingotn's neoliberal plans.

Latortue's brief regime was utterly corrupt--he and his cronies pocketed large portions of the $4 billion poured into the country by the U.S. and other powers when they ended their embargo. The regime dismantled the mild reforms Aristide had managed to implement. Thus, the pattern of impoverishment and degradation of the country's infrastructure accelerated.

In 2006 elections, the Haitian masses voted in longtime Aristide ally René Préval as president. But Préval has been a weak figure who collaborated with U.S. plans for the country and failed to address the growing social crisis.

In fact, the U.S., UN and other imperial powers effectively bypassed the Préval government and instead poured money into NGOs. "Haiti now has the highest per capita presence of NGOs in the world," says Yves Engler. The Préval government has become a political fig leaf, behind which the real decisions are made by the imperial powers, and implemented through their chosen international NGOs.

The real state power isn't the Préval government, but the U.S.-backed United Nations occupation. Under Brazilian leadership, UN forces have protected the rich and collaborated with - or turned a blind eye to -right-wing death squads who terrorize supporters of Aristide and his Lavalas Party.

The occupiers have done nothing to address the poverty, wrecked infrastructure and massive deforestation that have exacerbated the effects of a series of natural disasters - severe hurricanes in 2004 and 2008, and now the Port-au-Prince earthquake.