Destroy All Monsters – "Nobody Knows" (1979)

Where I come from

Nobody knows

I like to win at trivia competitions as much as the next guy.  It’s a great way to impress babes, of course – “Did you really know which two bordering New England states are the only states in the U.S. that elect their governors to two-year terms instead of four-year terms?  That’s sooooo hot!”  

(Here’s another clue for you all)

And winning a certificate worth 30% off your bar tab is nothing to sneeze at.

But what keeps me coming back to play trivia week after week are the zen moments when an obscure  answer to a seemingly impossible query seems to materialize in your mind out of thin air.

It’s almost an out-of-body experience when the trivia-meister reads a question that sparks nothing in the way of a possible response.  You gape at your teammates, but you don’t really see or hear them – your brain slows to a crawl, like a computer that has no available RAM because you have a hundred tabs open and a bunch of apps running in the background. 

But at the last moment, the correct answer is inexplicably but undeniably there.  “Where I come from, nobody knows,” that answer sings to you as you scribble it down on the answer slip and run it up to the host.

Mirabile dictu!  (And how!)

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I enjoyed one such zen moment recently, when we were asked to answer the following question:

Katherine Ross starred in this 1975 movie that was set in a fictional Connecticut suburb, while the 2004 remake of that movie featured Nicole Kidman. 

Most of the teams playing that night were able to come up with the correct answer: The Stepford Wives.  (I had no idea the movie had a sequel, so I was no help.)

Katherine Ross

The zen moment came when the host read the bonus question:

What was the name of the author of the best-selling book that those movies were based on?

The Stepford Wives novel was published in 1972.  That was a l-o-n-g time ago, boys and girls.  

I was familiar with the basic plot of the book, but I never read it – nor did I see either movie version.  But for some reason, I was pretty sure that the author’s first name had only three letters – e.g., Ian, or Ari, or something similar.

I also had a feeling that the author had a Jewish last name.  

Although I never read the book, I certainly would have seen the book at the library or in bookstores back in the day.  I had a vague memory that the book’s cover was white, with the title and author’s name in large black letters.

Unfortunately, knowing what the book looked like or correctly identifying the ethnicity of the author wasn’t enough to win us any points.  We had to provide the actual name of that author.

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Earlier that night, I had a minor zen moment when answering a question that asked us to provide three two-word answers – the first word of each answer began with “B” and the second word began with “A.”

The first two questions – one was about a famous traitor (Benedict Arnold) and the other was about a famous “Massh*le” (Ben Affleck) – weren’t all that hard.

King of the Massh*les

But the third one – “What two-word phrase became popular as a result of its repeated usage by a New York Morning Telegraph reporter in the 1920s?” – had us stumped at first.

As we brainstormed, one of my teammates offered “bad apple” as a possible answer.

I suddenly had a flash of inspiration, and wrote down “Big Apple” on the answer slip.  There was no doubt in my mind about that answer, and I was correct. 

I don’t think anyone on my team would have pulled “Big Apple” if I hadn’t come up with it.  But I would never have thought of that answer if my teammate hadn’t thrown out “bad apple” as a possible answer.

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The author of The Stepford Wives is, of course, Ira Levin.  (Levin also penned Rosemary’s Baby and The Boys from Brazil, both of which were adapted into movies that did well at the box office.  I didn’t read either of those books either.) 

I can’t explain why his name sudden popped into my head any more than I can explain quantum physics or Thomas Pynchon’s novels.

But it did . . . which meant we were awarded two bonus points . . . which came in very handy considering that we finished in first place that night by exactly one point.

While finishing in first place is always very satisfying, what was much more satisfying for me was somehow coming up with Ira Levin’s name – forty-odd years after I last thought about it (assuming I ever really “thought about” it).

“God works in mysterious ways,” the saying goes.

And so does the brain of 2 or 3 lines.

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My original post about “Nobody Knows” by Destroy All Monsters appeared on April 8, 2016.

“Nobody Knows” was the 1000th record to be featured on 2 or 3 lines post, so it’s kind of a big deal to me.

As is the fact that my post featured an interview with Destroy All Monsters’ frontwoman, the inimitable Niagara – the ne plus ultra of punk-rock femme fatales:

Click here to read that post, which includes a link you can click on to hear “Nobody Knows.”

Click here to buy that record from Amazon:

Adriano Celentano – "Prisencolinensinainciusol” (1972)

Eni go for doing peso ai

In de col mein seivuan

Prisencolinensinainciusol (ALL RIGHT!)

“Humble” is not an adjective that is often used to describe 2 or 3 lines.  (Other adjectives that are not often used to describe 2 or 3 lines include “modest,” “reserved,” “unassuming,” “deferential,” “demure,” “self-effacing,” and “self-deprecating.”)

But playing competitive bar trivia can humble a man . . . especially a man who is plays all by himself – whether because he thinks he’s so smart he can score higher than the five- or six-person teams he is playing against, or because he has no friends and has no choice but to play solo.

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I’ve used several strategies to lasso trivia partners so I don’t have to play alone.

For example, I’ve arrived early enough at a popular trivia venue to grab a large table all to myself, and then offered a group of later arrivals a place to sit – on the condition that they allow me to play with them.

On occasion, I’ve struck up a pre-game conversation with a couple or a small group, and managed to wangle an invitation to join their team.

But my go-to strategy for finding trivia teammates is to sit at the bar and ask the bartenders if they want to play with me.

That usually works because bartenders have to be nice to their customers.

It doesn’t hurt, of course, that I have a reputation as a big tipper.  (20%?  The hell you say!  I routinely tip 22% or 23%, and have been known to go as high as 25% on occasion.  You best believe that gets a big – albeit insincere – smile from any bartender around.)

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Despite all that, I sometimes end up playing alone nonetheless.  

Like last Thursday, when my usual neighborhood trivia spot decided to cancel their game at the last minute – either due to covid concerns, or because they figured most people would have better things to do on the eve of Christmas Eve.  

I usually play at craft breweries, but the only place offering trivia that night that wasn’t too distant  from my home was a little pizza joint in a local strip mall.

All the other teams playing there had several members, and looked like regulars – I figured it would be pretty awkward to invite myself to join any of them.

And there was no bar at this place – so no bartenders I could glom on to as my playing partners.

I decided to give it a shot all by myself.

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Actually, I wasn’t that sad to be playing as a one-man team.

I’ve never won playing solo, but I still entertain a fantasy of walking into some place where no one knows me and single-handedly beating all the multiple-player teams I’m competing against.

That fantasy is a foolish one because no matter how much one person knows, there are going to be many subjects that person knows nothing about.  For example, there are usually a lot of pop culture questions – questions about music, TV shows, toys, movies, video games, etc.  I know a lot about sixties and seventies pop culture, but my abilities when it comes to more recent pop culture-related questions are quite limited – I would do much better with a couple of teammates who are two or three decades younger.

But the place where I played last Thursday tempted me because there were only five other teams playing – the place where I regularly play on Tuesdays draws two or even three times as many teams – and because most of the other players looked about as sharp as a marble.  (Just sayin’.)

Finishing first in even an unimpressive six-team field would be a tall order for a one-man team.  But finishing third out of six teams?  That seemed eminently possible.

*     *     *     *     *

At least it seemed eminently possible until I missed five of the first seven questions.

These weren’t near misses either.  For example, the host played snippets from three Christmas records and asked us to identify the three artists who made those records.  If you got two out of three correct, you got credit for the number of points you had wagered – if you got all three right, you got bonus points to boot.  

I came close to the two-correct-answers standard – I was only two correct answers short!  

That’s right – I got exactly zero correct.  I guessed – and I do mean “guessed” – Mötley Crüe, Harry Connick Jr., and Miley Cyrus.  The correct answers were Twisted Sister, Michael Bublé, and Gwen Stefani.  (Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.)

I did better on another three-part question.  By “better” I mean that I was able to name one of the three European capitals that begins with “R” – Rome, Italy.  I whiffed on Reykjavik, Iceland, and Riga, Latvia.  

Getting one out of three instead of none out of three makes one feel marginally less stupid, but you get zero points either way.  (It’s like hitting a weak grounder back to the pitcher in baseball instead of striking out– you feel a little better that you made contact with the ball, but you’re an easy out either way.)

Perhaps the worst of my whiffs on those first seven questions was failing to name the drink made with rum, curaçao, and lime juice that is popular in Polynesian-themed restaurants and has a rhyming name.

Pretty much every one I’ve told about that question has come up with “Mai Tai” as the answer.  But I didn’t.

*     *     *     *     *

I was beginning to avoid eye contact with the host when I handed my answers to her – being wrong so many times was embarrassing.

But I made an inspired guess on the 8th question – “What politician criticized the fictional Murphy Brown TV character for choosing to get pregnant and raise her baby as a single mother?”  I could think of a lot of politicians who might have questioned whether we should encourage women to get pregnant and have babies when there was no father in the picture, but I decided to take a flyer on former Vice President Dan Quayle.  YOU ARE CORRECT, SIR!  (I won bonus points by knowing that Quayle was from Indiana.)

Suddenly I started to roll, answering question after question correctly.  In fact, I answered the final 13 wagering questions without a miss _ including the question that proved to be the most difficult wagering question of the evening: “Which 95-year-old EGOT winner recently published an autobiography titled All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business?

After ascertaining that “EGOT winner” meant someone who had won at least one Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony, I correctly went with “Mel Brooks” as my answer.  (I earned bonus points for knowing that the Oscar-winning actress he was married to for 40-plus years was none other than the late Anne Bancroft.)

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That answer helped me to advance from 6th (and last) place to 4th place – which is one spot out of the money.  

The 3rd-place team had a sizable lead on me, but I had a chance to leapfrog over them and take home a prize if I got the final question right and they didn’t.

Unfortunately, the final question was “What is the highest-grossing American movie of all time that has the word ‘Christmas’ in its title?”

I didn’t know the answer, and neither did any of the others teams I was playing against that night.  (And neither do you, I’m willing to bet.)

So I remained in 4th place – which wasn’t bad for a solo player, but wasn’t exactly the outcome I was hoping for.

On the bright side, that restaurant’s pizza was very good, and they sold the local craft beers on their menu for only $5 per can during trivia.  Plus I learned a badly-needed lesson about humility.  So the evening wasn’t a total loss.

Although I’ll probably forget that humility lesson pretty quickly and be right back where I started.

[Final note: the answer to the final question was Jim Carrey’s 2000 movie, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which grossed $260 million domestically.  That’s a fairly anemic number compared to the much higher box-office figures for Titanic, and Avatar, and Star Wars : Episode VII – The Force Awakens, and Black Panther, and Avengers: Endgame (to name just a few).  But it beats every other movie that had “Christmas” in the title.]

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The lyrics to Adriano Celentano’s 1972 single, “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” are pretty much 100% gibberish.

Celentano was apparently trying to make some really important point: 

Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did.  So at a certain point, because I like American slang – which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian – I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate.  And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything.

(Whatever . . .)

“Prisencolinensinainciusol” was used in the first episode of the third season of the FX TV series, Fargo – which may be the best TV series in history.  (At least it was before the fourth season was released.  The fourth season sort of jumped the shark.)  

Click here to watch the scene that is accompanied by “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” which is the damnedest record you’ve ever heard.  It’s completely insane and completely irresistible.

Like Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” and Richard Harris’s “MacArthur Park,” “Prisencolinensinainciusol” is not just a fabulous pop record – it’s one of the absolute masterworks of Western civilization.

Click here to watch Celentano lip-synching the record on some crazy Italian TV show.  

Click here to watch an even crazier Italian TV performance of the song.

Beatles – "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (1963)

And please, say to me

You’ll let me hold your hand

Today is the 58th anniversary of the release of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in the United States. 

Capitol Records had intended to release the record several weeks later to coincide with the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, which was scheduled for mid-January 1964.

But the best laid schemes of mice and men – not to mention record companies – gang aft a-gley.  

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On November 18, 1963, NBC became the first American TV to air footage of the Beatles performing.  The piece was narrated by the great television journalist Edwin Newman, whose voiceover included this brilliant line that fans of William Shakespeare will appreciate: “The sound [the Beatles] make is called ‘the Mersey Sound’ because Liverpool is on the Mersey River.  The quality of Mersey is somewhat strained.”  (You can click here to listen to the audio of that piece.)

 

Four days later, the CBS Morning News broadcast a brief segment about the Beatles and the phenomenon known as “Beatlemania.”  The segment was supposed to be repeated on Walter Cronkite’s evening news program that night – that show attracted a much larger audience than CBS’s morning news program – but November 22, 1963 was the date that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.  So that piece was understandably preempted and didn’t air on the Cronkite news show until December 10.

Marsha Albert, a 15-year-old who lived in a Washington, DC suburb, saw the story about the Beatles on December 10 and immediately wrote to WWDC-AM disc jockey Carroll James, asking “Why can’t we have music like this in America?”

James managed to get a copy of the British 45 of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” from a British flight attendant, and invited Marsha Albert into his studio to introduce the record when he first played it on December 17.

DJ Carroll James with the Beatles

Listeners in the Washington loved the song.  WWDC played it repeatedly, and James shared it with DJs in Chicago and St. Louis.  Capitol Records threatened to go to court to stop the record from being played before the planned release date, but finally wised up and decided to go with the flow, moving up the release of the single to December 26 – not a date when you would usually release a record.

The record sold 250,000 copies in three days, and quickly climbed to the #1 spot on the Billboard “Hot 100,” where it remained for seven weeks.

“I Want to Hold Your Hold” was the first of seven Beatles singles to reach #1 in 1964 – no one other recording artist has had so many #1 hits in a single year.

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I don’t think there’s been any cultural phenomenon in my lifetime that was comparable in scope and impact to “Beatlemania.”

Was there anyone living in the United States  – man, woman, or child – who was not aware of the Beatles in early 1964?  I don’t think any other musician, athlete, or politician who came along later attracted the attention of so many Americans.

Click here to listen to today’s featured record.

Ed Sullivan and the Beatles

Click here to watch the Beatles performing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964.  It’s a surprisingly shaky performance – the record is much better.

Steely Dan – "Do It Again" (1972)

You go back, Jack, do it again

Wheel turnin’ around and around

You go back, Jack, do it again

In the second 1980 presidential debate, Ronald Reagan famously prefaced his rebuttal of a critical comment by his opponent, Jimmy Carter, with these words: “There you go again!”

The post-debate news coverage focused more on how Reagan had effectively defused Carter’s attack than on the merits of the issue the candidates were debating at the time.  

Final Electoral College tally: 489 to 49

Reagan’s iconic line has been quoted or paraphrased by a number of copycat politicians – e.g., Sarah Palin and Bill Clinton.

I have no doubt that “The Great Communicator” was thinking “There you go again!” last night as he looked down from heaven and watched me once again mishandle one of the questions at the weekly trivia contest at Smoketown Creekside. 

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I hope all you regular readers of 2 or 3 lines will excuse me for repeating a portion of my December 14 post – if I didn’t, the story that I’m about to tell wouldn’t make a lot of sense to those readers who are new to my wildly popular little blog.

As I explained in that earlier post, the trivia format used by Pourhouse Trivia – which runs the games at Smoketown – features rounds of five questions.  You may bet 1, 3, 5, 7, or 9 on those questions – but you can only use each bet once.

The optimal strategy is to use your largest available bet when you’re sure of an answer, and use your smallest available bet when you have no clue what the answer is.

Here’s the third question from one of the rounds in last week’s trivia competition:

Name the play by Thornton Wilder that is set in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners and features a character known as “Stage Manager” who speaks directly to the audience.

As I had explained in my December 14 post, my trivia team had already used our 3 bet and 5 bet when that third question was asked, so we were left with our 1 bet, our 7 bet, and our 9 bet.

The answer to that question – Our Town – should have been easy peasy for me.  I’ve seen that very famous play performed more than once, and I recently read a biography of its author.

But my mind went blank when the question was asked – I simply could not think of the play’s name at that critical moment.  (“Choked” is an ugly word, but go ahead and use it to describe I did if you must.) 

As the time permitted to get an answer to the host ticked down to zero, I reluctantly wrote the number down “1” for our bet.  I stood up and started to take the otherwise blank answer slip to the host when one of my bartender teammates came rushing over and whispered “Our Town!” in my ear.  

As soon as I heard that answer, I KNEW it was correct and that my prayers had been answered – and just in the nick of time!  As the host harangued us loudly for our tardiness, I scribbled the answer down and rushed up to hand it to him.

But I was too discombobulated to think to change our wager from a 1 – a smart wager when you don’t know the answer, but now we did know the answer! – to a 9.

That came back to bite us on the ass when the next question turned out to be a tough one that we couldn’t answer.  If I had thought to change our Our Town bet from 1 to 9, we could have bet 1 on the succeeding question.  But since we had already used our 1 bet, we had to bet 7 (which was the smallest bet we had left at that point).

That’s a six-point mistake, and most of our trivia wins and losses have been by fewer than six points.

The only comfort I took from this snafu was I would learn from it, and never make the same mistake again!

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Now that we’ve finally gotten to the end of that long historical detour,  let’s get right to the point.

Last night, we had a “Three Clues, One Word” question, which is a regular feature of the Pourhouse Trivia game.

The host reads three clues, all of which have the same answer.  In this case, the items described in all three clues had the same one-word name.

Here are the three clues:

1.  This television show was created by Chris Carter, who also created The X-Files.

2.  This album by the Backstreet Boys was released in 1999.

3.  This name was given to a series of crime novels written by Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson.

I had no idea what clues #1 and #2 were referring to.

As for #3, I knew that Stieg Larsson was the author of the hugely popular book, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and its two sequels – all of which featured a fictional badass named Lisbeth Salander. 

I not only have read the books, but I’ve also seen the movie adaptations of the books.  (There were Swedish and American movies made from the books, by the way – I saw ‘em all.)

But I had no idea what one-word name was used to describe the Salander trilogy.

As the time allowed for us to noodle over this question ticked away, I was prepared to write down “1” for our bet, leave the space for the answer blank, and take our medicine.

But at the last moment, one of my bartender teammates came rushing over.  She was sure the name of that Backstreet Boys album was Millennium, and she whispered that word in my ear.  I hurriedly scribbled it down and ran the answer slip up to the host just in the nick of time.

By the way . . . does any of this sound familiar?

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You see what’s coming next, right?  (As my dear old grandmother used to say, “It’s as plain as the nose on your face!”)

If you guessed that I once again neglected to change our 1 bet– which I had written down while we were feeling like we were in John Bunyan’s infamous “Slough of Despond” over not having an answer – to a 9 bet . . . you are correct, sir!

To make matters even worse, the “Three Clues, One Word” query was our bonus question – meaning there was an additional five points riding on it – and it was the first question of the five in that round.  (Talk about your perfect sh*tstorm.)  

There was a good chance that at least one of the remaining four questions would turn out to be a stumper – and that happened, we would have been without what I like to call the “In Case of Emergency, Break Glass” wager.

In fact, there was a later question in that round we missed: “What does the Hannukah-related term shammash refer to?”  (Only Gentiles on our team, I’m afraid – so we had no clue that a shammash is the candle used to light each of the other candles of the Hanukkah menorah.)

Just like last week, we bet 7 on that question because our 1 wager had been used already – so we lost six points due to my repeating the past because I didn’t remember it.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

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As it turned out, we nonetheless finished in first place both nights – so my crumbling under pressure had no ill effects on our team.  Maybe that’s why I didn’t learn my lesson after the first time it happened.

If neglecting to adjust the bet had resulted in the loss of the “50% off your beer tab” coupon that the proprietors of Smoketown Brewing so graciously present to the winning team each week, you best believe I wouldn’t have made the same mistake twice – consequences that serious would have made me sit up and take notice.

But because we dodged the bullet and won despite my misfeasance, I wouldn’t be too surprised if I commit the same blunder again in the future.

Which makes this post sort of anticlimactic.

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“Do It Again” was the first single released from Steely Dan’s 1972 debut album, Can’t Buy a Thrill, which was one of the albums you heard playing all the time if you lived in one of the residence halls at my college.  (“Can’t buy a thrill” is a line from Bob Dylan’s song, “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.”)

Click here to listen to “Do It Again.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Rolling Stones – "Short and Curlies" (1974)

It’s too bad

She’s got you by the b*lls

Do any of you happen to have a phone number or e-mail address for Stephen King?

If so, could you send it to me?  I have an idea for a book or movie that I think he would love!

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Years ago, I knew a couple who owned a male black Lab that had never been neutered.  I think his name was Randy, or maybe Rowdy.  (Either one would have been appropriate.)

That dog was always running away in search of female companionship.  When his quest for a little doggie lovin’ was unsuccessful, he would hump any neighborhood children who were friendly to him.

One day, he got overly excited playing with a teenage girl and started thrusting at her until he made a mess all over her blue jeans.

After that, the horrified wife insisted to her husband that they take the dog to the vet and get him castrated.  But the husband would have no part of it.

“If I let you get the dog fixed,” he told his wife, “next thing you’ll want to do is get me fixed.”

(True dat!)

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I was reminded of that couple and their dog at trivia a few nights ago.  I was hanging around having a beer after leading my team to a hard-fought victory, when one of the women sitting at the bar mentioned that she having minor outpatient surgery in a few days.

“If you’re not having general anesthesia, you should ask the doctor if you could watch while he does the surgery,” one of her friends suggested.

“I watched when my husband had his vasectomy,” another woman announced.  

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” I thought to myself.  “What kind of harpy would enjoy watching while her husband underwent a vasectomy?”

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Actually, I think a lot of women would enjoy watching while their husbands got “fixed.”

In fact, I think more than a few of them would be happy to personally perform the procedure if they had the chance. 

I don’t think any man alive would want a scalpel-wielding wife anywhere near his private parts.  “Have you had any affairs since we got married?” I can just hear her asking while in the middle of doing the ol’ snip-snip.  “Don’t lie to me!”

If that’s not a more terrifying scenario that those that King dreamed up in The Shining or Carrie or Cujo or even Misery, I don’t know what is.

Actually, forget about sending me King’s phone number or e-mail address.  I bet I can write the book or screenplay myself and sell it for at least a million bucks.  

Why share any of that cash with King?  He’s got plenty of do-re-mi already.

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It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll – which the Stones released in 1974 – isn’t in the same class as their very best albums (e.g., Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers), but it’s not bad.  In fact, it may be the best of their post-Exile on Main St. albums.

“Short and Curlies” – it’s the obvious choice for today’s featured song – has never been performed in concert by the Stones.    

Click here to listen to “Short and Curlies.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: