Republica – "Ready to Go" (1996)

I’m standing on the rooftops shouting out

“Baby, I’m ready to go!”

I’ve never had a cool nickname, and I’m envious of anyone who does.  (I know a guy who goes by “Ace,” and I would love it if people suddenly started to call me that – hint, hint!)

The next best thing to having a cool nickname would be to be a member of a trivia team with a cool team name.  I didn’t get to choose the somewhat boring names of my trivia teams – those teams got their starts before I joined them, so they already had names.

A lot of trivia teams have tried to come up with cool names.  But most of them failed – there are a lot of very lame trivia team names out there.

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For example, the team that’s won the last three Pourhouse Trivia championships is called “What Would Snake Do?”  That’s a takeoff on “What Would Jesus Do?” but substitutes the “Snake” character from the The Simpsons (who’s a career criminal) for Jesus.  (Obviously it would not be wise to make one’s life choices based on what Snake would do if he were in your situation rather than what Jesus would do.)  

Snake from The Simpsons

Another very successful local team called itself “Dave Martinez School of Management” during Dave Martinez’s seven-year-plus tenure as the manager of the Washington Nationals.  When Martinez was fired last summer, that team changed its name to “Miguel Cairo School of Management” in honor of the man who replaced Martinez as the Nationals’ interim skipper.  (Blake Butera was hired as the Nats’ permanent manager last fall, but those guys haven’t changed their name to reflect that development yet – they seem to be sticking with Miguel Cairo, who’s now a coach with the Baltimore Orioles.)

One of my favorite team names – “Equatorial Guinea Pigs” – requires a bit of explaining.  Most nights, we have a “last word/first word” question.  The correct answer to such a question is a combination of two names or phrases that have a word in common – the last word of one is the first word of the other.  For example, if you were asked to combine the name of the star of the City Slickers movie with the name of an object often used by fortune tellers, the correct answer would be “Billy Crystal Ball.”

The “Equatorial Guinea Pigs” took their name from a last word/first word question that asked you to combine the name of the only African country to have Spanish as an official language (Equatorial Guinea) with the name of the herbivorous rodent belonging to the Cavia family that is a popular household pet (guinea pig).

Finally, here’s a team name that I do not approve of: “Does This Handkerchief Smell Like Chloroform To You?”

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My trivia team calls itself the “Einsteins” – which probably strikes you as kind of dull.

Technically, our team wasn’t named in honor of Albert Einstein.  Rather, it was named for a fictional trivia team that was named in honor of the inventor of the theory of relativity.

Here’s the Wikipedia summary of the eleventh episode of the eighth season of The Office – which was titled “Trivia”:

Andy Bernard, worried that he will not be able to meet the 8% quarterly sales growth figures that [his boss] asked for by about $800, proposes that everyone in the office buy paper to alleviate some of the burden, but no one is willing.  He then asks Oscar Martinez to make a rounding mistake in the books. Oscar tells Andy that he does not have time to make the mistake because he is leaving for a trivia contest with a $1,000 prize in a bar in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Andy, encouraged by Darryl Philbin and Jim Halpert, decides to take the entire office to Philadelphia in an attempt to win the money and make up the sales growth difference. 

At the bar, which turns out to be a gay bar called the Liberty Well, Andy divides the office into three teams: the “A-Team” consisting of Jim, Darryl, Andy, and Ryan Howard, the “B-Team” consisting of Stanley Hudson, Phyllis Vance, Creed Bratton, and Cathy Simms, and the “Just For Fun” team consisting of Kevin Malone, Kelly Kapoor, Erin Hannon, and Meredith Palmer. . . .

Initially, the Dunder Mifflin “A-Team” does well but soon falters.  However, the "Just For Fun" team does much better than expected . . . . [They] and eventually win thanks to Kevin's correct answers. 

If you watched The Office, you’ll immediately get that Andy assigned the four people that he thought were the dumbest of his co-workers to the “Just for Fun” team.  Once that group surprised their co-workers by winning the competition, they changed their name to the “Einsteins” – hence, my team’s name.

The Einsteins from The Office did pretty well until they got a question about who was responsible for the famous E=mc² formula.  All the other teams knew that the answer was “Einstein” – but despite being named after him, the Einsteins answered “Thomas Edison.”

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They say that life imitates art.  And whoever “they” are, they are right.

Several years ago, our trivia host asked the teams who were playing that night to identify Time’s “Person of the 20th Century.”  

We wondered if the correct answer might be a World War II-era leader like FDR or Churchill (or even Hitler).  But Time’s choice was Albert Einstein, of course – whose name had never entered our mind.     

Since then, we’ve had two other questions for which Einstein was the correct answer.  We missed them both.

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The last 2 or 3 lines featured Elastica’s “Connection.”  Today, we’re featuring Republica’s “Ready to Go,” which was released in 1996 on Republica’s eponymous debut album. 

I’m not sure I realized until recently that Republica and Elastica were different bands.  They were both active in the mid-1990s, both had female singers, and both broke up after a couple of albums – so it was an easy mistake to make, especially for someone who is very busy on a number of important projects!)

Click here to listen to “Ready to Go.”  It’s bangin’!

Click here to buy “Ready to Go” from Amazon.

Elastica – "Connection" (1994)

I don’t understand how the last card is played

But somehow the vital connection is made

2 or 3 lines has been getting a lot of reader e-mails asking about how my trivia team has been doing lately.

I don’t believe in humblebragging – simple old-fashioned bragging is more my style.  So I’ll respond to those reader e-mails by saying my trivia team has been killing it recently! 

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In a typical week, over a thousand teams show up for the Pourhouse Trivia competitions in the Washington, DC area.  Of those thousand-plus teams, about 200 – including my Einsteins – qualified for the playoffs.

Some 52 of those teams qualified for the Pourhouse playoff finals, and you’d best believe the Einsteins were among them.  We know that we have no real chance at winning the Pourhouse championship because many of the teams in that competition are made up of trivia obsessives who spend most of their waking hours in front of a computer studying lists of trivia factoids or playing in online trivia contests.  By contrast, the members of the Einsteins actually have lives.  (At least, most of them do.)  

So 0ur goal is to finish in the top ten – which would mean we were in the top 1% of all Pourhouse teams.  We fell a bit short this year, but 18th place is nothing to sneeze at.  We may not have made the top 1%, but we ranked in the top 2% – which isn’t too shabby.

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The final category in this year’s trivia finals was “Celebrity Beefs.”  

I’m an expert in beefs involving rappers – go ahead, ask me about the Drake-Kendrick Lamar beef, or the rivalry between Jay-Z and Nas, or the “Bridge Wars,” and I’ll quote you chapter and verse – so I was hoping the final question would be something along the lines of “Name the East Coast-West Coast rappers whose beef culminated in both being shot to death?” (the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur) or “What female rapper threw her shoe at a rival at a 2018 New York Fashion Week party, and who was her target?” (Cardi B and Nicki Minaj).   

But the final question wasn’t about rappers:

Going viral in 2019, name either of the two social media influencers whose beef culminated in one posting the YouTube video “Bye, Sister.” 

I was clueless.  But fortunately for the Einsteins, one of our team’s members is a young woman who spends an inordinate amount of time viewing beauty-related videos on Tik-Tok, Instagram, and YouTube.  So she knew that “Bye, Sister” was a 43-minute YouTube video posted by beauty influencer Tati Westbrook that ripped fellow influencer James Charles a new one.

James Charles and Tati Westbrook

Here’s an AI overview of the Westbrook-Charles beef:

The Conflict: Tati Westbrook, who was a mentor figure to Charles, felt betrayed after he promoted a competitor vitamin brand (Sugar Bear Hair) instead of her own company, Halo Beauty.

The Accusations: In the video, Westbrook detailed feeling “blindsided” and accused Charles of using his fame to “coerce straight men into sex.”

The Fallout: Charles lost a record number of subscribers, while Westbrook's channel saw rapid growth.

Charles' Response: James Charles posted an apology video titled “tati,” followed by a 41-minute video named “No More Lies,” where he addressed the allegations, denied the accusations of grooming, and provided evidence to clear his name.

Long-Term Impact: The event . . . is considered a landmark moment in YouTube drama history, prompting debates on influencer responsibility. 

There were a lot of points riding on that question, so thank goodness we got it right – we would have fallen from 18th to 26th place if we had missed it.

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Click here to listen to Elastica’s 1994 hit, “Connection,” which allegedly borrowed its catchy initial riff from Wire’s “Three Girl Rhumba” (resulting in a lawsuit and out-of-court settlement).  

Click here to listen to “Three Girl Rhumba” if you’d like to judge for yourself if Connection was guilty of plagiarism.

Click here to buy “Connection” from Amazon.

Rolling Stones – "Sympathy for the Devil" (1968)

I shouted out, “Who killed Kennedy?”

When after all, it was you and me

A young person I know recently posted this online:

Hit rock bottom on the golf course today.  Truly a rotten, vile round.  The kind of round that makes you wish you never found golf in the first place. . . .

To say it didn’t go well is like saying that the Titanic didn’t go well.  

Or that JFK’s car ride didn’t go well.

I know that golf can be an extremely frustrating sport, and that a bad round can cause even a good person to say terrible things.  So I’m willing to overlook that truly tasteless statement about JFK.  (Given some of the stuff that I’ve posted online over the years, it would be the pot calling the kettle black for me to criticize someone for tastelessness.)

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I find it interesting that I reacted much more strongly to the line about JFK than the line about the Titanic.  After all, some 1500 people perished when the Titanic sank – the death of any one man pales in comparison to the loss of 1500 lives.

But while I winced when I read that reference to JFK’s assassination, I didn’t have the same kind of visceral response to the Titanic reference.    

Why was that?  Maybe because the sinking of the Titanic took place long before I was born.

Most of what I know about the Titanic comes from the 1997 movie.  And while that movie depicted the tragedy in very realistic fashion, viewing a fictional recreation of an event – no matter how vivid and dramatic – is not the same thing as living through the actual event.

I experienced the Kennedy assassination first hand.  I saw the graphic and traumatizing Zapruder film of that event over and over.  I remember seeing Lyndon Johnson being sworn in as President aboard Air Force One and Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald.  And I was glued to the TV during Kennedy’s funeral.  (Who can forget the image of the riderless horse, with the pair of boots placed backwards in the stirrups?  Or the shot of Kennedy’s three-year-old son saluting his father’s casket as it was carried from St. Matthew’s Cathedral?)

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A few of us may be able to give the date when the Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, or when the Apollo 11 spacecraft landed on the moon, or when Richard Nixon resigned.  But all of us remember November 22, 1963.  

Can you even name the year the Titanic sank – much less the exact date?

The person who wrote the message I quoted above is far too young to have lived through the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath.  For him, that event probably feels just as distant from the present day as the sinking of the Titanic feels to people who are my age.

But for people my age, JFK’s death is something that we remember very vividly.  I suppose that’s why I reacted much more strongly to his reference to it than I did to his reference to the sinking of the Titanic – even though that event was a much greater tragedy in objective terms.

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In case you’re wondering, the Titanic sank on April 15, 1912 – exactly 114 years ago today.

The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, while Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969 and Richard Nixon left the White House in disgrace on August 8, 1974.  

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The lyrics quoted at the top of this post were the lyrics that Mick Jagger sang when the Rolling Stones began recording “Sympathy for the Devil” on June 4, 1968.

But when Robert Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan on the very next day, those lyrics were changed from “Who killed Kennedy?” to “Who killed the Kennedys?”   

Click here to listen to “Sympathy for the Devil.”

Click here to buy “Sympathy for the Devil” from Amazon.