Rosalind Russell and Edie Adams – "Ohio" (1953)

Why, oh why, oh why oh

Why did I ever leave Ohio?

I read Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust when I was in college . . . but that was a l-o-n-g time ago.

I don’t remember much about that book.  So I had no clue how to answer the following question when it popped up at trivia earlier this week:

“What enduring animated TV character shares his first and last name with one of the main characters in the 1939 novel, The Day of the Locust?”

None of my teammates had ever heard of that book, much less read it.  So it looked like we were in trouble.

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Nathanael West, the author of The Day of the Locust, was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City in 1903.

West dropped out of high school but managed to get admitted to Tufts College (now Tufts University) by presenting a forged high school diploma.

After Tufts got wise to West and expelled him, he got into Brown University by appropriating the transcript of his cousin, a Tufts student who was also named Nathan Weinstein. 

According to his biographer, West did little schoolwork at Brown but read extensively.  I bet he would have been a good trivia player.

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Speaking of trivia . . .

We ended up turning in “Homer Simpson” as our answer to the question posed above.  

The first episode of The Simpsons aired in 1989, so Homer certainly qualified as an enduring character.  Of course, you could say the same about Bart Simpson.  

My team thought about going with Simpson fils instead of Simpson père as our answer, but we couldn’t decide whether to refer to him as “Bart” or “Bartholomew.”  (Our trivia host is a pretty picky guy.)

Homer Simpson at work

In the end, we stuck with Homer – and that turned out to be the right choice.  Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

(Here are some of our other correct answers from that night: Enola Gay, DeLorean, Tom Selleck, Tampa Bay Rays, Y is for Yesterday, 1984, Carli Lloyd, Napster, and La Paz.)

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In The Day of the Locust, Homer Simpson is a bookkeeper from Iowa whose doctor advised him to move to California for his health.  

Homer has been described as a “soft-mannered, sexually repressed, and socially ill-at-ease” man whose inner torment is manifested through the seemingly uncontrollable movements of his unnaturally large hands.

Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, told an interviewer in 2012 why he chose to name his protagonist after The Day of the Locust character.  “Homer was my father's name,” Groening said, “and I thought Simpson was a funny name in that it had the word ‘simp’ in it, which is short for ‘simpleton’ – I just went with it.”

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The Day of the Locust is set in Hollywood, and most of the book’s characters other than Homer Simpson work in the movie industry.  

Nathanael West knew that industry well.  He had been employed as a screenwriter by several Hollywood studios, and his wife Eileen was Walt Disney’s executive assistant.

A year after The Day of the Locust was published, West and his wife died in an automobile collision resulting from his failure to stop at a stop sign. 

Coincidentally, West’s friend and fellow novelist-cum-screenwriter F. Scott Fitzgerald had died from a heart attack the day before.

Eileen’s body was cremated and her ashes placed in her husband’s coffin for burial.  I wonder if their family chose to do it that way so they only had to pay for one cemetery space instead of two.

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The Wests died just a few days before they were scheduled to fly to New York City to attend the opening night of My Sister Eileen, a play that was based on autobiographical short stories written by Eileen’s sister Ruth.  

In those stories – and in the play based on them – Ruth and Eileen are sisters who move from Ohio to New York City to seek fame and fortune.  (Older sister Ruth wants to be a writer while younger sister Eileen is an aspiring actress.) 

My Sister Eileen was very successful – it ran for 864 performances, and was made into a 1942 movie starring Rosalind Russell.  

My Sister Eileen also inspired the 1953 musical Wonderful Town – which won five Tony Awards (including Best Musical).  

My Sister Eileen is also the title of a 1955 musical comedy film that’s based on the original play, but doesn’t use the music from Wonderful Town.  (Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, had wanted to make a movie version of Wonderful Town, but couldn’t agree on a price for the film rights for the musical.  So he had a new score written and ordered other changes to avoid running afoul of the copyright laws.) 

Last but not least, My Sister Eileen was turned into a sitcom that aired during the 1960-61 season on CBS.

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Ruth and Eileen didn’t have it easy when they upped stakes and moved to New York City.  In today’s featured song from Act One of Wonderful Town, the sisters wonder if it would have been better for them if they had stayed in Ohio.

Click here to listen to the original cast recording of “Ohio,” with Rosalind Russell as Ruth and Edie Adams as Eileen.  (If you don’t know who Edie Adams is, click here to watch her singing “Big Spender” on behalf of Muriel cigars.)

Click here to buy “Ohio” from Amazon.

Deee-Lite – "Groove Is in the Heart' (1990)

Your groove I do deeply dig

No walls, only the bridge

My supper dish, my succotash wish

I am a very successful trivia player, but I freely admit that a higher power is responsible for much of my success.

As you probably know, the University of Michigan’s football team – coached by Jim Harbaugh – is this year’s national championship.  One of our trivia questions this week asked who was the Michigan football coach when the team last won the national championship.

That very morning, I had finalized a 2 or 3 lines post about Tom Brady and the late Frank Ryan – a couple of men who became outstanding NFL quarterbacks after spending a good part of their college football careers sitting on the bench.

Here’s the first sentence of that post:

During his very successful 13-year stint as the head football coach at the University of Michigan, Lloyd Carr’s teams won five Big Ten titles and the 1997 national championship.  

I wasn’t 100% sure that Michigan hadn’t finished atop the college football rankings sometime between Carr’s 1997 title and Harbaugh’s 2023 championship.  But as I recalled, the period after Carr’s retirement and before Harbaugh’s ascension to the head coaching job had been a dry spell for the Wolverines.  So I felt pretty safe in answering “Lloyd Carr” to the trivia question.

If that question had been asked at the previous week’s trivia contest, there is NO WAY I would have come up with the right answer.  (Lloyd who?)

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It was at least a million-to-one shot that I would not only choose to write a 2 or 3 lines post that mentioned Lloyd Carr and the fact that one of his University of Michigan football teams had won a national championship, but also that I would do that less than 24 hours before my team was asked to answer a question about Carr’s accomplishment.  

Lloyd Carr

In other words, it was one hell of a coincidence – if it was a coincidence at all.

Some people don’t believe in coincidences.  For example, Albert Einstein famously said that “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”

The great Russian author Vladimir Nabokov saw the world a bit differently:

A certain man once lost a diamond cufflink in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish . . . but there was no diamond inside.

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I think I heard today’s featured record back in the nineties, but it had fallen off my radar until I heard it recently while watching an episode of Big Mouth on Netflix.

If you haven’t seen Big Mouth, it’s a remarkably vulgar and offensive animated series.  Netflix wouldn’t dare air a live-action show about middle schoolers that was as explicit and filthy as Big Mouth is, but the rules are apparently very different for animated shows.  (In one scene, two 13-year-olds kiss and dry hump each other until the boy makes a mess in his pants – said mess-in-pants being very plainly depicted.)

The brains behind Deee-Lite was Lady Miss Kier (née Kierin Magenta Kirby in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1963).  “Groove Is in the Heart” – which made it all the way to the #4 spot on the Billboard “Hot 100” – also featured Parliament-Funkadelic’s Bootsy Collins and A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip.

Click here to watch the official music video of “Groove Is in the Heart.”  (The slide whistle is m-o-n-e-y!)

Click here to buy the record from Amazon. 

Mary Hopkin – "Those Were the Days" (1968)

Once upon a time there was a tavern

Where we used to raise a glass or two

Remember how we laughed away the hours?

Almost two years ago, I wandered into Smoketown Creekside – a craft brewery located in Frederick, Maryland – to check out their weekly trivia game.

I finished in the middle of the pack that night – not bad considering I was competing solo.  When I was young and foolish – as opposed to when I was old and foolish, which is now – I was arrogant enough to think that I might win at trivia all by myself.  But I learned that it’s virtually impossible for a single player to win – you need people of different ages and different backgrounds in order to cover the wide variety of questions that are asked at the typical trivia competition.

I noticed that the three bartenders who were working that night were playing as a team.  Since I didn’t know a soul at Smoketown, I asked the bartenders if I could play with them when I came back for trivia the following week.  They kindly agreed to join forces with them, and – as the saying goes – the rest is history.

One of the bartenders was a thirty-something woman, one was a forty-something woman, and one was a fifty-something woman.  I was a sixty-something man.  That may not sound like anything special, but our whole was somehow greater than the sum of our parts.  Together we were almost unbeatable

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Unfortunately, our reign didn't last long.  One of our bartenders quit her Smoketown Creekside job a few months later and never played again, while another one joined a different team.

We tried recruiting new players to fill our holes, but our results weren’t good.  A number of new teams started playing at Smoketown around that time, and several of those teams were quite good.  We had gotten used to winning two out of every three weeks, but suddenly we were finding it a struggle to win once a month.

But we eventually got our mojo back thanks to a motley group of new recruits who complemented each other well. 

And just like that, we were winning again.  For a few months, we took turns finishing in first place with one other team.  I became more than a little obsessed with beating that team – I didn’t care whether we won as long as we finished ahead of them.  But since the beginning of this year, we’ve dominated our rivals.

In fact, we’ve dominated them to such an extent that I don’t even consider them to be our rivals any more.  As Yankees fan Alec Baldwin famously said to Red Sox fan John Krasinski in a 2011 TV commercial for New Era baseball caps, 

John, for the last time, this is not a rivalry.  Just like fire doesn't have a rivalry with kindling.  Lawn mowers don't have a rivalry with grass.  And America doesn't have a rivalry with Costa Rica!

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Earlier this summer, we learned that the owner of Smoketown Creekside – whose wife was one of those three bartenders I had teamed up with almost two years earlier – had sold the brewery.

Tonight – which was the final weekly trivia competition ever at Smoketown Creekside – marked the end of an era.  Trivia at Smoketown has been a highlight of my week for a long time, and I’m not embarrassed to say how much I’m going to miss it. 

The new owners plan to continue trivia once they’ve finished  redecorating the building.  So my team will have the same players present when the new place opens in a couple of months.  

I was very worried that we might have to play at a different location, or switch to a different night of the week – which might have resulted in the loss of one or more of our team members.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that I would have been very sad if that had happened.  (I never see the people on my team except on Tuesday nights at Smoketown Creekside, and I feel like I have very little in common with them -- but I love each and every one of them just the same.)  

As usual, we scored 20 for 20 on the bonus round this week

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We were riding a three-week winning streak when the final Smoketown Creekside contest kicked off tonight.

That three-game streak became a four-game streak when we correctly answered tonight’s final question and prevailed by one point over the second-place team.

That may sound like we just eked out the victory, but that wasn’t really the case.  We had a y-u-g-e lead going into the final question, so we bet conservatively – after all, a one-point win is as good as a ten-point win.  

By the way, the final question tonight was “Name the fictional character who first appeared in 1989 and was later chosen by Time magazine to be included on their list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.”  Not everyone playing tonight knew that the answer to that question was Bart Simpson, but we did.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

The winner gets to choose the category of the following week’s first question, and we commemorated our years playing trivia at Smoketown Creekside by choosing “Bart Simpson” as next week’s first category. 

By doing so, of course, we will also be reminding all the also-rans that they lost tonight when our host kicks off the competition next Tuesday by asking a Bart Simpson-related query.  

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Click here to watch Mary Hopkin singing “Those Were The Days” on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1968.  (That’s FIFTY-FIVE years ago, boys and girls.)

Click here to buy “Those Were the Days” from Amazon.

Ice-T – "Don't Hate the Playa" (1999)

 

This goes out to all you haters out there

Actin’ like a brother done did somethin’ wrong

’Cause he got his game tight!

After last week’s trivia competition, I know EXACTLY what Ice-T was talkin’ about!

‘Cause some of my team’s rivals was actin’ like a brother done did somethin’ wrong . . . just because he got his trivia game tight!

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Team Dynamite! – my Tuesday-night trivia team – has been suffering through a long dry spell, but we finally got off the schneid and won convincingly this week.

We dominated the weekly Pourhouse Trivia competitions at Smoketown Creekside  in December and January, finishing on top seven times in nine weeks.  

But until this week, our most recent first-place finish had been on February 2.  And unlike Bill Murray in the Groundhog Day movie, we didn’t get trapped in a time loop that caused us to relive our February 2 experience over and over and over.  Our experience was just the opposite: we went weeks – months, really – without reliving the thrill of victory.

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Some believed Dynamite! had fallen victim to “The Curse of the Rubber Stamp.”  

Earlier this year, I ordered a “Dynamite!” rubber stamp to use on our answer slips.  (You have to fill out and turn in 21 such answer slips during each contest, and it gets very tedious to handwrite “Dynamite” 21 times every week – I figured a rubber stamp would make that task a lot easier.)  

Some viewed this as an act of hubris, the ancient Greek term for an extreme and unreasonable feeling of pride and overconfidence.  The Greeks believed that the gods would punish someone who was guilty of hubris, and there were those on the team who were convinced that was the reason Dynamite! had never won a game in which I had used my rubber stamp.

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The infamous “Curse of the Bambino” ended when the Boston Red Sox won the 2004 World Series and ended the team’s 86-year-long championship drought.  (It still grieves me deeply to read that sentence.)

Well, if there was a “Curse of the Rubber Stamp,” it lost its grip on Dynamite! this week when our team cruised to a convincing victory over 19 other teams – including our two most bitter rivals.

But the victory was not without controversy.  When I walked up to collect our team’s prize, the game’s host told me that there had been allegations by some of the whiny b*tches that we had beaten like a rented mule that night that Dynamite! had not won fair and square.

Specifically, those LOSERS had complained to him that our team had used more than seven players – seven being the maximum number of players a team can have under Pourhouse Trivia’s rules.

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Unlike “Deflategate,” the “Triviagate” controversy can be understood without knowledge of the Ideal Gas Law.  

Suffice it to say that I sit at the bar during trivia – not at a table, like most teams – because I play with the bartenders, and it would be impossible for me to communicate with the bartenders as they worked  if I sat at a table instead of at the bar.

It’s easy to see how many players are on a team that’s sitting at a table.  But at the bar, people are constantly coming and going.  

The reason why some of our trivia rivals believe we have more than seven players results from the fact that there’s a cornhole tournament each week in an adjacent room.

I’ve become friendly with many of the cornhole crowd.  One of our Dynamite! regulars is the wife of a cornhole competitor, and a couple of our occasional participants are cornholers who join us once they are eliminated from the cornhole competition. 

But there is a constant stream of cornhole kibitzers coming and going by our players because we sit near the location where they come to pick up their beers and settle their tabs.  “Are you winning?” someone may say as he waits for an IPA.  “What was the answer to question X?” another one may ask, referring to a question that he heard asked ten minutes earlier.

It’s all perfectly innocent – believe you me, I know exactly who is contributing to Dynamite! by suggesting answers to me, and I make sure that no more than seven people are participating on any given Tuesday.  

But consistent winners in any sport – e.g., the New York Yankees and New England Patriots – often find themselves envied.  And the same is true of Dynamite!

As the 19th-century French author Victor Hugo once wrote: “The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.”

Hugo wasn’t writing about the petty people who accused Dynamite! of cheating.  But he could have been.

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One way for the members of Dynamite! to express our opinion of those who have unjustly accused us of cheating would be to change our team name and order t-shirts with the new team name printed on them.

The photos that appear throughout this post show some of the potential new team names that we seriously considered.

I was tempted to quote Hank Hill’s high-school football coach – you can click here to hear what that coach used to say when Hank’s team was losing at halftime – but it was too long to fit on a t-shirt.

So I decided that the best choice would be something that former major-league pitcher Joey Eischen once said about Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos.

You see, when the Montreal Expos moved to our nation’s capital and became the Washington Nationals in 2005, Angelos was not happy.  That’s because the stadiums where the Nationals and the Orioles play are less than an hour’s drive apart, and Angelos feared that his train-wreck Orioles team was going to suffer at the box office once there was another baseball team in the area.

When Eischen – who was then a pitcher for the Nationals – heard that Angelos was unhappy, he noted that the Nationals were in Washington to stay, and told the Baltimore owner to get over himself in these well-chosen words:

HE’S GOING TO HAVE TO SUCK ON IT AND LIKE IT!

I think that expresses my feelings about the teams who whined that Dynamite! was cheating rather nicely:

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Ice-T has been a regular on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit for years, does TV commercials for Geico and others, and recently competed on The Masked Dancer.

But back in the day he was a pimp, a bank robber, and a gangsta rapper whose song “Cop Killer” was widely condemned thanks to lyrics like these:

I got my twelve-gauge sawed-off

I got my headlights turned off

I'm ’bout to bust some shots off

I'm ’bout to dust some cops off

I'm a COP KILLER!

“Don’t Hate the Playa” was released in 1999 on Ice-T’s seventh studio album, The Seventh Deadly Sin.

Click here to listen to “Don’t Hate the Playa.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.