Do you know this man?

On February 5, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I do a trivia question every week. It’s usually a history question of some sort, and the stakes are low; you can get the answer any way you want except for asking me (it’s literally impossible to cheat) and if you get it right you get a piece of candy on Friday. If you get it wrong nothing happens. Some kids do it every week, some when the mood strikes them or a friend offers them the answer, and some will pretend in late May that they never heard me mention it.

I usually theme the questions at least a little bit, and since it’s Black History Month I figured I’d highlight some figures from history and see how many the kids could identify. My building is pretty diverse, which I’m not using as a code word for “mostly Black,” I mean genuinely pretty well-mixed. That said, I’m not really expecting many of them, if any at all, to immediately recognize that fine gentleman up there; my theory was they’d either take a picture of the picture and ask some adults or do a reverse Google Image search, which I believe has been the process for the handful of correct answers I’ve received so far.

(Yes, I know “Who is this?” is not a trivia question in the classic sense of the term. Shut up. It’s my game and I can do it however I want. Next week will be Mae Jemison, I think.)

Anyway, the insistence from the first several kids that gave me answers that that was either MLK Jr. or fucking Steve Harvey has me questioning my sanity. And it wasn’t like it was white kids being clowns, either. At least one Black student asked me in apparent seriousness if it was King. I’m not supposed to give them help one way or another but I needed to shut that down immediately if I planned on surviving the week.

So. Without any research or double-checking, do you know who that is?

#WeekendCoffeeShare: White People edition

On February 7, 2016February 7, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories4 Comments

coffee2

If we were having coffee, I’d brag for a bit about my insane performance at trivia night last night. I am smart and know a lot of stuff, but success at a trivia competition tends to be at least partially a function of the luck of the draw, because the categories are so critical to how you do. I’ve only done these three times, but the previous two I wasn’t terribly useful because the categories were all in my bad spots. This trivia night? Ten categories, four of which were “David Bowie,” “Star Wars,” “Movie Quotes,” and “The 1990s.”

I kicked every bit of the ass, is what I’m saying. We were tied for first place, only missing one question out of the first 70, until the “Super Bowl” round happened, and our one sports guy had virtually no backup. Then there was the “Indiana History” round, where we missed a couple of questions we shouldn’t have because of team miscommunication, and we ended up in 4th place out of about 50 teams. So, still, not bad, but we literally missed seven of our eight questions in two rounds.

Also badass: the tiebreaker is predicting how many points your team will get right. I campaigned hard for 92 at the beginning and lost. Our final score? 92.

Other than that, I refer you to this post from 2014, because the experience was basically identical, right down to hearing someone call for Ray Lee Ray and looking around and having the incredibly rare and insanely problematic thought my god I’m the only black person in the room float through my head.

I am not a black person, obviously, and I should never be thinking such things. However, I suspect that were things like Trivia Night graded on a curve, I would be Yaphet Kotto. Because holy shit are these things white.

The cheesecake went over quite well, by the way.

Speaking of sports: I understand that the Super Bowl is today, and it’s entirely possible that if we were having coffee that subject might come up. I did not watch the Super Bowl last year, and as a result I missed seeing Missy Elliott live. This year, Beyoncé is performing, and the rumor is she’ll be performing the single she dropped yesterday. I will not be repeating that mistake. Let’s take a moment:

(Will that work? I dunno. It doesn’t appear to be available for embedding on YouTube.)

(Holy shit! It looks like it worked!)

At any rate, prior to going to the trivia night I’d been listening to and watching that over and over again, and if there’s any chance that that song is getting performed live at the Super Bowl I’m ferdamnsure gonna be watching.

The fact that I’d been watching that over and over again– and, more importantly, watching the reaction to it on Twitter– might also have had something to do with the cultural whiplash upon arriving at the Snow Folk Palace later that evening, by the way.

So, yeah. Are you having people over for the sportsenation? Tell me what you’re cooking.

In which there’s some lint in there

On May 1, 2015May 2, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

WARNING: This is the whiniest, most inside-baseball ridiculous no-one-who-matters-will-ever-see-this whiny blog post of all time, so either click away while you still can or brace yourself.

This is Irish Dave. He has apparently decided on his own that he wants to be called that; I didn’t come up with the name. He’s the new morning DJ on the radio station that I usually listen to on my way in to work. (Left aside for now: why I bother listening to terrestrial radio. I have reasons; I don’t know that they’re any good.)

Anyway, he’s the new morning DJ, and they’ve completely redone the show now that he’s on it. It’s called the New Fun Way to have Fun Fun in the Morning while You’re Having Fun and Waking Up To Have Fun, or something ridiculous like that, and Irish Dave is the host. The previous morning show had a stupid trivia question segment that happened to coincide with my morning drive in to work; they’d basically quote a statistic (“40% of women say this never happens to them… but it does!”) and challenge the viewers to come up with the answer and give away some stupid prize.

On Irish Dave’s show, they’ve done something similar, and in the same time slot, except it’s appreciably dumber. He calls it the Whiz Kid segment, but the ads and promos call it Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader, because god help us if we want to be original ever and the best thing to do is to steal other people’s dumb ideas. Here’s the problem: there’s no actual being smarter than the fifth grader; it’s just a kid reading the question, and frankly she’s reading it poorly– her delivery is syllable-by-syllable and halting as hell, and as a teacher I think she really needs to work on her fluency. It’s awful. But she’s not competing at all, they’ve just got a little kid asking the question for some entirely unclear reason. Occasionally Irish Dave pretends she’s calling in live. This is obviously not true at all and I don’t understand why he bothers.

This was this morning’s question, rendered word-for-word:

“Between 1845 and 1847, three fourths of one million people and hundreds of thousands of others emigrated to the United States. What caused this tragedy?”

A couple things about this. First, the style of the questions now make this shit much less fun. I knew right away it was the potato famine, but it’s not fun guessing if you don’t immediately know. That was the fun thing about the previous segment– the stats were always ridiculously generic and the answers could really be just about anything. This is a history question. You either know it or you don’t.

And it’s a horribly phrased trivia question. First of all, the kid’s reading the question badly, because no one ever says “three fourths of one million.” It sounds weird, but it’s written as a fraction on the sheet of paper she’s reading from and she’s a fifth grader so she doesn’t know to say quarters. Second, what the fuck is the deal about “3/4 of a million people” and “hundreds of thousands of others“? What the hell are these “others”? Are they people? Horses? Lice?

Finally, the actual emigration isn’t the actual tragedy. The famine was the tragedy. The famine didn’t cause the tragedy of emigration, the famine was the tragedy that caused the emigration. Did the fifth-grader write the question?

Fucking dumb.

On an entirely unrelated note, all of my books for the signing have shown up. I don’t know that I ever officially announced this, but I redid the cover and the interior for Skylights before printing the 30 copies that I’ll have with me for the signing. Here’s what the new cover looks like:

Pretty, innit? So if you order the print edition of Skylights (or buy it at the signing) it’ll look a bit better than the earlier version did.

In which I am terrified

On February 2, 2014February 2, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy9 Comments

simpsons You may have noticed; I’ve talked about it around here as recently as last week: I tend to be a homebody. I used to be a lot more social than I am now, but it takes quite a bit to overcome my societal inertia nowadays. Like… I dunno, a superhero movie. That’s about it.

A couple of weeks ago I committed to being part of a team for a fundraiser trivia night. I did this when “February 1” sounded like it was way off in the future, so far off that I’d never actually live that long. My wife, a bigger fan of trivia than I, also committed. Then we realized on Thursday night that February 1 was in two days and sorta had to scramble for a babysitter. Whoops.

I was at OtherJob all day Saturday, watching shitty weather happening and dealing with a miserably low number of customers. I got a lot of stuff done, but I got no school stuff done at all and so I got home in kind of a crappy mood and in no way interested in mingling with puny humans. The fact that a solid majority of the people we were competing with were going to be strangers made it worse. I don’t do mingling well. I am worse at mingling when in a preexisting bad mood.

My wife made me go. I scowled, but I agreed.

Trivia Night was at the Fraternal Order of Police’s bingo hall. I’d never been in the part of town where it was; easy enough directions, but a lot of looking around for the place we’re going, in the dark and bad-visibility snow.

Oh! Look! A bingo hall. My wife notes that there’s no signage declaring the place to be an FOP.

“There’s no way in hell there’s two bingo halls on the same road,” I say, and we pull in. And we drive past the place. There’s bingo happening inside, and I can’t quite describe why but the place, which was all windows in front, looked like it very well could have been the most depressing building on the planet. I wanted to kill myself just driving past it.

And it was pretty clearly not the FOP. Weird. Well, back on the road.

Two minutes later, we’re driving past a second bingo hall. “This has to be it,” I said, and then we noticed the entire building was dark. So… that’s two bingo halls, on the same road, and neither of them is the one we’re looking for?

Where the hell am I and what the hell is going on? Am I still on Earth? Is it still 2014?

No, the bingo hall we wanted was the third such hall on the same road. We found it. The parking lot was packed, and mostly unplowed. We had to drive entirely around the building and park behind it. There are what looks like millions of people trying to crowd into this place, and my misanthropy has already been well and truly activated.

We walk in. Now, we’re supposed to pay to get in, and the table is registered under the name of one of the members of our group, which makes me think there’s an assigned table for us. We walk in and there’s like fifty tables scattered around, none of them numbered. There’s a woman standing by the door who looks semi-official, but me making eye contact with her just makes her look at me funny, and she doesn’t have any paperwork or anything with her, so we’re… just supposed to look around, I guess? And pay… somebody? Eventually?

Luckily for me our group ended up being by the door; I don’t think I had the heart to search for too long.

Two things become immediately apparent to me: one, I should have taken the “bring a snack” suggestion that I was given much more seriously. There are 45-50 teams of 10 here. These motherfuckers have decked their tables out like goddamn Thanksgiving dinner. They look like they’re tailgating at the Super Bowl. “Snack” does not quite cover it– “each team member will bring enough food to feed thirty people” is slightly more accurate. I spent a moment considering just wandering around the room and seizing food from people’s tables, first to see if they’d even notice, and second to see if they would let me.

Not a joke: one table I walked past several times over the course of the night had six large pizza boxes on the table. For ten people. And there was a lot of other food that was not pizza. Our table, mostly composed of newcomers who had no idea of the, uh, local culture, had a meat and cheese plate, some brownies and a sad-ass bag of Krunchers. And Bek and I hadn’t even brought that.

The second apparent thing: What with judges and employees and bartenders and everything else in addition to the teams there are six hundred people in this place and every single damn one of them is white. Weird fact about me: I am as pasty-complexioned as one can be and I avoid the sun as one avoids the wrath of God, but large groups of white people make me deeply nervous. I spent twenty damn minutes trying to find, at the very least, somebody who looked like they might have had a Hispanic grandparent or, hell, somebody vaguely Jewish-looking, and nope. Nothing. So as soon as these folks get all het up about whatever white Republicans who go to FOP trivia nights like to get het up about, they’re gonna find my ass.

I look under the table to see if there are hoods and robes. No such luck.

Then the PA announcement for, I swear to God, “Ray Lee Ray” to come to the judges’ table, and I had to be physically restrained from fleeing. Nothing good ever happened around anybody who was named Ray twice. And if Ray Lee Ray is running shit then I need to get myself gone, now.

I brace myself for the prayer before the trivia night starts. Amazingly, it doesn’t happen. Which causes me to relax, just a tiny bit.

There’s actually no punch line to this story; once the actual event got rolling and everybody sat down and stopped creeping me out, it was fun and went well. I just did not walk in remotely prepared for what I was going to be greeted by, which is my fault. We got 82 of the 100 questions right, and it probably should have been a little higher– there was at least one question that we would have gotten right if, like an idiot, I had not overlooked the existence of an “all the above” answer, a fact that aggravates me deeply, because I yell at my kids for that kind of shit all the time. That wasn’t a high enough score to place. The wife won a gift basket. And I had a bizarre moment at a urinal that I may save for another post. (How’s that for burying the lede?)

But, yeah: I live in a place where there are three bingo halls within a two-mile stretch of the same damn road. I may need to move.