Perpetual Jet Lag

You can't trust anyone lately

Lede from a story on CNN.com today, "Shuttle returns to space":

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida (CNN) -- Discovery roared into the skies over Florida Tuesday morning as NASA returned to shuttle space flight for the first time since the 2003 Columbia disaster.

Under a blue, nearly cloudless sky, the spacecraft lifted off at 10:39 a.m. ET, as scheduled.

CNN seems to be following the same standard as NY1's meteorologists: "blue, nearly cloudless sky" means, roughly, overcast with a 30% chance of rain.

Man, that's classy

If you win a fairly competitive contest of useless knowledge, and perhaps more importantly if you do so with the thinnest possible margin of victory, do you:

1. Cheer in triumph, accept the trophy and cash prize from the host, and perform an old school Arsenio arm pump?
2. Trudge sheepishly to the stage, grudgingly take the trophy and prize, and shrug your shoulders to the assembled crowd?
3. Scream "Fuck yeah!" as you approach the stage, raise both middle fingers high above your head, seize the trophy and prize, then spend the rest of the evening complaining at the top of your lungs that you "can't stand to be in the same room with all these losers"?

If you answered (c), you could qualify to be the captain of "Team: The Musical."

So yes, we lost last night, coming in fifth -- which in itself was something of a miracle. We didn't do nearly as badly on the "Country and/or Western" audio round as we thought we would have, getting 18/20 on country "standards" like Waylon Jennings, Patsy Kline, and Tammy Wynette.

We did, however, suck absolute hairy ass on the final general knowledge round, getting maybe 4 of 14. We also had several near misses, where we (a.) really should have known the answer, giving I'd seen it on NY1 two days prior, and (b.) second-guessed a quieter team member who thought they knew but didn't fight for it. Luckily the abysmal performance on the final round salvaged the team dynamic, since if we'd lost by one I think we'd have torn each other's windpipes out over some of the more egregious answers.

We now look forward to August 8th, focused with steely gazes on rubbing a win right in that bald geek's face.

[I completely guessed on the right syntax in HTML to make a lettered ordered list, BTW. Which adds no points to my overall score, but still.]

Title Defense

OK, apparently we're a pretty smart group of geeks, we are.

The Fantastic Fournicators successfully defended our Big Quiz Thing title tonight, narrowly winning by 1/2 of a point. At several points, particularly in rounds 4 and 5, we thought all was lost. The only real "miss" (where someone had it but we wrote another answer) was that the Von Trapps went on to found a ski resort at Stowe, VT. (The answer, "The Sound of Music", was eschewed in favor of "The Unsinkable Molly Brown.") The rest was just stuff we didn't know, and guessed poorly at. (Come on, "Golden Sombrero?" What the hell does that have to do with anything?)

Thankfully Wednesday's special event at the Manhattan JCC is not a "league" match, so even though half of us can't make it on Wednesday, we can still defend our title on the 25th. After all, there's geek pride and a $20 personal take at stake.

Planning Ahead Update

I've started planning Jenny's birthday festivities in earnest. Many will be receiving notices, invitations, etc. eventually, though there are lots and lots of things still to coordinate.

As a sort of status update, and to illustrate how absolutely irretrievably geeky I am, see the current map of potential venues below. (Click for larger.) In case you're wondering, yes, I did reconstruct this by hand from several Google Maps searches.