Month: January 2020

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Super Bowl Trivia Questions!!!

So the Big Game is coming up, and you’ll probably want some trivia questions for your Big Game party! In that spirit, here are some for your freebie use. I have not grouped these in any way, nor am I ranking them by any idea of difficulty. Answers are in the comments for the post. Enjoy, and may your preferred team end the game with more points than the other one!

1. What is the highest combined point total in a Super Bowl?

2. What is the lowest combined point total in a Super Bowl?

3. What winning team scored the fewest points?

4. What losing team scored the most points?

5. What is the oldest existing venue to have hosted a Super Bowl?

6. What is the oldest existing stadium that is home to an NFL team to have hosted a Super Bowl?

7. What is the last Super Bowl to be played in a stadium that was not home to an NFL team?

8. According to a Super Bowl-related episode of THE SIMPSONS, who are the favorite teams of Homer Simpson and Moe Szylack?

9. Three American Idol winners have performed the National Anthem at Super Bowls. Which ones?

10. These two teams have met in three Super Bowls.

11. These teams have each met in two Super Bowls.

12. These three teams are 1-0 in the Super Bowl.

13. This is the only team to be currently undefeated in multiple trips to the Super Bowl.

14. As of 2020, this team has gone the longest without returning to the Super Bowl.

15. As of 2020, this team went the longest between Super Bowl victories.

16. To date, this is the only Super Bowl whose participants played their home games in the same state.

17. Following each of this team’s last two Super Bowl victories, the starting quarterback for both games retired. Name the team and the two quarterbacks who retired as champions.

18. These teams have won at least four Super Bowls.

19. These teams have lost at least four Super Bowls.

20. This player is the only special teams player to have been named Super Bowl MVP.

21. The team with the NFL’s season rushing champion has advanced to the Super Bowl only four times. Name the players, the teams, and the Super Bowls.

22. Since the NFL adopted a 16-game regular season, seven teams have posted records of 15-1 or better. Only two of those have won Super Bowls, however. Name the two champions, and the remainder of the teams and their results.

23. This is the only team to win the Super Bowl after being outscored during the regular season.

24. Over the course of 12 months, this city hosted the NHL Stanley Cup Finals, the World Series, the Super Bowl, and the NCAA Final Four. Which city was it, and which Super Bowl was hosted?

25. Four coaches have each lost the Super Bowl four times apiece. Name them.

26. Which of the following has never happened in a Super Bowl: a punt return for a touchdown, two wild-card teams meeting in the Super Bowl, a team playing a Super Bowl on its own home field, or a head coach winning a Super Bowl with two different teams?

27. Name the four teams that have as yet never reached the Super Bowl.

28. In only two Super Bowls did neither team commit a turnover. Which ones?

29. The closest geographical proximity between the two cities represented in a Super Bowl was 164 miles. Which two cities, and which Super Bowl?

30. What is the earliest in a Super Bowl that a winning team has taken its final lead?

31. No team has ever won three consecutive Super Bowl championships. What two teams came closest to doing so?

Enjoy, and go Chiefs (although a 49ers win would not leave me unhappy)!

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Something for Thursday

Listening to this piece might lead one to assume that it is perhaps a movement from a larger sacred work for baritone, chorus, and orchestra, but it is not: It’s a piece of film music, composed by Patrick Doyle for Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 production of Shakespeare’s Henry V. This piece comes after the Battle of Agincourt, when it becomes clear that the vastly-outnumbered English host has in fact routed the French. King Henry says this:

Do we all holy rites:
Let there be sung Non nobis and Te Deum,
The dead with charity enclos’d in clay;
And then to Callice, and to England then,
Where ne’er from France arriv’d more happy men.

Composer Doyle–for whom Henry V was the first major film project–wrote a penetrating and lyrical theme of both sadness and hope to accompany a long tracking shot as King Henry marches across the field of battle, carrying one of his English casualties on his back. Braveheart gets a lot of credit for the brutality of its battle scenes, but Henry V was there first, depicting medieval battlefields as places of churned mud and bloody filth. Doyle’s soaring sacred piece soars above all of this, building and building from the soloist onward as more and more of the musical forces join in. The result is sublimely effective, and it’s easy to see why Branagh has returned to Patrick Doyle for his filmscores in many, if not all, of his subsequent directorial efforts.

Here is “Non nobis domine” from Henry V.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

In his lifetime Hector Berlioz wrote three operas (four, if you count the “Dramatic legend” La Damnation de Faust, which is sometimes staged as an opera even though its long passages of purely orchestral music make such staging difficult). The first is rarely heard on the opera stages of the world today owing to its high degree of difficulty for the singers, but the opera isn’t completely forgotten, as its overture is frequently heard in concert halls. Benvenuto Cellini is based on the memoirs of the Renaissance sculptor of the same name. In addition to fine sculpture, Cellini left behind an autobiography that has been hailed as the finest autobiography ever written, and which represents one of the finest accounts of Renaissance Italy written by a contemporary. Berlioz had a deep love of all things literary, which informed all of his music, including the opera Benvenuto Cellini. Even though this opera failed (and only one of Berlioz’s three operas, Beatrice et Benedict, was a success during his life), Berlioz–ever the recycler–made use of some of its material in one of his most famous works, the Roman Carnival overture.

Here is the overture to Hector Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini.

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Something for Thursday

As noted the other day, conductor and pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy has retired from public performance. Ashkenazy was born in 1937 in Russia, but in the 1960s he emigrated to the West where he has lived ever since, starting with London and then to Reykjavik and then to Switzerland. His output as a pianist and a conductor propel him into thie highest ranks of musicians of the last fifty years. The other day I featured Ashkenazy as a conductor; today I present him as a performer in his natural element.

Thank you for the music, Vladimir Ashkenazy!

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Plannie McPlannerson

Now that I've written four books of a nine-book series, I should probably nail down the backstory! #amwriting #writersofinstagram

 

So last week I wrote about the various issues that arise when writing not just one novel but a series of novels, and wouldn’t you know it! I am running up against those issues right now.

In just a couple of weeks I start doing my next round of revisions for The Savior Worlds (The Song of Forgotten Stars, book 4), which is the volume in the series that kicks the larger story into real motion. That being the case, it’s suddenly clear to me that I need to really codify, if only for my own use right now, the backstory of this saga.

If you’ve read the three currently-published Forgotten Stars books (and why on Earth would you not have read them! They’re terrific, even in my biased opinion!), you know that I drop a lot of small and not-so-small hints and tidbits about the nature and history of the long-lost, long-fallen Arrilori Star Empire. I did this because the main planet of the first three books, Xonareth, was once a member of that empire but was banished and forbidden to travel to the stars until the Arrilori returned to set them free…and there they waited, and waited, and waited, while the Arrilori fell completely and utterly into ruin. Xonareth is, as I’ve mentioned before, the planetary society equivalent of those fabled Japanese soldiers who spent decades on deserted islands in the Pacific, never knowing that World War II ended.

But as the second act of The Song of Forgotten Stars dawns and is now taking shape, it’s starting to become important to hand out more and more information about the Arrilori Star Empire. It’s time to flesh out the backstory.

And all I have of that backstory right now is…hints and tidbits. I have a very “big picture” version of what I know befell the Arrilori and their galactic empire, but I need more than that. This is what I meant in the post about series writing, in that you need to do more ground work when you’re doing a series that tells a single, large story.

You may now be asking, “Hey dummy, shouldn’t you have already done all that work?” Well…maybe, maybe not. That’s where the whole “plotter versus pantser” thing comes into play, after all. But also in this case I knew that I could get away with the first three books in the series without a complete picture of who the Arrilori were and how everything they built came to ruin. I had the luxury of being able to throw in some cool stuff here, a few hints there, a couple of juicy tidbits sprinkled throughout. I was leaving puzzle pieces for myself as a storyteller, and now it’s time to put the pieces together for myself before I go on to do it for the readers.

At least, that’s the plan. Plans can go awry, of course….

See you ’round the Galaxy,

-K.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

I’ll have more to say about this later in the week, but for now I learned yesterday that one of my musical heroes, pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, has retired from public performance. Ashkenazy has been a giant of the music world for more than sixty years, and his performances–both at the keyboard and on the podium–always have a good deal of excitement behind them. In my opinion, Ashkenazy’s cycle of the three symphonies of Sergei Rachmaninov have never been equaled. (One day I’ll write the long paean to the Rachmaninov Second that’s been in my head for years.)

While Ashkenazy might well be most closely associated with Russian and Slavic music, he was no one-trick pony. Here he is conducting Debussy, about as spiritually far from the heavy Russian Romanticism of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov you can get and yet still remain in roughly the same time period. Debussy’s La Mer is a three-part work, called “symphonic sketches” by the composer, who wanted to avoid the associations of the symphony and the symphonic poem. Debussy often worked to throw off formal constraints in a way that is not unlike his earlier countryman, Hector Berlioz. La Mer is deeply evocative and masterful in its use of orchestral textures to convey Debussy’s impressions of the sea.

Here is La Mer by Claude Debussy, performed by the Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the great Vladimir Ashkenazy.

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I’m progressive!

In more ways than just the political, mind you. My lenses, for one!

The new specs help my Stare Of Withering Intensity! #eyeglasses #spectacles #newglasses #newglasseswhodis

Yes, it was finally time for new glasses. I’ve been mildly farsighted since my college years, when I found that I was getting headaches when doing heavy reading and computer work, so I’ve had prescription glasses for those kinds of scenarios ever since then. My prescription has changed a few times in the years since, but never much, and my last pair of glasses (acquired in 2009!) only themselves became necessary when my previous pair (acquired in 2001!) became scratched to the point that they were annoying to wear.

Last time I visited the actual eye doctor for an eye exam, though, he indicated that I had in the course of time and age and all that stuff gone from farsighted to being mildly nearsighted, which explained why I’d been noticing that stuff in the distance was increasingly blurry. The worst effect of this was driving and noticing that street signs and such were much harder for me to read than they had once been. So, enter The Wife’s new job with its spiffy vision plan, and off to the optometrist. An hour or so of exam-stuff later (“Which is clearer? 1 or 2? 1 or 2? Read the bottom line…no? the next one up…no? How about now?”), another hour or so of looking at frames and talking about lens options, and a week for the new lenses to be ground, here I am, with new glasses.

New glasses, friends! And after being farsighted most of my life, my eyes have flipped the other way, so hello, progressive lenses! #eyeglasses #spectacles #newglasses #newglasseswhodis

And let me tell you, the difference for distance sight is amazing. I can see far off stuff with clarity that has been so long gone I didn’t realize it, but now that it’s back, I can’t believe it.

I could have chosen basic glasses for distance sight, and then removed them every time I wanted to read or write, but that seemed a pain in the ass, and anyway, I like the way glasses look. It’s much easier to look like your thinking thinkly things if you have a pair of glasses on! So I opted for dual lenses, which brought up the next option: bifocals or progressive lenses. I actually had bifocals for a time when I was in grade school, and while they worked, I really didn’t like the constant sharp line across the lower part of my vision, so I decided to get the progressive lenses where there is a transition between the “reading” section at the lower part of the lens and the “distance” part that takes up the upper half. I’m on Day Three of these glasses as I write this, so I’m still working out the kinks. I’m finding that I can’t really hold a book and my head at the same angles as before, and that I have to actually move my head slightly as I read if I’m holding the book at my usual closeness. This is kind of irritating on its own, so I’m trying to teach myself to hold books farther away from my eyes, which is also an adjustment. I’ll get there, but for now I’m having moments of clarity alternating with moments of wondering why I can’t see my book totally clearly, and figuring out why with a bit of finagling and fidgeting.

It’ll be fine. One thing that makes me a little nervous is only having one pair, now that I’ll be wearing these basically all the time. I figure I’ll be careful this year, and then next year I’ll get another exam and assuming that my prescription doesn’t change much between now and then, I’ll get a second pair and then either rotate them in and out or use one for work or…well, who knows. That’s a year away. Let me just get through the next year without breaking these! Luckily my track record on breaking glasses is…OK. There was the pair that I broke in college when I had them in my backpack and unfortunately landed right on top of them when my feet hit a patch of ice and went right out from under me. And then there was when I was in second grade, and I left my glasses (brown horn-rims, no less!) on the living room floor when I went to get something and then came running back in, having forgotten they were there, and only had time to register my mother screaming “YOUR GLASSES!” before I felt the crunch of eyeglasses under my foot.

Two broken pairs in 48 years isn’t bad, is what I’m trying to say.

Reading with the new specs. I'm still trying to figure out the 'sweet spots' for reading purposes.... #eyeglasses #spectacles #newglasses #newglasseswhodis

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