Surveying the Scene (It Landscape)

I’m pretty tough to play trivia games against. By that, I mean that my friends tend to get frustrated, since I continually answer obscure and random questions. Back when one of my friends had a Trivial Pursuit 1990s edition, I had to answer all the questions on a single card in order to get a pie piece.

I attribute my success to a past drenched in pop culture and reading when I should have been accumulating actual knowledge. Instead of learning things like Biology and Chemistry, I was normally more interested in reading books about the fight for late night between Leno and Letterman after Carson, or about how Miramax rose from a seedy re-cutter of films to an actual Hollywood powerhouse. When it comes to games like Trivial Pursuit, this knowledge is useful, but I tend to be an iffy Jeopardy! player.

My supernatural skills raised their head again this past week, when I was dominating a game of Scene It Second Edition trivia. Sure, I had never played before, but why should that stop me from doing really, really well?

The rules of the game help a player of my talents. Because a good portion of the questions are free-for-alls, I was able to out-answer a couple of the other players. It also helped that I was the oldest person playing, at 27. (That still doesn’t explain why I was able to answer questions about “Fast Eddie” Felson, since that movie came out in 1961.)

In contrast, I really struggled when we played Pass The Popcorn. It’s essentially Trivial Pursuit with just movie questions, but you can really minimize a better player because of the categories. (Basically, you’re allowed to swap category cards each time it’s your turn. This meant that people would just keep swapping until they didn’t have a card that matched mine or my friend Lisa’s, the other strong player in the game.)

Also, this whole post reminds me that I still haven't found anyone to play Scene It SNL or Simpsons against me. I have both games, but challengers have been tough to come by. Curses.

The Wikipedia groupthink

[Left] The first result on Google Images for "wikipedia monster." Thanks to this site for providing it.

Over the years, Wikipedia has morphed from a quirky, somewhat-encyclopedic place that I could find out everything I ever wanted to know about Top Chef, Top Cat and Topps baseball cards to some weird organization paralyzed by a collective mind. Just in case you can't tell from the wording I've used, and the title of this entry, I'm somewhat against this shift.

Slate reporter Chris Wilson has done a couple good articles, here and here, which show that a small percentage of Wikipedia users are responsible for the vast majority of the edits to the site. Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing – The accuracy of Wikipedia has improved as a result, and silly (but funny) things like Stephen Colbert getting everyone to change the elephant page are edited out pretty quickly.

The downside has been an adherence to some destructive policies, namely, the elimination of trivia and fancruft from articles. Maybe it is just because I have a journalism degree, but I think this is the new weak spot of Wiki's collective editing mind. While trivia sections, by their definition, are not important information, they are interesting. I like reading quirky little facts in articles about obscure subjects; they help flesh out characters, whether you're reading a novel or an encyclopedia entry. I understand that the editors are shooting for a collection of objective fact, but why not shoot a little higher and go for a collection of interesting, objective fact? It seemed to work out quite well for Hemingway, when he was a journalist, and George Plimpton.

Because the groupthink has been given the edict to cut down on the trivia, Wikipedia is now a less interesting place for me to visit. Oh, sure – When I want to read up on a certain subject, it and Google are still the two sites I consult first. But it has traded the sheer, utter depth it used to possess for a sort of quasi-professionalism. There didn't seem to be much thought given to the idea of integrating tidbits, regardless of how small they were, instead of making “yes no” value judgments.

And getting personal for a second, looking at some of the edit histories for Wiki's most active editors can be downright scary, in terms of the time devoted. While there should be some praise given for what is an altruistic deed – contributing to a common encyclopedia for all of the Internet to use – I feel that the personality type of such an editor is showing through in the writing. If you have the time, and more importantly the drive, to do so much editing, then creativity and art are probably secondary concerns, and I definitely think this is reflected in the current quality of articles.

Computer buying, Casey's trivia and other lows

[Left] I could have used Elizabeth Bogush, the redhead from the KGB commercials, last night. Then again, who couldn't? Thanks to AdRants for the photo.

First, as a procedural note, sorry about the late posting of this entry. Unfortunately, I went non-stop from about 9 a.m. Thursday to 4 a.m. Friday, between work and the trivia finals at Casey's (more on that later). I slept in until about noon today, but because of that, I was working from 1 p.m. to just now. Whew!

Anyway, to reference the title first: Can anyone recommend a good laptop for me to buy? Money is a priority, so the cheaper the better, but things like bundled software don't matter as much to me. The only real requirement would be a big hard drive - I'm a pack rat when it comes to files, and I'd want something at least as big as my current desktop hard drive, which is 120 gig. Hopefully, I'd also use this laptop to get rid of my desktop. And I don't want an Apple / Mac.

As for why I need a new laptop, time to get on to the personal stuff. My laptop overheated and the battery is completely shot, probably because the fans don't work properly. It's about five years old and kind of beat up at this point, so it would probably be better to replace it now as opposed to trying another band-aid fix.

On top of the laptop breaking, my team came in second at the Casey's trivia finals last night. That sounds pretty good, except that we lost out on first place by ONE POINT! Ugh. What gives??? The sad thing is that there were several questions - What was actor Fred Thompson's character name on Law and Order, what character danced while he sliced an ear off in Reservoir Dogs - that I should have gotten. So frustrating to be so close to winning, only to have it "yoinked!" from us.

Fat guys

For no particular reason outside of needing more books to read, I've recently been reading two biographies about fat guys. Elvis: The Final Years by Jerry Hopkins is rather self-explanatory, yet incredibly interesting to me, since I have no real knowledge of Elvis' material.

Well, actually, I shouldn't say that I'm completely ignorant of the King. My mind works like a sponge when it comes to pop culture trivia, so of course I've sucked up some bits about Elvis. Before reading this (somewhat) authorized biography, I knew he had a couple songs – “Jailhouse Rock” and “Hound Dog” that either created movies or arose out of them. I knew that when he appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, he had to be filmed from the waist up because his dance moves were too scandalous for the audience at home. I knew that he had Colonel Parker, a flashy, entertaining promoter, who was kind of like the white Don King.

Whenever I'm reading a biography, I always look for a balanced account of a person, and Hopkins' fares pretty well in this regard. While he is very detailed about Elvis' generosity, it doesn't seem over-the-top, and it is balanced with all the pill binges and temper tantrums from his final years. Hopkins does his best to break up the cyclical nature of a music biography – go to town, perform, go to next town, perform, rest, etc. – with stories about Elvis' early days and his excess.

For example, instead of starting out with mundane details about Elvis' life growing up and military service, Hopkins gives the background and sets the scene for the King's famous meeting with the nastiest U.S. President of all-time, Richard Nixon. (For more on Nixon, read anything by Hunter S. Thompson from the 1970s. Nixon will always be my famous president because of all the sleazy things he did; there is sort of a sad humor to it all.) Elvis arranged the meeting with Nixon to offer his services as a sort of double-agent, able to infiltrate the music industry to help curb rampant illegal drug usage and anti-Americanism. The irony is that Elvis was almost surely on quite the drug cocktail himself at the time, albeit a vaguely-legal one, since his many uppers and downers were all prescribed.

The Elvis book really shines when it tells these sorts of stories, and I also enjoyed how it sprinkled in little tidbits and anecdotes in the context of the times. Whenever Elvis performed, janitors would have to deal with hundreds of pairs of soiled underwear left behind by the female audience members, which is hilarious to the seven-year-old part of my humor. Also interesting was the description of an Elvis “record” production. On any given record in the 1970s, only a few songs would be true originals, and almost none would feature just Elvis singing. Almost every record was comprised primarily of material first recorded by other artists, or featured songs that Elvis had already recorded decades ago. The money-making schemes by artists of today are nothing compared to Elvis and Colonel Parker.

The other biography is a bit more by the numbers and traditional, but since the topic is Alfred Hitchcock, it is still an engrossing read. It is more than 600 pages though, densely packed with information in standard type, so it is slow going through it. I've finished about 200 pages in two days, a slow pace for me, and Hitch still hasn't made it to America, so there has been no reference to the films I actually know of – The Birds, Psycho and North by Northwest. Reading about his British films is interesting – I now want to check out The Man Who Knew Too Much, for example – but I still do have a sense of “When do I get to the good stuff?” hanging over my reading. I'm willing to stick with it for now, primarily because the remaining library books I have out are kind of fluffy books about some of the worst films of all-time.