Chuck & Sean's Trivia: The answers for 09.09.07

Round 1


1. Who was the first woman to serve as a justice on the Supreme Court? Sandra Day O'Connor

2. What year of the Olympics were filmed in Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl's film Olympia Spiele? 1936

3. What is the first and last name of the character from that 70's show cast who is referred to as a "cocktail dad"? Red Forman

4. What is the highest waterfall on the Mississippi river? St. Anthony Falls

5. The rules of the very difficult and useless game golf is written jointly by two organizations, one in the U.S. and one in what country? Scotland

6. What rapper acted as the Mouse King in the Nutcracker at Baltimore's School for the Arts? 2pac

7. What Canadian-born architect, who designed a building in Minneapolis, also designed the trophy for the World Cup of Hockey? Frank Gehry

8. What month did Kurt Cobain die in in 1994? April

9. In 31 B.C. The Final War of the Roman Republic ended in the battle at Actium. Who won? Octavian, or Caesar

10. Billy Madison rises himself out of his hung-over pool side stupor at the beginning of the film Billy Madison when he realizes what special day it is. What day is it? Nudey Magazine Day

11. What city and state did Michael Moore grow up in? Flint, Michigan

12. What is the name of the first published novel by Chuck Palahniuk? Fight Club

13. What country is Lesotho entirely surrounded by? South Africa

14. What rite of passage, when directly translated is known as: one to whom the commandments apply? bar or bat mitzvah

15. Author Madeleine L'Engle died on Friday. What was her most popular book? A Wrinkle in Time

Round 2

1. What is Peter Griffin's sole response to all questions when he is on a parody of Jeopardy on the "Brian: Portrait of a Dog" episode? Diarrhea

2. What major Southern city was occupied by the Union early in the Civil War and was thus spared the destruction that many Southern cities endured during the Civil War? New Orleans (wikipedia.org)

3. In what city did Jimi Hendrix die? London, England (wiki)

4. Name the four inner planets? Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars

5. What is the most populuous city in Vietnam? Ho Chi Minh City

6. What are the names of the crash test dummies who are the mascots for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration? Vince and Larry

7. Who was the lead role in the TV show Monk originally written for? Michael Richards

8. What movie did Kevin Spacey win his first Oscar for? The Usual Suspects

9. Hmong people's original homeland is the mountainous Southern region of what country? China

10. The U.N. recognizes 192 countries, but most scholars agree there are 194 countries in the world. One country missing is an island, and the other one is completely within the borders of another country, name both. Taiwan, Vatican City

11. What non-coastal Western state has the lowest median age in the United States with a median age of 28.5? Utah

12. Which county has a higher Asian population, Hennepin or Ramsey county? Ramsey

13. In rap slang, if someone is a crooked eye sipper what does that mean? they drink st. ives malt liquor

14. What living singer, born in 1940, is the only vocalist to win Grammy's in three separate categories, jazz, pop and R&B? Al Jarreau

15. What title, used in numerous fields, literally means "holding a place"? lieutenant

Music Round


Daughter – Pearl Jam
The Rat – The Walkmen
The Beatles – Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite
50 Cent – 21 Questions
Death Cab for Cutie – Soul Meets Body

Chuck & Sean's Trivia: The answers for 09.02.07

EVERY SUNDAY NIGHT down at the 331 Club in Northeast Minneapolis, writer Chuck Terhark and musician Sean McPherson throwdown on some kickass trivia, and The Bottle Gang is proud to sponsor it. Starting this week, we'll be posting the questions and answers from last week's trivia for ONE WEEK ONLY, so study up and learn from your mistakes.

Round 1

1. Recently a baseball game between the Detroit Tigers and the New York Yankees resulted in a score of 0 to 16. Which team got 16? Detroit Tigers

2. What Seinfeld character said “you could throw a dart and find someone better than me” and also described himself as “steeped in gayness” in the same episode? George Castanza

3. Please name all seven counties in the Twin Cities seven county metro area? Anoka, Carver, Dakota, Hennepin, Ramsey, Scott, Washington

4. What are the O’s made of on the logo for the TV show Divorce Court? Wedding rings

5. What college was the crap show Felicity based on? New York University

6. Alberto Gonzales is a dipshit. Spell the dipshit’s last name? Gonzales

7. What state pays the most for redeeming used cans? Michigan, 10 cents

8. What state is Arlen Specter a senator from? Pennsylvania

9. What date and day of the week did the 35W bridge fall down on? Wednesday August 1, 2007

10. Mississippi is the fattest and poorest state in the United States. What pseudo Midwestern state is the slimmest state, with only 18% of the adult population being overweight? Colorado

11. Rupert Murdoch’s company bought the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago. What is the official name of the company that bought it? News Corp.

12. How many weeks does Billy Madison get to pass the tests for each grade in the amazing film, Billy Madison? 2 weeks

13. Who founded the Order of the Missionaries of Charity? Mother Teresa

14. Hurricane Felix is moving through the Carribean right now as we speak. What number Atlantic hurricane is Felix for this year? 6

15. Who is the first African-American Secretary of State? Colin Powell

Round 2

1. Was Saddam Hussein Sunni or Shia? Sunni

2. What was the 50th state to be joined into the Union? Hawaii

3. What year did Nixon unsuccessfully run for President? 1960

4. What is the capital of Egypt? Cairo

5. What was Bill Murray's character’s name in the Royal Tenenbaum's? Raleigh St. Clair

6. What is the name of the new head coach of the Gophers football team? Tim Brewster

7. What was Theodore Roosevelt doing in Minnesota when he first said “speak softly and carry a big stick” on September 2, 1901? Attending the Minnesota State Fair

8. Name one of the two closest bus routes that flank the 3-3-1 club. #17 & #11

9. Are the days on Mars longer or shorter than those on Earth? Longer, 24 hours 39 minutes

10. What is the total complement of genes in an organism or cell known as? Genome

11. Which gender is known as the homogametic sex in chromosomal studies? Women XX

12. What 2005 movie had the tagline, "the cure for the common man"? Hitch

13. Who is known as the father of geometry? Euclid

14. What type of Jewish bread is often used to make French toast in New York Diners? Challah

15. In 490 B.C. Pheidipides ran 26 miles, starting in Marathon to announce the Greeks success over the invading Persian. What city was he running to? Athens

A quick note about the Martini

I HAD HEARD THAT bartenders can be skittish on the subject of vermouth, but, in the last few months, I have discovered a rather startling phenomenon. On two separate occasions, in two separate bars, I had bartenders serve a gin Martini without any vermouth in it at all, and act surprised when I complained. The Martini has only two necessary ingredients (three if you use orange bitters, but few bars carry them); if you leave out the vermouth, you're serving a straight shot of gin. One bartender had to be cajoled into putting the Vermouth in, and then added it in drops, like he was dropping acid into a base and was afraid the whole thing might explode at any second.

"Customers don't like vermouth," he explained. Well, then, they don't like the Martini, and should be steered to another drink. I'm frankly flabbergasted by this. What self-respecting bartender takes a drink order, and then deliberately leaves out the defining ingredient, without even bothering to ask the customer if that's what they want? Here's a hint to area barkeeps: If a customer orders a gin Martini, and even goes so far to specify what gin they want in it, chances are they want a Martini, and not a glass of gin with an olive in it.

You know what else people don't like? Bitters and rye whiskey, so I must assume that when someone orders a Manhattan from these bartenders, they get served a maraschino cherry, and nothing else. (SPARBER)

Kosher wine: If it’s good enough for winos and the prophet Elijah, it’s good enough for you

ARE THERE WINOS ANYMORE? There must be, as most American big cities have one section of town that still serves as a skid row. Even if you were to miss the gangs of drunks, often seen shirtless and sipping from brown paper bags, it would be impossible to miss the broken glass. The sidewalks and gutters are filled with shattered bottles. Among the empty vodka and malt liquor bottle shards, the careful observer will notice a distinctive label: that of MD 20/20, commonly referred to as Mad Dog, a sickly sweet wine fortified with various fruit flavors, including “Pink Grapefruit” and “Hawaiian Blue.” Alcoholics still take to Mad Dog for the same reason they have for decades, and for the same reason they favor other sweet wines. It is inexpensive and it kills your appetite, which is an important consideration when choosing between a meal and a drink.

What most winos don’t realize is that while they’re working on enlarging their livers, they are also obeying strict Jewish dietary law. Mad Dog, you see, is produced by Mogen David, and is manufactured under careful rabbinic supervision. Winos, it seems, have a taste for kosher drinks.

In general, most Americans don’t have a very clear understanding of Jewish dietary laws. A Jewish Studies professor at the University of Minnesota used to tell a story about his frequent experiences aboard airplanes, as the flight attendants would inevitably discover that they had neglected to pack a kosher meal for him. According to the professor, who, as a graduate of Yeshiva University, also held the title of rabbi, could always look forward to the flustered flight attendants bringing a regular meal and offering to find a rabbi to bless it.

He would patiently attempt to explain that the Jewish laws regarding foods do not involve a rabbinic blessing. According to the Five Books of Moses, there are simply some foods Jews can’t eat, such as pork, and no amount of blessings by nearby rabbis will make them acceptable. Even those foods that are allowed in the Pentateuch, such as chicken, must be slaughtered in a particular way, called shechita, by a trained butcher; failing this, the animal is inedible. In order to insure that food is produced in a manner that is consistent with Jewish law, a supervisory committee examines the manner in which the food is produced. Once they are satisfied, they authorize the food to be marketed with a hescher, a trademarked logo that identifies the food as kosher. Some of the more common symbols are that of The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, which is a circle with a U in its center, and that of The Organized Kashrus Laboratories, which is also an encircled letter, in this case a K. Although rabbis participate in this supervisory process, they do not bless the food to make it kosher. Jews do bless their food, but it serves pretty much the same function as the Christian practice of grace before meals.

In theory, all wine is kosher. After all, there are no prohibitions against fruits or vegetables in the Jewish dietary law. If you’re walking along and you see a grape hanging from a vine, no matter how strictly observant you might be, there’s nothing preventing you from popping those grapes into your mouth, unless, of course, you happen to be stealing them, in which case you might want to revisit the Ten Commandments. But the grapes require no rabbinic supervision and no trademarked logo to be kosher. And, yet, were you to ferment those grapes and throw them in a bottle, there is not an Orthodox Jew on earth who would drink it without an okay from the rabbis. (There are other Jews who might guzzle away without question, as different branches of Judaism have different levels of observance; many members of the Reform movement, as an example, would have no compunctions about drinking your wine, even if you were to serve it with a side of bacon, which they would probably also enjoy.)

So what’s the deal? Well, firstly, we should explain that the Five Books of Moses were occasionally vague about dietary laws. For example, Deuteronomy 14:21 advises against boiling a lamb in its mother’s milk, and what does that mean? The rabbis interpreted it as meaning that Jews simply should not mix milk and meat in general, but even that raises a thicket of tricky questions. A puzzled Jew, faced with this restriction, would naturally wonder how long they would have to wait between eating a hamburger and enjoying a chocolate shake. And what about birds and fish? They don’t produce milk, so is it allowable to have a turkey and cheese sandwich?

The answers were left in the hands of the rabbis, who themselves could sometimes be a little quarrelsome. Some rabbis argue that you must wait three hours between eating meat and drinking milk. For others, you must wait six. Most agree that milk can be drunk with fish, and most agree that milk should not be drunk with fowl, but you’ll find some rabbis who take the opposite viewpoint on both. Most observant Jews just go with whatever tradition they grew up in, although we presume that some simply skip the issue altogether by becoming vegetarian.

On the subject of wine, the rabbis have a general consensus. The beverage is just too important to Judaism to be left unsupervised. Jews have been making wine since Biblical days, and wine plays an important part in many Jewish rituals — let us look at the feast of Passover as an example. Not only are four cups of wine drunk by each of the participants (and, at many Seders, these are enormous cups of wine), but a special cup is set aside for the prophet Elijah. He is supposed to go from door to door on some Passover evening, giving word of the coming of the Jewish messiah; seeing as there are about 14 million Jews in the world, one presumes that the prophet will be quite snookered at the end of the evening.

As wine is of great ritual importance to Jews, they take great pains to make certain that kosher wine is not tainted. During the production of the wine, it may not be mixed with any additional chemicals, coloring agents, gelatins, or any of the many other additives often found in wine. Additionally, the tools used to make the wines — the presses, tanks, and crushers — must all be cleaned with scalding water, to insure that they are free of contaminants.

As cautious as Jews are about making certain their wine is not adulterated with strange ingredients, they are even more concerned with making certain that the wine is not tainted by something far worse: idolatry. Many European vineyards were owned and operated by monasteries, and the wines they produced had certainly been earmarked for Jesus. Such wine simply wouldn’t do for a Jewish ceremony. And if the winemakers were not Christian, well, who knows what strange gods they dedicated their wines to? For this reason, kosher wine can only be handled, from the vine to the glass, by Jews. Sabbath-observant Jews, mind you. A Jew who flips on his television on Saturday, or spends money, or engages in any of the hundreds of prohibited behaviors on the Jewish day of rest, could spoil a perfectly good bottle of wine simply by pouring it.

That is, unless the wine is mevushal. This type of wine is created by taking normal kosher wine and heating it to 186 degrees Fahrenheit. Boiled wine was forbidden for ritual purposes at the Temple in Israel, and so contemporary rabbis treat it as though it were a different substance altogether. Therefore, wine that has been heated is subject to fewer rules than its unheated version, and can be handled by non-Jews without losing its kosher status. This type of wine wasn’t especially popular until recently, though, as boiled wine can lose much of its flavor. Techniques for flash-boiling the wine are now common, which keeps the wine’s flavor, and mevushal wines have started to develop quite a following.

By the way, there are considerable more restrictions regarding kosher wine. Grapes cannot be used to make wine until the vines that produce them are four years old. Vegetables or other fruits may not be grown between these vines. When the wine is completed, one percent of it must be dumped out, to represent the ten percent tithing that once went to the Temple in Israel. It is no surprise that the production of kosher food, especially wine, requires rabbinic supervision. There are so many rules, it would be easy to accidentally miss a few, and it doesn’t matter if you get a rabbi to bless it — the resulting wine is never going to be kosher.

All of these rules can get to be a bit frustrating, especially when dealing with people who are ignorant of them — such as flight attendants. Take our Jewish Studies professor as an example. After an endless number of hungry flights and an endless number of helpful stewardesses offering to have a regular meal blessed by a rabbi, he finally gave in to his hunger. “I’m a rabbi,” he told them. “I’ll bless the food.” (SPARBER)

The Flaming Moe :: A Simpsons Movie Special

SO YOU ALL KNOW about the Flaming Moe, right? Episode 8F08 in the third season revolved around it—the drink Homer invented and then Moe ripped off whose secret ingredient is children's cough syrup and that's made special by lighting it on fire.

In the show, Homer explains that the drink was invented when one of Marge's sisters drank the last beer. He combined all the alcohol that was left in all the bottles in the house, accidentally including children's cough syrup, and when Patty (or perhaps Selma) ashed into his drink, it went up in flames, improving its taste immeasurably. Most bars (I'm pretty sure) don't have children's cough syrup, so we set about making up a drink that would approximate the Flaming Moe. The only kinds of alcohol you can actually see when he's making the drink are tequila and creme de menthe, but man, we're not going to combine those two drinks. It has to have enough mass to fill a largish glass (hello, vodka) and taste like cough syrup (enter the flavored brandies) and be flammable (welcome, 151 rum).

3 oz. vodka
1.5 oz. Kirschwasser
1.5 oz. Creme de Cassis
1.5 oz. Blackberry Brandy
1 tsp. 151 rum

Take everything except the rum and pour it into a rocks glass. Stir. Now take a spoon, turn it upside down, and pour the 151 rum over the spoon so it distributes itself evenly over the top. WARNING: DO NOT ACTUALLY DO THIS. THE BOTTLE GANG ACCEPTS NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY DAMAGES INCURRED BY THIS DRINK. Light it.





But I wouldn't drink it if I were you. I'd make it a shot if you had to, but in the show, it's clearly in a bigger glass than a shot glass, so we made it in a rocks glass. If it's a shot, I'd probably nix the vodka and cut the other things down to .5 oz. apiece. Again, though, DON'T EVEN TRY TO MAKE THIS. JUST LOOK AT THE PRETTY PICTURES. (McPHERSON)

Cocktailphernalia: Hobo pump decanter

THIS PLASTIC NOVELTY, probably dating back to the early Fifties, is precisely what you want when you need to decant some liquor -- the sense that an inebriated, clowlike-hobo is vomiting liquor directly into your glass. (SPARBER)

Book Review: The Ultimate Bar Book

WHEN IT COMES TO getting a book with an exhaustive list of cocktail recipes for you to try out at home, you've got a lot of options, and they're all more or less the same. But if you want to get a book which will give you all that, but also enrich your knowledge of the art of cocktails and give it to you with a wink and a nod, you absolutely need to get Mittie Hellmich's Ultimate Bar Book.

The first thing that distinguishes it from most other bar books is that the cocktail recipes are divided into categories based on the dominant alcohol in the drink, not alphabetically. This makes it phenomenally easy, once you've familiarized yourself with the basic liquors, to find a drink to suit your mood. Feeling whiskey? Just flip towards the back and find something delectable to mix up. Within each section, there are also subsections devoted to particularly significant drinks and their variations. So you get a page discussing the history of the gimlet under gin, a spread on the Bloody Mary under vodka, and a whopping three pages each devoted to the Manhattan and the mint julep under whiskey.

That's the technical part of the book, but there's so much more. The front section includes a glossary of bar equipment (with illustrations of the implements), a glassware guide, a guide to types of drinks (with the histories of standards like the rickey, the fizz, the flip, and exactly makes a drink a highball), and an invaluable section on the science/art of making a drink. Did you know that most cocktails consist of three parts? Hopefully you do if you've been reading The Bottle Gang, but thinking of a cocktail as consisting of the base (the bedrock liquor, greatest by volume), the body (the modifier, a sort of comment on the main alcohol, like vermouth), and the perfume (the last touch that adds complexity to the drink, whether through sweetness, bitterness, or perhaps a fruity overtone) makes it much easier to come up with good cocktails on your own.

Then there's Hellmich's writing, which is dry as a dry martini, especially in the sections that detail the stories of each type of alcohol. "Although originally used as a health tonic," Hellmich writes, "gin has no official medicinal value today; nonetheless, Martini drinkers claim a variety of positive effects."

And regarding vodka: "Even the regular premium vodkas tend to have a somewhat harsh finish, so unless you wish to evoke a Dostoevskyian moment, they are really suitable only as mixers."

There are lots of websites that can give you recipes for making cocktails, but Hellmich's Ultimate Bar Book treats the subject with respect and just a bit of tongue in cheek—a perfect companion for a night of tippling.(McPHERSON)