Probably by the time you read this, you'll have already missed your opportunity to play Superman Jeopardy today at the 2026 Metropolis Superman Celebration in Metropolis, Illinois. It's scheduled for 9:30 AM CDT, which is way too early for trivia brain work good, if you ask me. The good news is that they'll run it again tomorrow and again on Sunday. The bad news is that those are scheduled for 9 AM and 10 AM, respectively, and I just don't think anyone should have to answer questions about what Superman's favorite food is* at that time of the morning.

Maybe they're holding the trivia contest that early to make space for autograph signings. An actual Superman will be in attendance this year: Tim Daly, who gave voice to Superman on Wings Superman: The Animated Series from 1996 to 2000 and several direct-to-video animated movies. Mr. Daly is charging $50 for a selfie or an autograph on an 8x10 (or $80 for the combo of an autographed selfie, however that works these days), which seems incredibly reasonable given his resume. I have to wonder how many kids might end up discouraged that he's not signing "Superman" on animation stills of Superman, but given that his cartoon has been off the air for two decades, it seems just as likely that all the autograph seekers will all be middle-aged Gen Xers. So long as everyone goes home happy, I guess.

What should I even care about the activities of a superhero convention happening several states away? I won't go to conventions less than an hour up the road from my house when William Shatner comes to town! But it warms my hardened Kryptonite heart to know that so many people enjoy Superman enough that for 48 years (give or take a global pandemic) they get together every year to celebrate a fictional character by giving their cash to aging actors. Huzzah!

*Superman would say his favorite food is beef bourguignon with ketchup, which I'm sure he likes, but it's his "favorite" because that's his code phrase with Lois Lane to tell her he's alright (as established in numerous comic books over the years). The origin of this is often credited to the first time Lois fed Clark Kent beef bourguignon in Superman #297 (1976) the first night they, um, spent together, if you know what I mean, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Clark's propensity for drowning steak in ketchup was first indicated on an earlier date with Lois in Superman #276 (1974). Both stories were written by Elliot S! Maggin, so we should probably ask him.

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As a child of the 70s, I have long considered myself a Star Wars fan, which is why I impulsively decided to follow the link to "The Best Star Wars Trivia Quiz Questions to See How Much You Really Know" at Mental Floss dot com. The quiz has 100 questions, only the first 19 of which are in the category "Classic Trilogy (Episodes IV–VI)." But that's about where my fandom ends, so I figured I'd do pretty well. And I'm happy to report that I did know the name of Han Solo's ship and Luke Skywalker's trainer on Dagobah. But then I got to question 15.

15. What is the Emperor called in The Emperor Strikes Back?

I know I'm getting old, but I don't recall a movie named The Emperor Strikes Back in the "classic trilogy." And I certainly didn't know the answer.

Darth Sidious

Again, I'm old now, but I do remember a Darth Sidious who was the Sith Lord master of Darth Maul and later (after Maul gets cut in half) Darth Tyrannus and later (after Tyrannus gets decapitated) Darth Vader. (As Luke's trainer says of the Sith, "Always two there are. No more, no less." By which he clearly means a top half and a bottom half.) Darth Sidious was the evil alter ego of Sheev Palpatine, the representative of the planet Naboo in the Galactic Senate who manipulated events to rise to Supreme Chancellor before disbanding the Senate and ruling the galaxy as Emperor. So, yeah, Darth Sidious and the Emperor are the same person, but technically speaking, since Sidious wasn't introduced as a character until the fourth Star Wars movie, The Phantom Menace, no one called the Emperor that in any of the "classic trilogy" films, especially one that doesn't exist. (Point of fact: the prequels played so coy about Palpatine/Sidious's future as "The Emperor" that I have often wondered if Lucas expected contemporary audiences to be unaware they were all the same person.)

So I call bullshit. But what else should I expect from a piece of Internet clickbait in the post-truth culture in which we now live, where every major technology and media company has turned their content engines over to poorly curated supervised LLMs that "hallucinate" up to half their facts? The fault is clearly mine for expecting reality to live up to my fantasies of living in a more civilized age.

Happy May 4th to those who celebrate.

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As I type this, I have exactly 100,000 Xbox GamerScore.

You might think that's a pretty big number. It is.

You might ask what that's good for. Not a damn thing.

You might say no sane person would willfully spend so much time accruing meaningless statistics. That's a fair point.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go check Google Maps to see how many more miles I have to drive before I would have reached the moon. (Only 192,000 more to go!)

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While we were on the way to a second place finish at trivia last week (where we learned that a flute is a woodwind instrument and a Philco Predicta was a television), friend Keith was amused by my phone lock screen and background. I assume that's because he is envious and would like to use them himself. So here you go, Keith.

If you like those, you might want my computer background image, too.

Ask yourself: is it vanity that I have my name and face all over my devices, or is it that I want everyone to know who they belong to?

(It's vanity.)

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Those of you who know why know why.

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Walking through Oak Hill Cemetery last week with Mom and the girls, we passed the burial plot for J.W.A. and Zippora Rowland. As you can see, only one of them was buried there.

You'll note that there is no death date for Zippora, though the engraver presumed it would happen sometime in the 20th century. That marker visible on the bottom right isn't for her, it's J.W.A.'s. Why is his body on Zippora's side of the bed? That's just the tip of the iceberg of what I don't know about Zippora. Who was she, and why isn't she buried along with her name? Of course this made me curious, so I did a little Googling.

It seems J.W.A. Rowland lived most of his life not in Newnan but in Bowdon in neighboring Carroll County. I don't know what he did for a living, but the Carroll Free Press of the late 19th century reports that he was the initial vice president of the Carroll County Chorus Choir Association. (That meeting appears to have been in the Shiloh UMC building which still stands halfway between Carrollton and Bowdon.) Still in Bowdon in 1892, he was witness on a U.S. Patent application for Ocran D. Bunt's plow fender (patent #467853). "James W.A. Rowland" appears as a 72 year old man living in Newnan, GA by the time of the 1920 census. Nearer his death, he was a co-plaintiff in a 1921 lawsuit against the Central of Georgia Railway Company in which he won $250. (They were riding in a buggy "when the mule drawing it ran away and threw them out," causing injuries. It's not clear what role the railroad played, but the court said they were guilty.)

None of those references mention Zippora.

Zippora Rowland does show up in the 1930 census as a 62-year-old woman living in Newnan, GA. "Zippora" was never a popular name, but I don't find any reference to her in the local papers of the era.

So whatever happened to Zippora? Did she remarry? Did she die somewhere else, and no one knew to bring her back to Newnan where her marker was waiting for her? I like to think she's still alive somewhere, enjoying the good life on her sesquicentennial birthday. Here's to you, Zippora!

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The Traveling Wilburys.

Those of you who know why know why.

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I stumbled upon this not-quite-as-informative-as-it-pretends-to-be image yesterday. For unknown reasons, it tells you how much Clark Kent would have paid for rent in 1938, but not what his power or grocery bills would have been or how much of his salary as a newspaper reporter would have been consumed by his listed expenses. (Hint: even adjusting for inflation, he'll do a better job saving for retirement in 2015. Assuming he could find a paper to work for.)

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I went to trivia last night and totally blew off the question "What did the 'u' stand for in the defunct UPN Network?" as too easy. I was certain the answer was "Universal." I was wrong.

I knew that it was Paramount's television network, but I incorrectly assumed that it had been a joint venture between Paramount and Universal. It wasn't. UPN was a solo Paramount project.

Perhaps I confused UPN with the Paramount/Universal joint venture UIP, formed in the 1970s to release their films internationally. Too bad for me, the 'u' in UIP doesn't stand for "Universal," either.

The correct answer, same for both UPN and UIP is "United." Thankfully, Friend Brian knew the correct answer. I applaud Brian for his trivia knowledge.

Brian, the next time I tell you that you are wrong about something, you can point to this post and say, "I was right about 'United'." Hopefully, the memory of this one time I was wrong and you were right will console you when I prove you are wrong about whatever we're talking about now.

APPENDIX 2014-09-17: Given that it is Batman and Football month, I should mention that one of the questions at trivia was "What Batman villain, according to one origin story, was originally known as The Red Hood?" That question really was too easy! Sadly, there were no questions about football.

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The 2012 New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year is "gif." That's right, "gif," as in the acronym for Graphics Interchange Format, a digital image format introduced to the world by CompuServe in 1987 and largely replaced in the 21st century by the patent-free Portable Network Graphics ("png") format. "Gif," pronounced either as "gift" without the "g" or as the peanut butter brand Jif, depending largely on what side of the Atlantic Ocean you're on, has finally climbed to the top of the logophile heap, and all it took was changing into a verb.

I'm not one to doubt the wisdom of the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary, but I can't say that I've heard the word "gif" used as a verb yet. The archaic gif, unloved and abandoned by digital imagery professionals, now survives thanks to amateurs who have found that it makes a handy universal format for animating and sharing brief clips of children being attacked by animals and adults earning Darwin Awards. If anything, it's not "gif" that should be awarded, but "ISP," for finally building the Internet's tubes large enough to support the ridiculously bloated size of animated gifs.

Ultimately, I have to guess that if a 25-year old word is the Word of the Year, it must have been a slow year for words. Seeing the hoopla that "gif" got, I thought I'd take a look back at past words honored by the New Oxford American Dictionary:

2012. gif
2013. squeezed middle
2014. refudiate
2015. unfriend
2016. hypermilling
2017. locavore
2018. carbon-neutral
2019. podcast

It's almost like looking into a time capsule! All of those are zeitgeist words. Who refudiates anymore? I guess that means that in a few years, we won't even remember that in 2012 we giffed.

Yep, just like it all never happened....

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