On the drive to Miami, Trey and I occupied ourselves with the Sports Illustrated Trivia Game: Multi-Sport Edition. According to the tin, "you'll find questions for all ages and levels of trivia knowledge." This is true, assuming that "all ages" means "over 30 years old" and levels of trivia knowledge" means "sports-loving shut-in." Here's a sample question:

Name the Broadway play about Rugby that appeared on the 1973 cover of Sports Illustrated."

Despite having nothing about to do with boxing, that question about "The Changing Room" appears on the "boxing" card. Technically, that's not even a sports question, so how about another?

Who finished as the runner up behind John Daly in the 1991 PGA Championship?

Of course, everyone knows that the answer to that question is Bruce Lietzke, right? Wikipedia tells me that second place finish was Lietzke's best finish in a major ever, so how dare I not know his name! Maybe I should stick to football questions.

The Chicago Bears routed the Washington Redskins in the 1940 NFL Championship Game. What was the score?

Okay, fine. Whatever.

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My father and I watched the season opener of Monday Night Football as the New England Patriots exploited the Miami Dolphins' inability to cover anyone. The Patriots passed for 517 yards -- a franchise record -- on their way to a 38-24 victory. A notable target of the Patriots was anyone covered by Benny Sapp.

Sapp was clearly unable to cover even perennial slowpoke and former Dolphin Wes Welker. Welker reportedly runs a 40-yard dash in 4.61 seconds. To put that in perspective, the NFL won't hire you to play wide receiver if you run a 4.66 forty. The difference in those two times, 0.05 seconds, is just slightly longer than the length of time that a single frame of a movie is shown on a movie screen. If you are a cornerback too slow to catch Welker, much less tackle him, you shouldn't expect to be an NFL player. And now Sapp isn't, having been cut by the Dolphins yesterday.

Sapp has been a Dolphin for just a little more than a year, arriving from the Minnesota Vikings as the other half of the trade for wide receiver Greg Camarillo. Trivia note: the sure-handed Camarillo was responsible for the Dolphins' only win in 2007. While Sapp wasn't single-handedly responsible for the Dolphins only loss (so far) in 2011, he certainly won't be missed as much as Camarillo, either.

Before you start feeling sorry for the guy, I should point out that The Miami Herald reports that he will get to keep his entire $1.6 million salary for the season. That's nearly $267,000 for each pass that the Patriots got past him. You've got to admit that's a pretty good payday for one night's "work."

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Most tombstones show the date of death. Many tombstones record the date of birth. But there aren't too many tombstones showing a third date.

This tombstone for Jennie Hardaway McBride, found in Newnan's historic Oak Hill cemetery, demanded a little research. And not because there are no oaks or hills anywhere in sight.

It turns out that "Jennie" isn't even Mrs. McBride's real name. Before she was Mrs. "Jennie" McBride, wife of Newnan merchant and Scotch-Irish society member William Cardwell McBride, she was Virgina Rebecca Hardaway, daughter of Isora Burch. In 1903, Isora Burch organized the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, named in honor of her great-grandmother, Sarah Dickinson Simms. Jennie would eventually succeed her mother as regent for the DAR Sarah Dickinson chapter. But that doesn't solve the question of why she has three dates on her tombstone.

The death certificate for "Mrs. W. C. McBride" of 14 Robinson Street in Newnan, Ga, lists the cause of death at age 50 as "acute uremia." The internet tells me that uremia is typically caused by kidney failure. In this case it wasn't a surprise to anyone when she died; the certificate notes that she was diagnosed with "uremia" six months before it killed her. However, that still doesn't account for the third date on the tombstone.

The father of Mrs. McBride was Robert Henry Hardaway, descendant of a boy "kidnapped" onto a ship bound for America in 1685. It turns out that daddy also has 3 unusual dates on his grave: "December Twelfth, 1837, - 1869, February 11, 1905." Robert Hardaway was born in 1837 and died in 1905. So what did he do between those two dates? He stayed busy. For one thing, Hardaway was a Confederate States Army soldier in Company B of the 1st Georgia Calvary. For a time afterwards, he was a member of the Georgia State General Assembly. And he was also a partner in the merchant firm Hardaway & Hunter in Newnan where he met Isora Burch and was married on December 12, 1869! Ah, ha!

The historical record states that Jennie R. Hardaway was married on April 18, 1894. Mystery solved. At least two generations of the Hardaway family of Newnan liked to put their wedding dates on their tombstones. Who knows why, exactly, but if I had to guess, I'd suppose they died a little those days. They don't call spouses "balls and chains" for nothing. Marriage: it's a life sentence.

[For the record, Jennie Hardaway McBride shares a common ancestor with my mother. Sarah Dickinson Simms, Mrs. McBride's 2nd great-grandmother, was my mother's 4th great-grandmother, making her my 5th great-grandmother. What can I say? Newnan's kind of a small town.]

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Hanna-Barbera's The Flintstones went off the air in 1966. Its last spin-off series, Cartoon Network's Cave Kids, aired it's last new episode thirty years later in 1996. The most recent original Flintstones content aired in 2001, so it's been a decade since The Flintstones has been culturally relevant as anything other than nostalgic reruns. That being the case, why do they still make Flintstones-themed Fruity Pebbles?

Introduced in 1971, Postâ„¢ Fruity Pebbles weren't introduced to the public until after The Flintstones were canceled thanks to free-falling ratings. Their entire, long-running success has endured without the support of the very product from which they were licensed! That's pretty amusing given that Fruity Pebbles is credited as the first breakfast cereal brand built from the ground up around a licensed property. Since then countless licensed cereals have come and gone, including E.T. Cereal, Mr. T, and Urkel-Os, which had hte the benefit of support from their licensed properties.

My point -- assuming that I have one -- is that I suspect that at this point the merits of the cereal, such as they are, must speak for themselves. Surely no one is buying Fruity Pebbles because of the Flintstones ties anymore, so there must be something in those Fruity Pebbles to enable 40 uninterrupted years of sales longevity. Nothing that The Flintstones actually actively endorsed on their show could have sold this well, right?

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In the American English language, "pussy" is a charged word that can be uttered innocently, but if you yell it in a room almost everyone will assume you mean it as vulgar slang. In that regard it's like "beaver," also a cute and furry little animal turned profane synonym. Come to think of it, women are also often called "chicks" or "rabbits," which sort of make me wonder why other cute, furry animals like squirrels and raccoons don't get similar treatment.

A quick internet search on the word "pussy" -- don't try this at home -- revealed that the English word has been used as a diminutive form of "puss," as in "cat," for more than 400 years. For most of that time, the word has also been clearly used to refer to women as a term of endearment; the word apparently didn't assume its profane meaning that won't pass network television censors until the late 19th century. There is no consensus among etymologists what triggered this change, but it has been suggested that this was due to an infusion of Old Norse or Old Germanic languages. It seems that "pusse" is Low German for "vulva." (Something else to blame on the Germans!)

This wealth of meaning has caused "pussy" to become the base for several other words of widely diverse meaning over the years. Certainly the self-redundant "pussycat" (ca. 1805) is an obvious example. But so, too, the feline-inspired "pussywillow" (ca. 1869, because cats are soft) and "pussyfoot" (ca. 1903, because cats are stealthy). On the other hand "Pussy-whipped" (ca. 1956) is clearly derived from the profane definition. I don't suspect that anyone ever wanted to whip a cat. Women, of course, are a different story.

This entire train of thought was generated over a pleasant dinner at Olive Garden when my mother informed me that she found it acceptable to use the word "pussy-whipped" despite its etymology. I suspect that this is only because the time she was busy defending ridiculing my need to rush home and tend to my poodles, a situation that caused her to label me as "poodle-whipped." That label is fine by me: I'm sure that I enjoy my cute, furry animals at home as much as the next guy.

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This week, humanity lost on Jeopardy!. IBM's latest game bully, Watson, defeated Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter to claim the title of trivia champion. The three-day affair that passed for "info-tainment" was little more than a glorified commercial for IBM. The event was hosted by IBM and promoted by IBM, so it should be no surprise that it was won by IBM. Anything less would have been rude.

I don't mind that a super-computer knows more trivia than any single human does (Google is my friend), but I do have to wonder why all the theater is necessary. Back in my day, encyclopedia salesmen used to go door to door. I guess it just never occurred to any of them to go shilling on game shows.

Certainly, host Alex Trebek spent a great deal of time talking about all of Watson's many other, fine aspects for three days, but he carefully omitted the one aspect of the show that gave Watson a far superior advantage over any other Jeopardy! contestant has ever experienced. Watson is deaf and blind and has to be given the clue digitally. In order to buzz in, Watson is given an electronic signal when Trebek is done speaking and the buzzer is activated. Human contestants have to wait for the "buzzers enabled" light. If Watson feels confident that it has calculated the correct answer -- and more often than not it will given that it reportedly processes 200 million "pages" of content per second -- Watson can immediately depress the plunger with a far quicker reaction than a human.

The average human visual stimuli to physical response reaction time is somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 milliseconds. Watson's CPU is capable of over 80 billion operations per millisecond, making it just a little bit faster than a human. The only way for a human to beat Watson to the punch is to anticipate the buzzer activation and jump the press. As we know, that ability to anticipate is, like all human abilities, erratic at best. So in a contest of even equal intellect, one should expect the computer with a digital start signal to win most if not all of the time. It would take a super-human performance to even hope to equal Watson's response time.

I don't mean to suggest that the construction of a computer that can dynamically interpret puns in the English language and then provide obscure bits of corresponding responses isn't a major technological feat. It is very impressive. I just mean to say that watching humans playing against it makes for some pretty boring television.

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I recently took a quiz on MentalFloss.com in which I had to name the internet's 10 most visited sites. I did... poorly. If you'd like to try your hand at it before you read any further, go here.

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Done? Good. Clearly I wouldn't mention this quiz unless I had done awesomely or abysmally. Care to guess which?

I got only 2 out of 10, the search engines. Bah! No wonder I can't earn a living making websites. I clearly have no idea what people use the web for. I should have gotten Wikipedia; I go there almost every day! But the others? I have no money, so no ecommerce site even crossed my mind. And social networking sites are for people who who like people!

If Facebook is really the most visited non-search engine website in America (Google is #1 overall), of course a movie based on it would be popular. The Social Network is the equivalent of those unauthorized biographies of Justin Bieber that line supermarket tabloid check-out aisles. They don't have to be good, they just have to exist; Bieber's own fame will sell them. If The Social Network wins Golden Globes and Oscars, shouldn't the authors of those Bieber biography books start winning Pulitzers?

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I don't care for the New Year's Eve holiday. I'm too old to be excited about being another year older and too young to be excited about surviving another year. I'm not nuts about crowds anyway, and I don't drink alcohol.

The New Year's Eve television coverage leaves me cold as well. I don't care to listen to rock concerts. I don't care to watch radio DJs. And I have no idea what Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffen have in common, but I'm pretty sure that I don't care.

That said, there is something to look forward to on television on New Year's Eve: University of Georgia football! Georgia has been invited to the Liberty Bowl this year to battle the University of Central Florida. Consider the following facts:

• No SEC team has lost in the Liberty Bowl since 1991.
• Despite UCF's 10-3 record, they haven't played any team that has approached SEC-level talent.
• The UCF head coach is George O'Leary, who went 3 for 7 against UGA during his tenure as head coach of Georgia Tech a decade ago.

What does all that mean? Hell if I know. But get out of the way, Dick Clark; here come the Bulldogs!

Bonus Trivia note: This is the first time in the Liberty Bowl's 52 year history that it will be held twice in the same year. The 2009 Liberty Bowl was played January 2, 2010.

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The 2010 New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year is "refudiate," meaning "to reject." My spell-checker wants to change that word into "repudiate," which makes sense, since "refudiate" is nothing more than a typo in a Twitter feed back in July. We now have a new, completely unnecessary word in our dictionary. This bit of political genius/manipulation will now be bloating the reference aisles on our national bookshelves with as much bullshit as is typically reserved for the self-help section.

The enemy here is not, surprisingly, Palin. This bit of trivia may be lost to history, but Sarah Palin herself attempted to correct her initial typo to "refute," the word she presumably meant to Tweet. Rather than let Palin get away with her mistake on Twitter -- where grammar goes to die -- her followers and detractors forced her into owning the mistake as intentional in order to save political face. She's relatively innocent in this fiasco. Sure, she could be smarter and not send messages to the public realm without reviewing them for mistakes, but that's probably asking too much.

No, the enemy here is the New Oxford American Dictionary. Damn you, Oxford University Press dictionary editors. Throwing a political figure's mistaken and jumbled words words back at them is a tried and true political tactic with great lineage. ("Potatoe" and "misunderestimate" spring to mind.) Mudslinging may have a storied tradition in American politics, but let's not start treating the weapons used as anything other than what they are: mud. If Oxford University Press includes words like "refudiate" in their dictionary, all they are doing is dirtying their own reputation.

Therefore, I refudiate the inclusion of the word "refudiate" to my automated spell-checker's personal dictionary. It already has a hard enough time with the perfectly cromulent words that I've already added such as "truthiness," "unfriend," and "wriphe." I mean, come on, it's not like my hard drive has all the space in the world.

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If you're been around awhile, you may have read one of my many rants against Chad Pennington here before. (Need a refresher? Look Here.) Well, it finally looks like the Dolphins will be rid of Mr. Noodle Arm forever.

After a tumultuous week in which Pennington (drafted in 2000), who signed a one-year contract to be a backup quarterback with the Dolphins in March for $2.5 million, was named the starting quarterback over Chad Henne (drafted in 2008), Pennington was injured in Sunday's game versus the Titans. After attempting a 5-yard pass. On the very first play from scrimmage. In his throwing shoulder. The same shoulder that ended his season in 2004. And 2005. And 2009.

So with any luck, we're through with the quarterback who lost his ability to throw more than 20 yards down field sometime before Chad Henne even entered college. But don't fear for Pennington: since his injury was on the first offensive play of the game, it triggered a contract rider paying him $3.25 million more. So Pennington will be paid $5.75 million for the two snaps he played this season, or $2,875,000.00 per snap. Ugh.

But wait, it gets worse! Later in the same game that claimed Chad Pennington, Chad Henne was struck down with a knee injury that may keep him on the sidelines for weeks! The Dolphins have somehow angered the football gods!

With only two days until tomorrow night's game against the Chicago Bears, the Dolphins are now scrambling for quarterbacks. Yesterday the Dolphins signed Patrick Ramsey, 2002 first-round pick mega-failure for the Washington Redskins. After years of under-performing, Ramsey was traded from the Redskins to the Jets in March 2006, where he failed to beat two-time shoulder injury survivor Chad Pennington for the starting job and was cut. Never one to say "die," Ramsey has played for the Broncos, Titans, Lions, Saints, and Jaguars while waiting for his opportunity to finally replace Pennington.

Bonus trivia: Ramsey will be the third of the first four quarterbacks drafted in the 2002 NFL Draft to play for the Dolphins. The only stand-out in that elite group is mega-failure David Carr, currently the third-string quarterback for the 49ers. The first to sign with Miami was mega-failure Joey Harrington in 2008. The Dolphins have also previously signed Josh McCown, the fourth quarterback taken in 2002, who was cut from the team to make room for... Chad Pennington. Note that prior to Ramsey, the Dolphins considered signing J.T. O'Sullivan as a potential Pennington replacement, but since he was taken relatively late -- sixth-round -- in the 2002 Draft, he was presumably not a big enough failure to sign. The only other quarterback taken in the 2002 Draft still active is David Garrard, who has been the starting quarterback for the Jacksonville Jaguars since 2007, and is the only QB from 2002 who can't be considered a failure.

Rumor has it that we worked out Oakland Raiders' mega-mega-failure JaMarcus Russell earlier in the week. Russell (drafted in 2007) was run out of Oakland on a rail earlier this season after three years where he was paid $5,586,000 million for each of the 7 games that he won during that time. That sounds like a quarterback that the Dolphins' management should be considering.

Meanwhile, I suspect that somewhere, minor-failure quarterback Pat White, the Dolphins' second-round pick in 2009 who was cut from the team in September after being paid nearly $2.4 million for only one year of play, is very disappointed with his agent.

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