I suppose since I did Henry Segrave yesterday, I should follow that up by doing his evil twin and chief rival Malcolm Campbell today, who did pretty much all the same stuff. However, unlike Segrave, Campbell’s career is tainted by his fascist sympathies, which explain the subtitle for this post along with the much-renowned slogan for Campbell Soup.
Well, I celebrated the first day of fall on Tuesday by falling as I walked home from my doctor’s appointment on that day. As with the trivia contest last week, I took an Uber to get there but walked home, although the clinic I went to was a little closer to my house than the closest bus I could catch after the trivia contest. I tripped while carrying a number of items on Buckley Road in Liverpool either just before or just after crossing Bailey Road because apparently my sandals tripped as I switched from road to sidewalk or vice versa. My hands are fine, but I did gash my knee slightly and it’s still hurting a bit, as is my left ankle, which I also tripped on the day before. That very strenuous walk perhaps contributed to yet another instance of a whole lotta shittin’ goin’ on.
As for the appointment itself, I had never been seen at this clinic before so it was mostly just me providing some introductory information before I either had testing or referrals done at other clinics. Since Mom is still supposed to come home a week from now, I have no idea when I’m going to be able to even leave the house to go on an appointment, although she has decided to go to the day center on Thursdays, so that would provide me a slight time window to do it I guess. There were three things worth noting at this appointment. Most notably, I had apparently been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder at some point. It was in some record even though they hadn’t yet obtained my medical records yet, so I don’t know what that was about. I have suspected OCD for quite some time since I have frequently struggled with intrusive thoughts and on various occasions in my life, handwashing and obsessively checking and re-checking things, but nobody told me I had actually been diagnosed. Additionally, my vision seems to have gotten significantly worse as I could see nothing except the E through my left eye alone even while wearing my glasses. While that was always my bad eye and at one point I was nearly blind with it in childhood, I think I had improved it from 20/400 to 20/70 corrected in that eye after several years wearing an eyepatch, and now it seems to have degraded again. I have noticed struggling with smaller print a bit more if I don’t have proper lighting. And finally, they measured me to be an inch shorter than I thought I was (5’7” instead of 5’8”). There wasn’t really time or an opportunity for any kind of medical testing for my bowl issues or a referral to a dietician to help me with my eating disorder, but hopefully, I’ll be able to find days when Mom is in the day center to schedule these things.
I went to my last bar trivia contest tonight and our team placed second. I will also probably be going to confession and mass for the last time in a while this weekend, and my last men’s group on Tuesday the day before Mom comes home. I took the dehumidifer upstairs and bought some humidifier filters because it’s time to run the humidifer instead. I’m going to take our air conditioner out over the weekend and I’ve already plugged our space heater in. Finally, I’m going to move one computer - either my desktop that I am currently using or my work laptop - probably the laptop into the front room where Mom’s hospital bed is going to be placed so I can work while also supervising her if she has to go to the bathroom or something. Somebody is going to be delivering the hospital bed, wheelchair, and walker soon but I haven’t scheduled the day yet as I was on the toilet when they called and I missed it. But yeah, this looks like it’s happening. And I was able to open the door from the outside with my key a few times, which seemed to loosen it up enough so now I can open it from inside, but it may still need to be replaced and one of my high school classmates is coming on Thursday to give me some advice about that.
Sure, it means my socialization will diminish, but I really don’t mind (as long as Mom doesn’t radicalize herself by listening to news radio again, although she says she doesn’t want to), since as I said, I wasn’t getting much out of any of these activities socially to begin with. One of the bartenders and my main trivia teammate Bill did give me their phone numbers before they left, but I don’t know if I’m planning on calling them for anything.
One of the nurses has said she’s going to throw a cookout when Mom is discharged home. That might be nice, although I’m certainly unlikely to eat anything when considering both my ARFID food input issues and IBS food output issues.
I’m finishing up going through all the thousands of drivers in the Veranstaltergemeinschaft Langstreckenpokal Nürburgring/Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie sports car endurance series, which races only at the Nürburgring, has on average 9 or 10 races a season, 15 class-winning teams a race, and three or so drivers per team. I’m quickly looking up all the nationalities and birth and death dates for the drivers who are not already on my master driver list, and my goal is to finish entering all these drivers by the time Mom comes home, but I don’t think I will make it.
Beowulf was the only thing that made sense to me for Question 1, although I didn’t consider The Canterbury Tales, which was the second most-popular answer. I figureed I would have heard of the answer to Question 2 and I have, but only as a Scrabble word. The math questions are so much harder than the questions in any other category usually and it seems unfair to have any questions that you’re not likely to get unless you went to grad school in a particular discipline; I put varnix, which was stupid. Switzerland was probably the easiest question and I’m surprised my opponent scored it 2 points, but I did have a weak World History record. I should’ve gotten limey because I have seen it before and the citrus should have clued me in to that, but I instead put matey. I’d never heard of the Brownie camera and I put Katzenjammer just because I knew The Katzenjammer Kids was the most popular comic strip of the day. And as good as I am at the pop music questions, I probably wouldn’t have gotten that one if it hadn’t been mentioned in The Social Network…
First question was ridiculously easy, but I had no clue on the rest of this stuff. I put niacins for Question #2, nothing for Question #3 (I figured I’d have never heard of the guy and I haven’t), Bundt cake for Question #4 (hey, it is shaped like a dome, but I don’t think I’ve heard of panettone), man and home for #5 but considering what Paradise Lost is about, that should’ve been obvious. Finally, I guessed scroll for Question 6, which does sound Greek and I was wondering if there was some mythological figure called the Skroll or something.
Kicking myself over Question #2. I actually learned a little bit about the Japanese language when I was writing my book Nerds per Minute because I literally discussed how people entered characters when typing in Japanese for the Intersteno multilingual contest in my book. I knew that there were two methods called kanji and kana, and that one of them involved selecting the right Japanese character and one of them involved transliterating the Japanese phonetically into English letters, but I couldn’t remember which was which, and I guessed wrong. I suspect a lot more people have heard of kanji than have heard of kana, so my own research tripped me up here and got me confused in a way no one would be if they hadn’t heard of kana. Donald Duck might be an embarrassing miss, but I put the second most common answer, Popeye, even though I knew he came out of a comic strip originally called Thimble Theatre, so I should’ve tried harder. I put crew for Question #3 and I’ve never heard of any of the correct answers. Despite how terribly I do in the geography questions, there was a time recently when I was trying to memorize all the capitals, so there you go. I put pence for Question #5, but I guess that was decimalized. And then Question #6 was one of the biggest gimmes in the season.
Magenta is one of my most embarrassing misses and I erroneously thought it was a hard question, even though it was rated as easiest by my opponent and the league players in general, and even though it had the highest correct response rate. I just blanked and put nothing, then went d’oh when I saw it. I just forgot the color even though I had certainly seen magenta and cyan many times before, but definitely not in years. At least my opponent scored it 0 points so I effectively lost nothing. My opponent was listed as nonbinary, so I figured Question 4 would be the easiest for her, but I probably wouldn’t have marked that as easiest if she hadn’t been. I guessed Unfair for that one. I put The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly for Question 1, which is not a bad guess, but I should’ve known that wasn’t a remake. I put Leeds for Question 3, because I knew The Who’s legendary Live at Leeds album was that year, and Glastonbury just didn’t come to me at all. Everybody thought Question #5 was going to be harder than it was, but the three-letter country code really narrows it down, and it actually had one of the highest correct response rates despite being rated as one of the more difficult questions. I’m honestly surprised I got the last one since I know nothing about fashion.
After my initial cockiness at predicting what questions would be easy or hard for my opponents, I really struggled with that in this batch, this one especially. Even though we both got both of them right, I was surprised that “golden ratio” had the highest correct response rate by a large margin and most people thought that was the easiest while I didn’t at all even though I got it. I didn’t know that from art at all, but I knew it from reading Arthur Benjamin’s book of math tricks, Mathemagics, which was an important formative influence on me as a boy. Likewise, I was surprised that “Rudolph” wasn’t the easiest question even though we both thought it was, but that actually had the third-worst response rate. Maybe most of the players are too young to know who Gene Autry is now. But my 20th-century knowledge of the monoculture is usually way better than my 21st-century knowledge after everything got siloed off and fragmented. I suspect a lot of people got Question 1 because they’d seen whatever meme that was, but it feels like 95% of memes that went viral I never even noticed. I put eclipse. I’d never heard of Redken and put Maybelline (for me, way too many of my answers in terms of the stuff I don’t know about come from just random crap I remember from the ‘90s commercials… maybe it’s Maybelline! I might as well have guessed Mentos…) I never remember which polar explorer is which, and I put Peary for Question #5.
