It’s the off-season for Learned League, so almost every day brings four or five “One Day Specials” – single-topic trivia quizzes. I read all of them and usually submit my answers if I have good guesses (or better) for at least five questions (out of 12).

Yesterday’s One Day Specials were on Web Design, Time Inc., Math in Theatre, and David Foster Wallace. I’ve never read any David Foster Wallace, so I didn’t submit that one, but I did answer the others – and got all the questions right for Web Design.

I wasn’t alone in that – 38 players of the 1195 who submitted answers got them all right. Each correct answer earns 15 points. But there’s another factor besides correct answers on One Day Specials: moneying. You have to designate five of your answers as “money” answers – for each of those you get right, you earn a bonus, computed as the percentage of wrong answers for that question. So if 30% of the people answered wrong (or didn’t answer), you’d get 30 extra points. So you want to money the five questions that most people will miss.

I came close – I picked four of the hardest questions. But I thought that more people would know one of the frameworks powering today’s popular browsers (Blink, Gecko, or Webkit) than would know the name of the Weird Al Yankovic song which talks about HTML (White & Nerdy). I was wrong, and finished in 10th place – still by far my best finish ever in a One Day Special.

I’m writing this early tonight because I have a Shir Hadash Board meeting in a few minutes. Our new Transitional Rabbi will be there, and I’m looking forward to meeting him. I’d signed up to bring snacks this month; Diane graciously made pumpkin muffins for me to bring (we kept a few for ourselves, of course), and I’m also bringing grapes.

We finished watching Only Murders in the Building – I’m looking forward to the second series whenever it comes out.

Other than that, it’s been a quiet day here – there’s been a little rain on and off all day, with hopes of more in the next couple of days. No progress on the cooktop front. No photo editing. Just quiet. We didn’t even walk as much as usual, and the only wildlife I saw was birds on the high school lawn.

Two years ago was different – we were in Bulgaria, where we learned an old Bulgarian proverb: “To err is human; to blame it on someone else shows management potential”. That was an interesting trip, indeed!