New Scaratings

"The truth isn't the truth," Rudi Giuliani has declared. I have the utmost respect for Rudi Giuliani's response to the 9.11 attacks. Seventeen years ago he was heroic.

This and other nonsense was bantered about this Sunday afternoon. ROB and LORBOR were in session with LI ZHU, who are all members of the Party of the Mystified, so the politics flowed freely, if not in a straight line.

When ROB and LORBOR were about to depart, KLUDGE arrived. Twenty-five years ago, KLUDGE, who was then 23 years old, was the first Buzztime player with whom I played collaboratively. He's currently the chief of IT security for USBank, having held a similar position with BCBS, and is commemorated, somewhere in these pages, for having correctly pre-called the numbers of the answers, not the answers themselves, but the numbers of the correct answers, on a repeat Brainbuster. KLUDGE, who can't possibly be younger than 48, has never in prior acquaintance looked any older than 30. Now he looks much older, and could pass for 42.

48, as I recall it, is a sad age. Liquor salesmen take no interest in you, and McDonald's would scoff at your request for a discounted coffee. What do you have to live for? You go to the clothing store and, while merely browsing, some random clerk, half your age, steps up to you, demanding to see your ID. "I'm sorry, Sir, but according to your ID you're 48. Do you have your wife's permission to shop for plaid shirts, while unaccompanied by a responsible adult?"

Eventually KLUDGE wandered off, to attend a movie at the multiplex next door to B-52, and in my reverie I was upended by a guest player. who collected a 13.5 in the subsequent Countdown. A 13.5 is not a great score - a 13.5 average won't place you among Buzztime's Top 100 Countdown players, as of this writing - but hers was the best guest score (MSIQ) I'd seen in the five years I've been playing at B-52 - and it was better than my own. Of course I sought her out to convey my congratulations. And to offer a re-match. In the second match I got past her. It turns out I knew more about Alexander the Great, and his tutor, Aristotle.

No few of you will recognize the following anecdote.

Alexander was an ill-tempered youth, and having issued death threats against his teacher, as teenagers are wont to do, Aristotle packed his essentials and hoofed it down to the Piraeus, where he sought to book passage to the island of Lesbos.

The sailors scorned Aristotle for his cowardice.

"According to your own teacher, Plato, Socrates stuck around and took his medicine."

Replied Aristotle: "I love the truth more than I love Plato."