Picking over a plate of nachos at the Irish Emigrant, Jon, Rachel, and I try to make uneducated guesses to answer questions that our educations have not prepared us to answer. Miraculously, having watched and retained a bit of information from I Love the __s comes in handy, but in general there turn out to be a lot of topics for which I am quite content not to possess any particular expertise. I've always felt much better about loose derivations than being able to remember lists of facts or names of former boxing champions, for instance. However, being unconvinced by my first guess about California's state flower being a poppy is particularly unsettling given the topic of my fifth grade state project report.
The round on flags of the world is also somewhat troubling. We look at a banner, printed in miniature and speculate that something about its colors suggest Eastern Europe (it is not). We are wrong. Knowing the colors of a country's national soccer players only gets us so far (hello, Ukraine!), because only thirty-two teams competed in the World Cup. There are even a few countries whose existence was unknown to me [/us] before tonight. How does this happen? Even worse, I have already forgotten their names.
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Rather than study up on vexillology, I'm going to read the second chapter of the new Jennifer Egan book. I felt really smart, wearing a new corduroy jacket from the Nordstrom sale, shopping at at the University Bookstore for new hardcover fiction.
