For example: I’m not sold on “Try Trivia” as a name. I don’t want to use “Drunken Smartass” for everything. It seems like a concept that won’t translate so well north of 14th Street outside of Greater Pubquizistan.

Anyway. Enjoy.

See you later tonight, sexy people.

I had no idea the Great Gatsby was merely a particularly inspired mad-lib, and that the industry relies so completely on the work of swarthy Italian lumberjacks. Every day, learn a new thing.

This space is not fully filled in for the year or anything, even if trivia is (we’re back at Dempsey’s on Wednesday, January 7), but things have happened. I’m looking to improve trivia in New York, and I think I can do it, and soon. Details to come. Until then, find someone you love and tell them you love them.

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Drunken Smartass!

1. Drunken Smartass can run sixty-five kilometres an hour - that’s really fast.
2. Humans have 46 chromosomes, peas have 14, and Drunken Smartass has 7.
3. If a snake is born with two heads, the heads will fight over who gets Drunken Smartass.
4. The ace of spades in a playing card deck symbolizes Drunken Smartass!
5. California is the biggest exporter of Drunken Smartass in the world.
6. While performing her duties as queen, Cleopatra sometimes dressed up as Drunken Smartass.
7. Drunken Smartass is actually a fruit, not a vegetable.
8. In Chinese, the sound ‘Drunken Smartass’ means ‘bite the wax tadpole’.
9. Drunken Smartass was banned from Finland because of not wearing pants!
10. Lightning strikes Drunken Smartass over seven times every hour.

Hmm. Maybe he should be making movies.

Yes, there’s also video footage of me looking like I’m eight miles high in an Amsterdam brothel, listening to “I Can’t Help Myself” and trying to act out the story.

Look, the point of the article is this: the fireballs are fake. The technological advance is real.

It was the cultural touchstone for a generation, the reason I was late for work when I lived near Times Square for a couple of years and I had to wade through the throngs of screaming preteens begging & clamoring for a glimpse through the second-floor window of whassisface from 98 Degrees or whatsername from that Disney show, not that one but the other one, no no no, you know who I’m talking about. Man, times none of us will ever forget, things those people will go home to their places where people are sensible and rational and grow old, and tell their grandkids about. God’s children, every one of us.

Over the entire run of TRL, I watched, cumulatively, a grand total of about 40 seconds of it. That includes clicking past it to get to something else, all the time I spent loitering in TV showrooms (handy hint: talk about a great place to meet people!), the occasional DVR leftover from when I was wanting to watch — oh, okay, I have never DVR’d anything on MTV. I’m just trying to be nice. But yeah, if I’ve watched an entire minute of TRL over the course of my (and its) life, that would be more than I thought.

But I will miss it. Because now, Carson Daly now has no fallback position, and when his show gets cancelled*, he’ll be up for the same temp jobs I’m going for, and that would be bad.

I will miss it because now all those teenpop would-bes are going to spill into other shows I actually watch, like Jeopardy! or Washington Week In Review or Antiques Roadshow or Billy Mays commercials. And really, that’s no good for anyone concerned, especially me. And Billy Mays.

I will miss it because it kept a significant group of obnoxious truants, hoodlums, ne’er-do-wells and — and other people I have been in my life — in a clear and easily-avoidable place in the city for a couple of hours every day, and now they’re gong to be infesting every corner of town, including and especially the places I go to in my daily travels. Again, nobody really wants that.

I understand the vagaries of ratings and market demand and corporate branding and the economy and all the other reasons shows like this bubble up and then fade back into the flotsam of the television world. But today, the world of popular culture is a little less spangled, and for that, as a species, we are poorer.

* Is that even still on? That’s another show I’ve never seen, wouldn’t know where to find, and have no real desire to find out about. I don’t hate Carson like some people I know do. It’s just that this world actually is big enough for the two of us. Does my apathy make me a bad person?

The Final Presidential Debate Drinking Game Thread (Probably)