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Before 2008, Hamilton College never won a national championship in any team sport. Never. And it wasn’t for lack of trying, either – because Hamilton was part of an athletic conference called the New England Small College Athletic Conference, they were prohibited from playing in any postseason tournaments that commenced seven days after their last…

Thanks to knowing such minutiae as the third-largest city in Mississippi (Hattiesburg), and the three Van Halen albums comprised of either numbers or phoenetics (1984, OU812, 5150), I was able to finish Round 2 of Graney’s Monday Night Trivia with a sizeable run. Another team, “That’s What She Said,” was nearly perfect, but they missed…

Bear with me on this one. I’m bouncing around Google’s “Books” section, and I discover that Google has digitally scanned thousands of issues of Billboard magazine. So if you ever want to know what song was #1 on the pop charts in whatever year, chances are it’s listed in one of the issues Google scanned.…

RCA Nipper dog with Terry Haggerty Tire, AlbanyOriginally uploaded by chuckthewriter It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and I needed to get out of the house. So I grabbed my Nikon D70 and my camera bag, as well as my tripod, and went around Albany for a little photo walkabout. This time, I concentrated on…

In 2004, my editor at RoadKing alerted me that she had submitted my “Convoy Rides Again” article on country musician C.W. McCall to the International Automotive Media Awards. The article claimed a silver medal, which greatly pleased me. Last year, I submitted my article on the history of the Speed Racer animated series to the…

The Craigslist advertisement seemed too good to be true. I could make some money by being an extra in an upcoming Hollywood motion picture – a film for which scenes would be filmed in Albany. Sounded like a good deal. So I submitted a picture of myself and my car (the world-famous 1991 Pontiac 6000)…

Well, my first night of the four-week Monday night trivia competition at Graney’s Tavern worked out pretty well. Your man nailed question after question like Earl Anthony nailed strike after strike, having known such answers as the horror film that was Johnny Depp’s debut film appearance (Nightmare on Elm Street), the singer whose 1996 debut…

True story. Last year, the Recovery Room Sports Bar in Albany offered super-swank NY Giants and NY Jets tower suite tickets for the high scorer in trivia on their Wednesday Night trivia nights. So for six weeks, I was the team to beat, nailing three first-place wins and three sets of box seats. Then one…

I’ve cut my trivia night particpiation down to twice a week – Tuesday night at Pizzeria Uno in Crossgates Mall, and Wednesday night at Brown’s Brewing in Troy. Tuesday night I’m a solo lone wolf, Wednesday nights I have my teammates Mark and Jennie, but both nights I’m the “Street Academy” team, named after my…

bat-roc-02-cmOriginally uploaded by chuckthewriter In March 2008, I was at the PBL basketball finals between Rochester and Arkansas. At some point in the first quarter of the game, Rochester’s Keith Friel went up for a basket, the ball didn’t go through the cylinder, but Sammy Monroe and James “Mook” Reaves both went up to the…