Trivia Blog: 2/15

Players: Hannah, Mary, Victoria, Ben, Darren

Blogger: Darren

Hint of the Day: A box of Raisins

I know, I know, it's been awhile since there has been a trivia blog.  The Educated Friends took last week off and also missed three weeks ago.  And two weeks ago…well, I never got around to writing the blog and since Mary and Hannah have tasked me with doing it every week, it just never got done.  But tonight we were back in full force, at least physically.  Unfortunately we forgot to take a team photo, but if we would have then AI says it would have looked like this:

Mary and I got to trivia early and were talking about all kinds of things when Hannah showed up and excitedly declared “Great news!  I have an ear infection!”  To make things stranger, she then pulled a single pink pill out of her pocket, split it in half and ate half of it and then the other half.  It turns out that she was excited because there has been a ringing in her ear for weeks and she was worried that it was tinnitus but the really cute (from what I’ve heard) doctor at Urgent Care gave her medicine that will hopefully help it.

The opening category was The Vampire Diaries, a show that Mary watched in High School but none of the rest of us knew about.  Unfortunately, she was distracted talking to Victoria about Canine Lupus or something like that an didn’t hear the question.  We tried to repeat it to her, and it was about the violent nickname that a certain group of vampires had, and she said “I don’t know, put Rippers or something like that.”  She didn’t sound very confident and it also turned out that she only watched 3 of the 37 seasons of that show so we wagered only a single point.  But Mary was right and we got that point.  The next question was about words with DIS in them, and we easily knew the Tardis was in Dr Who and that Discord was an app, but we didn’t know what ‘someone who believes in natural beauty’ would be.  As a joke, I suggested “nudist” and you know what?  It was right and we got the bonus points!  So it really seemed like luck was with us, right? 

Well not so much, as it turns out.  While I did know that Martin Freeman played Tim on The UK version of The Office, we had no idea that Guggenheim and Astor died during the sinking of the Titanic.  And even with a multiple choice option, we did not know that the Toronto Maple Leafs haven’t won the Stanley Cup in 60 years despite winning 13 over all.  And because we had wagered low on the rippers, these questions cost us.

The audio round was a bit better, and it featured three songs with the word “Little” in their title.  We knew Little Miss Cant Be Wrong, a song that Hannah likes to vacuum to, and Dirty Little Secret but the third song was a country song.  We all looked expectantly at Mary, as this is supposed to be her area of strength but it did not come through tonight.  Victoria wanted us to put “Little Tractor”, but Hannah thought that the song sounded like it would be about sexual intercourse and so wanted us to put “Sweet Little Piece” (referring to a profane term for what is beneath the cutoffs the singer was singing about).  It turned out that the answer was “Take you for a little ride” and there was then some spirited discussion whether they meant a ride on a tractor, as Victoria suggested, or the kind of ride that Hannah was thinking of.  I guess we will never know.

I then cost the team a point when I thought that Unix was the operating system that Linus Torvald started rather than Linux.  And I might have gotten all geeky and tried to argue about that point but, well, it was just a point and (spoiler alert) the game did not come down to one point.  The next question asked for the two largest cities in Mississippi and we knew Jackson but thought the other one was Biloxi instead of whatever the right answer was.  (Gulfport?)  We ended that round strong by knowing about Matt Groening and The Three Amigos.

The top half of the halftime sheet killed us, as we had to recognize the names of various animated fish.  Sure, we knew Nemo and Flounder and even Cleo, but we did not know Klaus (although Ben knew he was from American Dad) or Kenny The Shark.  Luckily, the bottom half was better as we had to name words that ended with the letter X, and we got them all, including Matchbox cars (despite the fact that Mary wanted us to put Hot Wheels because she did not read the directions), Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat, and Foreigner’s Jukebox Hero.  The team was impressed that I knew what a parallax was, and we were all impressed that Ben’s totally made up word for Amelia Earhart, Aviatrix, is not in fact a totally made up word.  It was also during this part of the night that I found out that Victoria has a pet fish named after Edward Jenner’s development of the smallpox vaccine, although I was never clear whether the name of the fish was Edward Jenner or Smallpox, and I am not sure which would be weirder.

After halftime we were not doing so great, although Hannah didn’t mark down where we were – I think it was fifth place out of seven teams, though.  And we were really worried about the third round.  In fact, we really waffled over what to choose as the bonus category in this round as they all seemed awful.  The first question was NFL quarterbacks, and somehow Mary and Ben figured out that Aaron Rodgers and Matthew Stafford have the most yards of any active quarterback.  The second question was philosophers, which concerned us but the question was literally “Who wrote The Republic?”  For some reason that escapes me we did choose European Monarchs as the bonus, and luckily we knew which century each of three monarchs were all from so we got those points.  The next category was “Broadway Plays” and by this time we had realized that the hint of the day was going to lead us to A Raisin in the Sun.  I wanted to turn in the answer before we even heard the question as the ultimate flex, but my teammates were more rational – and wanted to see if there as a bonus question.  But yes, the answer was A Raisin in the Sun. 

Oh, and the final question of that round was about Beyonce’s new country songs and this time Mary did know the country music question.  So we had a perfect round despite our fears that we would crash and burn.  The 6-4-2 question was about the part of the human anatomy that can be affected by tinnitus.  Now you know why I told you the story about Hannah’s ear issues up above, because obviously we had extra reason to know the answer!  Of course, all the other teams also knew this (the answer, not about Hannah’s ringing ears) so we never even heard the easier clues.

The final round started with Canadian geography and asked which province bordered Idaho.  We went back and forth about whether it was Alberta or British Columbia, and in the end put Alberta when it was in fact BC.  There was also a bonus opportunity to name the capital of the province and it turns out that your Educated Friends do not know their Canadian capitals, as we would have said either Calgary or Vancouver when in fact neither are the capital of their respective provinces.  That round we also got wrong a question about a four letter word related to mollusks that also means a piece of metal you can use to trick a vending machine (we said clam instead of slug) but Mary did figure out that scallops were the bivalve food that also lends its name to a potato dish. My geek side also got to show off as, while several of us knew that The Highlander is the scifi movie franchise about a 16th century man named Connor MacLeod, only I knew that the sequel was subtitled The Quickening.  And my team was surprised that I knew what tv show the song Agatha All Along is from, even though I thought it was obvious.

We were technically still in the running at the final question, although unlikely to win, and I felt good about it because the category was TV history.  The question was “Nancy Zerg is a real estate agent who made headlines by winning this game show almost 20 years ago.”  We went through a bunch of options before settling on ‘Deal or no Deal’, but as soon as we turned it in the answer clicked and was obvious, as Zerg is the person who knew about H&R Block and beat Ken Jennings.  Even if we had gotten it right we would have only come in second, as it is we think we came in fourth.  Oh well.  Better luck next time.