Trivia Recap: 1/11

Players: Ben, Hannah, Mary, Darren, Marc, Kristin

Hint of the Day: A Rose

Opening Category: Teddy Roosevelt

Dear Gettysburg College,

I know that you gave me a sabbatical so that I could continue to work on my research projects, such as my ongoing work on arithmetical structures on graphs or what happens when you play Chutes and Ladders without any chutes or ladders.  Or maybe to continue to teach myself data science so that I can be better prepared to teach courses in those areas. Or to work on the book I am toying with about [redacted].  Unfortunately, Hannah and Mary had other plans.  They believe that my time – the time that you are paying me for – would better be spent writing blog entries about our trivia matches and that I should do this every week.  And they might even be right that more people read this blog than read my research papers, even though literally nobody responded to the not-so-subtle clickbait I put in the blog last time and therefore nobody won the glamorous prize that Hannah was going to purchase.  (The answer, by the way, was Springfield).  And I would normally still do the work that I am supposed to be doing.  But then Mary looked at me with her sad puppy-dog eyes saying “please don’t make me write the blog” and Hannah was her stubborn homework-assigning self and, let's face it, Ben doesn’t even really read the blog so was unlikely to write it.  So I agreed to do it again this week.  And we even took a picture early on to make sure that I didn’t need to use AI to generate one this week.

You can tell its not AI because there are the right number of people and we all have the right number of fingers.

As you see above, we thought we would have a full team tonight but we had two last minute cancellations.   So we were a bit concerned about how it would go.  However, the Educated Friends were on fire tonight.  With Ben in attendance we felt good about the Teddy Roosevelt question, and with good reason as we knew that his trip to Panama was the first time a sitting president left the country.  The next question asked who the only two MLB players are who had amassed 4000 hits.  Ben and I knew that one of them was Pete Rose, which was also the hint of the day.  We weren’t sure of the other, so Hannah started naming all the baseball players she knew.  This didn’t take very long as she only knows three: Daryl Strawberry, Derek Jeter and Ty Cobb.  She said them all with conviction, and Ben and I quicky rejected the first two, as any baseball fan would.  We did pause on Ty Cobb but after brainstorming a few other names we ended up going with Ichiro.  And yet, the answer was Ty Cobb.  Hannah was right.

We quickly bounced back with three questions about ‘block’s – we knew that the Cell Block Tango was from Chicago, how an NFL referee indicates a chop block, and that Gumby’s nemeses were the Blockheads.  We also knew about Eddie Murphy hosting SNL when Nick Nolte got sick and because Hannah’s favorite movie is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid we knew that Sundance died in Bolivia.

The second round started, as always, with the audio category.  Three songs about monkeys where we had to identify that the artists were The Beatles, George Michael, and Tones & I.  We knew this last one in large part because they had used this song in the audio round a few months ago and Danielle told us the answer then and we remembered it.  But Danielle wanted us to make sure to point out that she only knows Tones & I because of her niece, and she would much rather be listening to the Dave Matthews Band. There were some easy questions about badgers and the Colorado River and a question about the two sodas made by Coca Cola that are in the Top Ten soda brands but don’t have a variation of the word Coke in their name.  We easily guessed Sprite but also correctly identified Fanta.  Who knew? 

The final question of the round was about the movie The Beekeeper and who the stars are.  I had never heard of this movie until Spotify played me the ad the other day and I seriously had to go back and relisten to it to figure out if it was a joke or not.  It's not, and I have to admit it looks like a lot of dumb fun.  More importantly, we knew that the dumb fun stars Jason Statham and Phylicia Rashad so we finished out a perfect round.  And yes, it means we would have had a perfect first half if only we had listened to Hannah about Ty Cobb.

The top half of the halftime sheet had us identifying canned products like Crisco, Lincoln Logs, and Quaker State Oil with their logos removed, and we got nine of the ten.  We actually sort of knew the tenth except we all convinced ourselves that the tuna brand was Sunkist and not Starkist, probably because of all of the soda talk we had just been doing.  Oops.  The bottom half was a bunch of questions leading us to nine-letter words whose first letters ended up spelling out CONTAINER, hinting at the top half.  It was generally clever, but more importantly it meant we went into the second half with an almost perfect score and in first place.

You see, it clearly says Sunkist.

The second half started by asking us to identify movies based on descriptions of their opening sequences, and we recognized all three of Blazing Saddles, Austin Powers, and Deadpool.  Despite Adam stumbling a few times on the next question, Mary knew that an epidural is the only anesthesia given during childbirth so we got that question.  I missed the following question but the rest of my team clearly knew that it was pointing us to the sitcom The Middle; however, I did help getting the bonus points by knowing  that it starred Patricia Heaton rather than, as Ben thought, Patricia Arquette.  The next question asked about a 2006 music video where a circus ringleader breaks up a wedding.  Mary and Hannah named several bands that they thought it could be, but mid-oughts music is a definite blindspot of mine so I couldn’t help.  In the end Mary was sure it was Fall Out Boy and we all trusted her because she had a big punk phase.  Or maybe it was a pop-punk phase.  Or emo-pop-punk?  It was something that seemed out of character for our Taylor Swift expert in residence.  In any event, we went along with Mary being sure that it was Fall Out Boy.  But it wasn’t.  It was Panic! At The Disco.  (Am I punctuating that correctly?  I’m almost 50, so these things are hard.)

Fall Out Boy.  Or maybe its Panic! At The Disco.  Or Blink 182?

In any event, we knew that Russia, China, and Brazil are the three countries that border ten other countries, and we all guessed that Wyoming is the only state flag to feature a bison. So we were still in first place going into the final round, which was really Ben’s chance to shine.  The opening question was also our bonus and asked what Joseph Conrad novel was the inspiration for Apocalypse Now.  Ben wants to make sure that he gets credit for shouting out the answer before either of the English teachers on our team, although we all knew the answer.  However, we did not know the name of the lead character so we didn’t get our bonus.  The round continued with questions about Economics and Plantains (not the same question).  When they asked the sports question about which NFL division has three of its four teams going to the playoffs Ben sprinted back to the table from the bar to make sure we knew what the answer was.  And he also was helpful by knowing some facts about James Garfield in the Three Clues/One President round – my notes are sparse, but I think Hannah said one of the clues was “This president loves lasagna but does not like Mondays.”  Speaking of Hannah, I am supposed to point out at this point that her math was correct all night and we were up by six points at the end of regulation.

The final question of the night was a good one: Which US western state capital is only the 27th biggest city in its own state, the lowest such ranking?  I will pause for you to think about this for a minute, and share with you a photo that Hannah sent of what Ben was doodling.

Did you say the answer was Sacramento?  That’s what we said!  But it turns out that it is the sixth biggest city in California.  Did you say Juneau?  That was our second guess, but even though it is only one tenth the size of Anchorage it is the third biggest city in Alaska.  The answer is Olympia, as it turns out.  (Well, this website says its 25th.  But close enough.)  So we were wrong.  Luckily for us, a lot of other teams were also wrong (including the Street Sharks, who even have a Seattlite on the team.  Shame on them) so we ended up winning anyways!  Hooray!

Two weeks ago when we almost won I had wanted to choose “2024, the number” as our opening category because for some reason I find that idea hilarious. So Hannah had said we could choose it if we won this week since it is still the first game of 2024.  However, I have watch my son’s wrestling meet next Thursday and won’t be at trivia.  So they chose Dr. Seuss books as the category. 

So, Dear College, since I just remembered that I am pretending this is all a letter to you, I should tell you that we had a very successful night at trivia and beat at least two other teams full of college employees.  And Hannah and Mary insisted that I tell you all about it instead of pushing back the frontiers of scientific inquiry.  I hope that will meet with your approval the next time you consider merit pay raises.

Sincerely,

Darren Glass

Professor of Mathematics