Trivia Recap: 10/26 (Darren's Version)

Players: Hannah, Victoria, Mary, Darren, Landon

Opening Category: John Brown

Hint of the Day: A Plumber

We forgot to take a picture tonight, so I generated one using AI. Try to guess who is who!

So I’m not really sure how it happened, but somehow Victoria and I both got drafted to write the blogs this week, so we will each write our summary of the night’s events and then maybe you are all going to vote on who you like best or at least do something to drive traffic to Hannah’s blog so that she becomes a famous author someday. Since that will inevitably happen, you should all come to her book signing next Friday evening at Bantam Coffee Roasters from 5:00-8:00. And I will be out of town and have to miss it, but I am hoping that she will sign a book for me later, especially since I brought her homemade fig jam tonight.

Anyways, Victoria’s post will probably be a lot funnier than mine. Or at least a lot more offbeat, since she is after all the one who recently carved a cabbage and left it at Hannah’s doorstep. Tonight we were discussing whether she will change the color of the cabbage every year by dying them different colors, to which Hannah exclaimed “Victoria can’t dye cabbages! She’s a veterinarian!” I was so amused by that logic that I wrote it down, which I think is why Hannah assumed I wanted to write the blog.

Anyways, it was a fairly low energy night at trivia tonight. We had a lot of trouble deciding which category should be our bonus in the first round because we didn’t feel great about any of them. None of us wanted to pick John Brown because we don’t know much about him, although it turns out we did know that he was hanged for treason. Hannah really wanted to choose ‘Classic Hollywood’ because she was utterly convinced that the hint of the day being a plumber would mean the answer was Christopher Plummer, and she was right. But we hadn’t chosen that. Nor did we choose ‘Hop on the “Bandwagon”’ because we had no idea what that category would mean; it was three words whose letters are in the word “Bandwagon” and we quickly knew Donna and Nada and Victoria guessed that the Rolling Stones album was ‘The Even Bigger BANG”. We did choose Latin words and it turns out that Mary knew a lot about psychedelic drugs, or at least that the word ‘hallucinogenic’ comes from a Latin phrase about wandering in the mind. Landon also knew that the Celtics won a lot of NBA titles in the 50’s but didn’t know they were once beaten by the (St Louis) Hawks.

To keep it visually interesting, here is the St Louis Hawks logo.

As always we chose the audio clue as our bonus in the second round, but that did not work out so well for us tonight. They were all two-word song titles including the word ‘Wild’, and we only knew ‘Wild Night’ and not ‘Wild Child’ or the other one. We did know about Pimp My Ride and the fact that Ronald Reagan was born in Illinois and started as a baseball announcer. And we knew about Cinnabon, but we did not know about volcanoes of the world. Luckily, neither did anyone else so we felt like we were in reasonable shape.

The halftime sheet was all about the color blue, with the top half asking us to identify blue cartoon characters (like the Blue Beetle, Captain Planet, and…well, Bluey) and the bottom half asking us to match songs with blue in the title to the artists, like ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky” and U2’s “Bullet in the Blue Sky”. We aced the music half and got eight of the cartoon characters – even though we knew what the last two were from, we did not remember the fairy’s name in Sleeping Beauty or the blue jay from The Regular Show. At this point, we were in second by a couple of points.

This is also around the time that I ordered my second beer of the night, which was a new special Halloween beer they had called ‘Real Monsters’. Just to give you a sense of the beer, I quote from their own description: “It’s a black milkshake IPA brewed with tons of midnight wheat and hopped with calypso, mosaic, and aaaroma hops. After fermentation we then blended it with blackberries, chocolate and vanilla to give you a fruity, hoppy, chocolatey and vanilla IPA all in one.” I have to say that not all of their specialty beers work for me, but I did like this one so I wanted to give it a shout out.

The third round went well. I immediately guessed that Julia Louis Dreyfus was the woman cast member of SNL from 1982-1985 but decided to forego the bonus points to be sure and it, in fact, was. We knew that the six letter cricket term was ‘Googly’, probably in large part because it was also a word to describe Cookie Monster’s eyes. Hannah and Mary assumed we would bomb Olympics Geography, but we were in fact able to name two of the three countries that hosted an Olympics but no longer exist – we came up with USSR and Yugoslavia, but not with West Germany. Despite Mary’s knowledge of psychedelic drugs, it turns out that she does not know her vodka brands and led us astray but that only cost us one point. We made it up by recognizing that Barbie is the character who has seven siblings named Skipper, Tootie, Todd, and some other things I don’t remember and were still in second going into the final round.

That Barbie picture gives me a good reason to repost this photo of 60% of our team on Barbie Day at their high school spirit week.

I was worried about the final round, but we did quite well. While none of us knew that Italy had been unified we did guess that if there was a country whose unification was led by someone named Giuseppe Garibaldi then it was probably Italy. Somehow I knew that Flotsam and Jetsam were characters in The Little Mermaid and we knew that the Citadel was the university in South Carolina named after a fortress. When asked about the mascot of the Citadel, Landon thought it was the Bulldogs which seemed reasonable but in fact it was the Bullfrogs. Or at least that’s what Adam said and so we were pleased when he gave us the points anyways. But looking it up now I see that it actually was Bulldogs. Way to go, Landon! Because I listened to Jagged Little Pill (now a YA novel and a Broadway musical!) basically nonstop in 1995 we got the next question about 90’s song lyrics, and our combined literary knowledge let us recognize Jane Austen, Colleen Hoover, and Toni Morrison from the names of their novels.

Going into the final question we were in first place by one point but also 15 points ahead of the third place team, so we had to decide whether to guarantee ourselves second place at worst or go for first. We wimped out and bet low, which extra sucked when we correctly deduced the answer to the final question: “In 1812, Spencer Perceval became the only person ever holding this office to be assassinated.” (Note that this is the second question that we got right tonight based largely on our stereotyping of people’s nationalities based on their names. Hmm.)

Anyways, I guess that Smartacus also bet low because despite everything we still won the night! There was much rejoicing!

Here is what happened when I asked the AI overlords to show the team celebrating their victory. You can tell they are celebrating because their mouths are open, I guess? Also, how many fingers does that guy in the back have, anyways?

Dear readers, I hope you enjoyed my version of the events of the evening. I am sure that Victoria will tell a very different tale, Rashomon style, and perhaps we will get a second set of gift cards for that one.