Trivia Recap: 10/5
Players: Ben, Hannah, Darren, Mary
Blogger: Darren
Opening Category: Trampled by Turtles
Hint of the Day: an orchestra conductor.
Spoiler Alert: I’ll cut to the chase. We had one of the worst outings I think we have ever had as Educated Friends. Maybe it’s because we were shorthanded, or because people feel tired, or just the stars were not aligned, but it was not pretty. I’m saying this so that you feel comfortable scrolling on to something else on your Facebook feeds – go find a fun cat video or something! -- even though I know that me saying this means you will want to keep reading.
Not very happy Educated Friends
You may recall that last week we won! And Hannah chose Trampled by Turtles as the opening round for this week. And to make sure we were prepared, every morning this week she texted me and Mary a link to a Trampled by Turtles song. And then, because I am a smartass who can’t give up a joke, I would text both of them a picture of a turtle, probably trampling something. I think Mary and I agreed that Alone was our favorite of the songs. Their favorite picture was one that was actually of my son helping a turtle across a highway so it didn’t get trampled, but I’m not sure he would want that on the blog so here was the runner up:
Wheeeeee!
Anyways, obviously Hannah will easily get the question about her favorite band, right? Au contraire, my friends. The question was an audio clue that played a clip and asked what 19th century poet the song was named for. And Hannah had no idea. It really seemed like this would be another situation like when I chose Algebraic Geometry as the category and botched it, but we just kept naming poets and eventually Hannah said that she thought Walt Whitman was the best guess, and luckily we were right!
The rest of round one was pretty straightforward – we all knew that Sesame Street started on PBS and figured out that the hint of the day was referring to electrical conductors and we could name two of the three countries from the name of their female leaders, but we did not get the Scandinavian country correct which was fine since it was the bonus but foreshadowed things to come. Somewhere around here, Ben and Mary and Hannah started talking about which world leaders they wanted to “have adult time with” and picked up on a comment that I had made earlier about “sometimes hard things can be fun”. Being pure and innocent I wasn’t really sure what they were referring to, especially since I think several of us have moms who read this blog.
Sanna Marin was the Prime Minister of Finland that Ben would most like to join our trivia team. The first round can be on our team tab, Sanna!
The second round is when things started to really fall apart. The audio category was, as always, our bonus, but it did not go well this week. They played the karaoke versions of songs and we had to name the song. I immediately knew that the first one was Walk This Way but the second one caused a divide with the men on our team thinking it was “that Snoop song” and the women thinking it was Oops I Did It Again. Unfortunately, the men couldn’t actually come up with the name of the Snoop song so even though we were split 2-2 we had to go with Britney and it was, in fact, Snoop. Ben and I also originally thought the third song was Wonderwall, but then Ben and Hannah thought it was a Third Eye Blind song and I didn’t push hard enough so we switched to a wrong answer.
Since we should have trusted Ben’s first instincts on two of these we went along with him on the next question when he said that Teddy Roosevelt was definitely the president on the right on Mount Rushmore. But he isn’t. Abe Lincoln is. The rest of the round was decent as we knew the Pistons used to be in Pontiac (but not the name of their current arena – I went with Dominos but Hannah’s guess of Little Caesars was correct) and we knew that Crème de Menthe is the liquor in both a Grasshopper and an Irish Flag, and we knew that Wendy’s serves square burgers but not where its headquarters is located.
The top half of the halftime round went quite well – you had to recognize celebrities who had an X in their name, like Courtney Cox or Max Scherzer or Annie Lennox. And other than thinking that Rex Harrison was Max von Sydow we got them all. But the bottom half was “Norway, Sweden, or Finland?” Readers, can you tell me which of those countries meets each of the following criteria:
Gave us the video game Angry Birds
Uses the Euro as its currency
Won the 1994 gold medal in Olympic men’s ice hockey
Its mainland extends the farthest north
If you know this kind of thing, let Mary know and she might invite you to join us next week. In any event, we only got six out of ten, despite this really intricate map that Ben drew.
Not only does this map lack detail, but it’s also wrong and cost us points. Can you tell why?
We were out of the money at halftime and a good 20 points behind the leader. Not good. The third round went much better, which is not normal. We knew that Don Quixote was the one who tilted at windmills, and that Mozilla is the company that created Firefox and Thunderbird. We also got the opera question about librettos and a question about the fact that there have been two Rices as National Security advisor. The one question we got wrong was about which celestial body has Styx as a moon. When they told us the answer was Pluto, Mary and I both exclaimed “that’s not a planet!” and Hannah pointed out that they didn’t say planet but said ‘celestial body’ and we got annoyed that she hadn’t pointed that out earlier.
In the 6-4-2 round, the first hint was that it was the toy featured in the movie The Hudsucker Proxy so I immediately knew it and turned it in. I remember really liking that movie but haven’t rewatched it in many years, which is weird as I rewatch lots of other Coen Brothers films. Anyways, I didn’t really pay attention to the other clues.
At this point we had inched into third place, but were still twenty points behind the leader. And the worst was yet to come. Another geography question asked us which direction you go to get between certain cities, and it turns out that Sao Paulo is basically due West of Rio de Janierio and that Brisbane is due North of Sydney and that we got the question wrong. And then I got outvoted about which movie has Marilyn Monroe’s famous white dress. So even though we knew Dan Marino had a lot of touchdowns but no Super Bowl rings and that Rastafarianism comes from Jamaica (but was not popularized by Idi Amin) we did not have a good round. We did get a lot of points for the ‘Last Word/First Word TV Edition’ clue asking us about the mashed up tv-show “Bear in the Big Blue House of Cards”, despite Ben and Mary getting way too confused about the structure of the question.
In theory, we were still in it at the final question but the question asked us to name all three African countries with four letter names. We quickly came up with Chad and Mali, but not the third. (Can you name it? Maybe this is a way of getting more reader engagement). So we did not end up in the money. Even worse, a bunch of seminarians won so the opening category next week is “Martin Luther.” I think Mary agreed that she would text me and Hannah one of the 99 theses each morning, and in return maybe I’ll send clips from Martin and Luther.
Full Disclosure: For those who don’t know, Ben is a diehard Phillies fan and I am a diehard Braves fan. Depending on how the next couple of weeks go, one or both of us may miss trivia to watch baseball and/or we may have a blood feud between us. Stay tuned!
Comments