Trivia Recap: 10/6 (a night of one-liners)

The Players: Hannah (English teacher), Mary (English teacher), Darren (math professor), Victoria (veterinarian), Phil (very, very complicated), Brock (multimedia specialist who sometimes does things with graphic design and occasionally also does things with animation and every now and again is hired to just make sure that other people are doing what they need to do... but ultimately deals with events), and Alex (coffee shop owner)

Opening Category: Birds of prey (notice that it's not a proper noun; it was not in reference to the movie Birds of Prey)

Hint of the Day: Panda

Round One:

This was a solid round. Birds of Prey (Phil and Victoria knew California Condor and vulture straightaway), Horror Film Series (I actually got this one!), Also a Car Model (Phillip for the win... but my periodic table tank top came in handy letting us know that cobalt is the 27th element), This Is Jeopardy ("What is one thousand dollars, Alex?" Well, it's the biggest wager someone can make without having earned any money yet... and Hannah knew the answer, thank you very much), and US Presidents (Darren had Jimmy Carter and Mondale). It was a perfect round.

Round Two:

Five Little Letters was the category of the audio clue and we got "Layla" by Eric Clapton without a second thought. "Music" by a more popular artist proved to be a bigger challenge, but Phil knew it because he is hip and with it despite his forty-one years. The last song was called "Panda," which was the hint of the day, but we didn't get it. Nevertheless, we secured our five bonus points and earned points. It was fine. Next was Peninsulas, which we did not get right, and then there was a beer question in Beer Science. Phil was all like, "Yeast" right in my ear. Like, right in my ear. And then he followed it up with "Lager" for the two-point bonus). Darren wondered, "How confident are you about 'lager'?" and Phil said, "One hundred ten percent confident. I'm disregarding the laws of math. I'm that confident." And he was. He was right. We got the points. Then we had Legal Lingo and both Phil and Darren wrote down their eleven-letter answer on a napkin, but they wouldn't show their answers to the rest of the team because they didn't want to taint our opinions or whatever. It was "arraignment." We got the points. And weirdly but not surprisingly, Mary got the NFL Teams question right because the girl knows a thing or two about football.

Half-Time Sheet:

The top half was fun rebuses (some of them were really clever!) and the bottom was music scores accompanying movies. We aced it, no worries.

Round Three:

Darren knows his classic TV Shows and got Laverne and Shirley right out of the gate, but we didn't get their last names and that cost us the two bonus points. However, Phillip understands Signs and Symbols accompanying ski trails and so "green circle" was an easy answer. He once again spoke these words straight into my ear and now we are not only concert husband and wife, but we are also mouth-on-ear friends. He's my only mouth-on-ear friend and I am fortunate to have him in my life. I love that man.

We got to African Geography next and Phil was all like, "Damn it, Ben" because Ben has a cold and didn't come to trivia. But if Ben even had a whiff of Africa in the near future, there'd be a map. And Phil said that! Phil was like, "If Ben were here, we'd have the map already and he'd be filling it in and where is he when we need him?" The answer? Sick in bed. But Mary drew a map and this is what it looked like:

I think this map of Africa looks very much like a spaceman. I also think that this map of Africa elevates Ben's artistic abilities to maybe a step or two below Picasso, Renoir, or Monet.

Next was Tony Awards and I was like, "Damn it, Kristin" because she is our musical guru but she's driving to New Jersey to see Frankie-Frank (that's her dad) this weekend and so couldn't join us tonight. Fortunately, Darren knew the answer (Peter Pan) and we got points. Five of them, in fact.

Phil yet again defied math logic and was more than one hundred percent confident about the hardness of minerals. I think that's how it was worded... I might be messing something up. I don't know. The answer was "talc" and the other answer was "diamond" and we got it. Three points, plus a two-point bonus.

It was around this point that Darren's son showed up with his scooter after sports practice and took Alex's seat. She offered it to him, I believe, and he accepted. Darren bought his son a grilled cheese sandwich and some fries. I wasn't paying attention to the conversation that accompanied this period in time, but apparently Alex asked Darren, "Did you buy his food?" And then later, after Darren's son had left, it became evident that Alex didn't realize the two were related and thought Darren had purchased a meal for a homeless child. So that happened...

Side note: Victoria experiences such joy from running our answers up to Adam! It's so wonderful because 1) she's having a good time, and 2) no one else actually enjoys that job! Not that we don't like seeing Adam... but it's just a hassle, you know?

6 - 4 - 2:

The answer was Rhode Island and Darren was pretty sure he knew it... but he wasn't six-points confident. So we waited. And then we got it for four points because the answer was Rhode Island. It was very reminiscent of the Procter-and-Gamble 6-4-2 last week.

Side note again: Around this point, I was telling Mary and Phil a story about Augusta, my dog, and how she had put Harvey, my kitten, in her mouth the night before and squeezed a little too hard because Harvey yowled and I dropped my phone (I was talking to my mom at the time) in order to rescue him. When I retrieved my cell and returned to the conversation, I jokingly said to my mom, "I should just get rid of her. She's a horrible thing."

My mom said, "Oh, I think she's with you for the next twelve years at least."

This seemed a very long life... Augusta is already three and I've never had a dog live beyond twelve. However, she isn't as large as an Airedale so maybe she will be around for a good long while. Only time will tell. She'd better mellow out between now and then, though.

Anyway... back to the reason why I'm including this story: I was also telling Phil and Mary about how I was talking to an art teacher recently and he told me his family had a Kerry Blue growing up and she lived to be TWENTY OR TWENTY-ONE. And I was like... "Augusta will absolutely need to chill with her cat obsession if she's gonna be living with me for another two decades" and Phil said, "Wait, he's an art teacher?" I confirmed that he was. "There's a lot of dyslexia in the art community," Phil said very matter of factly.

So maybe the art teacher meant 12 or 02 years...

Back to trivia!

Round Four:

The Name's Almost the Same was figured out by Phil and Brock (one knew The Killers came from Vegas and the other knew Simon Pegg), Advertising Slogans was another win for Phil (Ben and Jerry's!), and "'F' the Sports Round" was all Brock. I mean, it wasn't all Brock since Mary and Phil figured out "falcon" and a few people knew "fade away," but Brock came up with "five hole" and he was the only one to come up with "five hole" and "five hole" was the answer so we were all proud of him. I gave him pats on the shoulder.

Mary loves British things and so she got "Tower of London" for Historic Landmarks, which was great. We only wagered one point, but it was still a point, you know? And then Darren and Mary, with their powers combined, got the Twentieth Century Literature question. Did you know Faulkner is considered stream of consciousness? I didn't.

Final Question:

This was one of the easiest questions we've ever had and while a lot of people knew the answer, I was the only one on my team who knew the answer... and the answer was MEGHAN MARKLE! Because she played Rachel Zane in Suits and I freaking love love love love LOVE Suits and I have SUCH a crush on Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht) and he is the ONLY actor I follow on Instagram (unless you count Ellen Degeneres, which I don't), and I just ADORE HIM SO MUCH!!! So, yeah. Zero thought was involved and I was one hundred fifty percent sure and I, like Phil, disregarded math laws and was overly confident. And it paid off because I was very, very right and we ended up getting second place. We only lost by ONE POINT. And Darren, who should from here on out be referred to as Mr. Glass-Half-Full (even though Victoria calls him Arthur), said, "It's good we didn't get first because we didn't have an opening category picked out."

I wish we had won, though, because next week's opening category is K-Pop and I am not excited about that.

Here's a picture that compares the map Mary drew to real Africa. Phil took it and it's pretty magical:

"See? I wasn't that far off." -Mary, 10.6.2022

Um...