Trivia Recap: 11/2

I would like to start by thanking the voters. It really meant a lot to me that you voted my blog from last week as better than Victoria’s version of the evening, and I was heartened to see that you rewarded my positive version over the smearing attacks and negativity in hers. I would also like to thank the real heroes – the teachers who have meant so much to me and to America’s children over the years and who obviously do so much more for society than lame-ass veterinarians. I would like to thank my son, who after I told him that I won grunted in a way that I can generously interpret as being interested in me. And I would like to thank my parents, and Pour House Trivia, and my college roommate who sent me this Onion article that these blogs remind him of. Truly, it was an honor just to be nominated, where by “honor” I mean “mild chore that Hannah assigned me to do for her own amusement/laziness.” Winning is a prize in and of itself, but I am also happy that I won real prizes. Well, sort of real prizes. As promised, Mary provided me with a collection of goodies from her desk drawer, including a bunch of stickers, some Milano cookies with a sell-by date of June 2023, pencils and highlighters, a stuffed hedgehog (I asked Mary what its name was and she said “I don’t know…how about Desk Drawer The Hedgehog?” So Desk Drawer it is. I hope that she put more thought into her son’s name.) But there was also a note.

Just some of the prizes I won. I hid the cookies so that my son didn’t eat them and get sick.

The note said “Congrats! You did such a great job with the trivia blog, you get to write it again this week!” Which is why I am here with you again, loyal readers. So jump in for another Trivia Recap.

The Players: Darren, Hannah, Mary, Landon, Ben, Mary’s sister Rachel.

Hint of the Day: A map that we think is pointing to Monaco.

Opening Category: 60’s One Hit Wonders (Audio)

The Blogger: Darren, but that should be obvious by now.

This week we took an actual team photo, so you will be spared the AI Hellscape that I had to use last week.

As you recall, we won last week and Hannah had chosen 60’s One Hit Wonders as the opening category. Much as in some previous weeks, Hannah wanted me and Mary to study. Friday morning she texted us and said “I think we all need to search 60s one-hit wonders on Spotify and listen to them this week. I’m starting with a 60s/70s playlist and this is the first song for me. Please text this thread with your first songs so I know you’re participating.” Mary quickly responded with Sandy by Larry Hall. I pointed out that Hannah assigns a lot more homework than most of my other friends, but told her she was worth it and then sent along 96 Tears by ? and the Mysterians. Hannah and I sent each other a couple of other clips during the week but generally felt pretty good about our preparation for the opening question. Which turned out to be about a band led by a frontman who used a punctuation mark for a name and whose only top 20 hit had a number in its title. Yes, I called it and we were off and running!

Ben had wanted to choose Rivers as our bonus category because he “know[s] an above average amount about rivers.” We didn’t listen to him but it turns out that he knows that the Nile is the longest river in Africa (insert joke about ‘denial’ here) even if he thought its colorful tributary was the Red Nile rather than the White Nile. Landon knew about sand wedges in golf and we all knew about different forms of power and Mary made a hail Mary (puns intended?) correct guess that there are five books in the Torah.

The audio clue was our bonus in round two and it was a different format: Adam played a clip of a tv show, a movie, and a song all from the same year and we had to guess the year. We all recognized Oceans 11 and Fear Factor and s recognized several of my teammates knew the song (which I didn’t know then and don’t remember now) and while we couldn’t quite remember if they were from 2000 or 2001 we eventually guessed 2001 and were correct. The rest of the round was pretty easy as we knew about New Zealanders being called kiwis and Outer Banks and Pulp Fiction, and we knew that Einstein was the scientist that Time Magazine named Person of the Century. For bonus points we could have named the runners-up and we tossed out lots of names – Hitler! Churchill! -- We ended up putting down Martin Luther King but it was actually FDR and Gandhi, both of whom we (Danielle, specifically) had mentioned but passed on. Oh well.

The halftime bonus sheet started by asking us to identify ten famous faces. That was it, no theme or anything. This was pretty easy and we quickly got them all. The bottom half was much more challenging as we had to match the celebrity with the magazine they appeared on the first cover of. Mary and I knew a couple of these (Wonder Woman on Ms, KD Lang on Entertainment Weekly, John Lennon on Rolling Stone) and then guessed a few more from context clues and then made a wild guess on the last two, but somehow we got a perfect score and were in first place going into the second half!

The second half started with a round with three words that each started with M, ended with M, and had a third M in the middle, including a religious branch (Mormonism), the p in p=mv (Momentum), and an artistic movement (Minimalism). Next up there was a zoology question. You would think we would totally ace that since we have a veterinarian on our team, right? Oh, but check that list up above again, dear readers. Victoria bailed at the last minute tonight and left us high and dry when it came up animal questions. Luckily, Mary knows all about bats and figured out that they use echolocation to locate things with sound. Ok, maybe it wasn’t that hard a question anyways. But I think it showed us that Victoria’s talents are not as unique as one might suspect and her blog-writing skills are at best the second best on the team. We finished up the round by successfully naming Taraji P Henson and Peyton Manning and that Bad Bunny has a song called Monaco, not because we know anything about Bad Bunny but because of the hint of the day.

I think the NFL question was around the time that Hannah got bored and started doodling increasingly elaborate doodles.

We really hadn’t been sure what to choose for our bonus category in the fourth round. Ben wanted to choose World War II History, but we didn’t trust him even though in the end he knew the name of the invasion of Normandy as well as the general in charge. We had considered both Brand Name Beverages and Lets Go To The Dentist and in fact we knew about Yoo-Hoo and impacted molars (two separate questions) but we hadn’t chosen them as our bonus either. Hannah had suggested going with “The Masters of Horror” because she thought it might be horror novels but we all thought it was more likely to be horror movies. And in the end it was, in fact, about identifying the Stephen King novel from the name of the protagonist and we aced it. But we hadn’t chosen any of those as our bonus categories.

Instead, we chose Crime Shows. Now, Hannah was the one who pulled the trigger on that choice but she wanted me to give the following disclaimer: Hannah refuses to take full credit for this decision because Mary was the one who said “Between all of us, I think we’ll know it.” And Hannah remembers this clearly because Mary should have said “among” instead of “between” because there were more that two of us. But she didn’t correct her. In any event, that is what we chose and none of us could remember the name of the cop show that Jennifer Lopez was in or the name of her now-deceased costar. Hannah remembered it had ‘Blue’ in the title and Mary knew that the co-star was a white man with a plain face and brown hair who normally plays bad guys, but somehow that was not enough to point us to Ray Liotta or Shades of Blue.

He does have a plain face and plays a lot of bad guys. And he is white.

We therefore went into the final question tied for second. And the category was mountains, so Ben felt confident. And, when asked what country Mount Logan is the tallest mountain in, he confidently said Australia. And I confidently wrote it down because, after all, Ben knows an above-average amount about rivers so the same is probably true of mountains. But unfortunately none of that confidence was warranted and Australia was not the answer and Canada was and so we fell out of the money. Sigh.

Next week I am not sure if there will be a trivia blog. I will be volunteering at the Adams County Giving Spree, which those of you who are local and able should use as a chance to donate money to the many great organizations in our community. Mary will be at a comedy show. Landon has work stuff. Ben was noncommittal and I think that Hannah was just pouting. Maybe we will have Chat GPT write a trivia blog for us instead.

Bonus Photo: Its not clear if Ben really didn’t think to flip the phone around when taking the selfie or was just joking, but here was his first attempt.