Trivia Recap: 12/14

The players: Darren, Hannah, and Victoria

Blog-writer: Darren

The opening category: Dungeons & Dragons

The hint of the day: Sand

So as you can see from the above, we were somewhat short-staffed tonight.  Among sick kids, holiday concerts, sporting events, and undisclosed commitments (I’m starting to wonder if Ben is a spy?) we could only rally the three of us to play. But we were committed to being there anyways, especially since we missed last week because of Hannah’s art opening.  (Did she mention that here?  She’s kept it very quiet)

In any event, it was a lovely night and we ate and drank well.  We kicked off the night by trying the goat cheese balls encrusted in pistachios with a cherry reduction, and I will tell you that it was very delicious.  Hannah was sure that Victoria would like them because she likes Scotch Eggs which are the same shape, and her logic seemed a little suspect to me since most people base their food preference on taste not shape, but in any event Victoria did like it and said “yes, I love all balls!” This was verified when she ordered a Yule Mule cocktail where the alcohol came separately in a little ornamental ball.

Speaking of the special food items that Four Score was serving tonight, they also had their Colombian chef prepare a special Colombian Fiesta platter that I ordered and that was very good.  Locals, I don’t know how long it will be around but especially that sausage was worth running over to get.

Finally, at the end of the night we decided to celebrate by having one of the special holiday beers – a coconut caramel stout – and while I think we all agreed it might be too sweet to drink a lot of, it was the perfect nightcap to a fun night.

Thanks for reading and see you all in 2024! 

Oh, wait?  You also want to hear about the trivia game?  Well, suffice it to say that wasn’t quite as good as the food.  The night started off strong as I did in fact play Dungeons & Dragon in middle school (I know, its so out of character for a mathematician who used to work in a comic book store and is single) so I was able to pull out of my memory that Intelligence was one of the character attribute.  We all knew that the game where you might play cards saying Skip or Reverse was Uno, and even though there are literally hundreds of sequels to Uno (my personal favorite is Uno Flip) we guessed from Adam’s snickering that the one he had in mind was Dos. 

The third category involved coming up with words that start with “CAT” and we knew that a catamaran was a boat and that Catalina is a location in the movie StepBrothers, but it turns out that the University of Vermont mascot is not the Catheters so we did not get our bonus.   We knew where MLK led bus boycotts, but we could not name any women’s basketball coaches since Landon wasn’t there.  Still, the opening round was good. 

The second round was also good, as we identified all three songs in the audio clue – “Ballroom Blitz”, “Barely Breathing”, and “Bad Blood”.  Yes, we got the Taylor Swift question even without Mary, although Hannah was skeptical.  The next question was about the chemical that makes skunk spray smell bad and Hannah was wearing her periodic table tank top so Victoria started lifting up Hannahs sweatshirt to see and dear readers I am sorry I did not get a photo of that moment.  Of course, while Victoria was undressing Hannah I just wrote down Sulfur because I didn’t need the periodic table for that one.  I continued my hot streak by knowing that Shetland was likely to be the region of Scotland that grew small horses.  We all knew that The Good Place was the NBC sitcom that popularized the term shirtballs, and I  knew it was created by Mike Schur, in part because I am a regular listener to his podcast – in all seriousness, the holiday episodes are normally the highlight of my Christmas season, even if you don’t care about sports at all.  Oh, but you still want to hear about trivia I guess?

The final question was about a comedic actor that had a bunch of different love interests with names they gave, none of which I can remember because we didn’t recognize them at the time.  One was a Veronica and I knew there was one by that name in Anchorman, so we guessed Will Ferrell because we didn’t have a better guess.  Or at least Victoria and I didn’t.  Hannah had suggested Adam Sandler even though she had no idea what movies he had those love interests in or could really name anything about it so we overruled her.  And, as you can probably guess, she was right.  We said she didn’t have a good reason but she insisted that I include in this blog “My GUT told me.  And my HEART!”  About half an hour later she realized that the hint of the day being sand was about this question, and I said if she had thought that earlier I would have gone along with her.  She said that the hint subconsciously affected her gut.  But we only lost one point on this so it wasn’t a big deal.

The halftime sheet had us identify different kinds of pastas, which we did pretty well on except that we switched rotini and rotelle.  And the bottom half had us come up with a bunch of phrases that had the initials F.F.  We could not come up with what kind of Flyer was the name of an old sled, and we didn’t know the supreme court justice (You know who would have known the supreme court justice?  Ben.)  But we knew the Foo Fighters and Farrah Fawcett and Folsom Field and so while it wasn’t a great round it wasn’t horrible.  Still, at half time we were in fifth place. 

The third round is where things really started to fall apart  Despite the fact that we knew that today was the anniversary of The Clash’s London Calling and we knew something about the purple heart and we got lucky by guessing that Madam CJ Walker made her money in cosmetics (although Victoria really wanted us to put that she was a sex worker), we did not know the name of the 2007 Bjork album that shares its name with a river in Ghana, even though Victoria really tried to find it on Hannah’s world map socks, and this time I did get a picture.

The final question of the round was about what 21st century movie had Kate Winslet say “Meet me in Montauk” and we totally blanked on any Kate Winslet films.  We put The Reader because we couldn’t think of anything else, but unsurprisingly that was not correct and as soon as we heard the answer I started kicking myself.  Speaking of kicking myself, in the next round we were asked to name the US Senators who are officially independent and I could not come up with Kyrsten Synema’s name even though I could totally picture her.  You know who would have known that?  Ben. There’s also a good chance Ben would have known the name of the arena that sumo wrestling takes place in and Landon definitely would have.  And even though we knew the authors of the books that Handmaids Tale and Game of Thrones were based on, we did not know who wrote Bridgerton, which again showed that we needed Mary even if we do know something about Taylor Swift without her.

On the positive side, we did not fall into a trap in the 6-4-2 question where they wanted us to say that pumpkins were the largest gourds rather than watermelons.  And we were able to name both European countries that have E as the only vowel in their name (can you?).  The ‘medical slang’ question was about a term that is the common name for allergic sinusitis even though your body temperature doesn’t raise.  As a medical professional, Victoria started scribbling and I think she may have even been drawing chemical symbols trying to figure it out but I don’t really know because I just wrote down Hay Fever and turned it in, which Hannah thought was the funniest thing ever.  Or maybe that was just the coconut caramel stout.

In any event, we were in 6th place out of eight teams going into the final category – Hannah wants to make sure I point out that this means we were in antepenultimate place because that is her favorite word of all time even though she has yet to use it in one of her own books – but technically we were still in it.  And the final question was about the 90’s movie where a bunch of people sat around a diner discussing “Like a Virgin.”  We knew that it was Reservoir Dogs  but so did everybody else so we did not end up in the money.  But what do you expect when there were only three of us?  Still, we had fun and isn’t the real victory the balls we ate along the way?