Trivia Recap: 12/28

We have arrived at the final trivia night of 2023, and what a year it has been.  Much of the team was off doing “family things,” but Mary, Hannah, Siri, and I still showed up for trivia.  Despite the fact that most of the usual teams also took the week off (presumably for “family things”), we arrived to a very packed Fourscore (presumably lots of people avoiding their “family things”) and were worried we would have to stand for all of trivia, but luckily a small table opened up just before game time. 

This is not what we looked like at all.  But we forgot to take a team photo again, so we are back in the AI hellscape. 

The opening category was ‘Jesus in the Gospel of Luke,’ which none of us were very optimistic about.  The question asked how many days Jesus wandered in the desert fighting off Satan’s temptations, and Hannah got excited and said “Darren, you know numbers!  You should know this!” I then had to tell her we didn’t cover those numbers in Mathematics graduate school, and that being raised by a Jew and an Atheist I was not going to be any help.  Hannah said we should put 40 because “it feels like a biblical number,” so we did and we were right!

The next question asked about famous Marches and we knew The Ides of March, the Imperial March, and the March of the Penguins so got all our points.  Another question asked what fabric gets its name from the Hindi word meaning dirt-covered and Hannah again came to our rescue by knowing it was khaki.  We knew that G-Men are part of the FBI because Siri loves Leonardo DiCaprio, and while we didn’t know for sure that the Detroit Lions really sucked in 2008 we did know that the hint of the day had been a photo of lions so we guessed that one correctly.

The Hint of the Day

The audio round involved identifying songs covered by Postmodern Jukebox.  We got "Hollaback Girl" and "Flowers" correct, but could not identify the third one despite Mary’s best efforts. It turned out to be "Can’t Feel My Face."  The next question seemed too easy as it asked about “a brand of taffy” and the answer was Laffy Taffy which seems like poor quiz-writing etiquette and we started to second guess ourselves but so many teams were turning it in quickly that we went ahead and gave that answer, which is good because it was right.  We did well on the next question because Siri knew that Tom Joad was from The Grapes of Wrath and I knew that Bruce Springsteen had written a song about him. Somehow we knew that Granada was the island where Operation Urgent Fury took place, and there was an easy question about Sex And The City to close out the first half.

The top half of the halftime sheet had us identifying photos of famous Jacks and Jackies, such as Mr. Black, Ms. Joyner-Kersee, and Dr. Skellington.  (He did have a PhD, right?)  The second half involved finding words with BALL in them, which I am just now realizing is a New Years Eve ball dropping reference.  It's too bad Victoria wasn’t with us, as we all know how she feels about balls.   But even without her, we identified Ballet as a dance, Thunderball as a James Bond film, Highballs as a type of drink, and the greatest invention of all time, the cornballer.

As an interesting aside, we have mentioned before how our wonderful host Adam sometimes struggles with the pronunciations of some difficult words like ‘ballet’ and ‘Granada.’  But when he read the answer ‘caballero’ he did it in a seamless Spanish accent that was beautiful.  Credit where credit is due.  Speaking of which, we got a perfect score on the halftime sheet and were in first place by four points after halftime.  Hannah also wants me to point out that her math was correct on our score sheet as we entered the second half.

The second half opened with a question about the singer whose final studio album was Duets 2, released in 1994 featuring a duet with a female rock star on ‘Luck Be A Lady.’  I wanted to put Tony Randall, which Hannah very quickly corrected to Tony Bennett, but then we remembered that he released songs with Lady Gaga which were certainly after 1994 since she was only 8 at the time.  Luckily, I remembered that Frank Sinatra died just after that time (Fun trivia fact: I remember because he died the same night as the final episode of Seinfeld).  We guessed that the female rock star was Joan Jett but it was actually Chrissy Hynde which I guess Siri had suggested but didn’t fight for.

The next question was in Road Trip Geography: If you start in St Louis you could travel 90 miles north on one interstate or 250 miles southwest on a different interstate to arrive in two cities with the same name.  What is that name?  To help Hannah with reader interaction I am not going to tell you, but one person who sends Hannah the correct answer will get a prize!  The next question was about comic book supervillains and Hannah immediately said we should choose it as our bonus because I was there.  Her logic is sound: as I may have mentioned, I worked in a comic book store in high school and still have several thousand comic books in my garage (hey ladies, I’m also single!) and while I haven’t read them recently I do still watch all the movies and tv shows.  So you would think it would be a good choice.  And I did know that Edward Nigma is the secret identity of The Riddler.  But I could not pull that Max Dillon is Electro, and I don’t think I ever knew that Barbara Ann Miranda is Cheetah (I know I just said I watch all the movies, but I guess Wonder Woman 1984 was the exception that proves the rule).  So we lost a bunch of points here.  Luckily, Siri had some good logic about why the theoretical planet between the sun and Mercury was called Vulcan, and I did know about Joe DiMaggio’s brothers so we got some points back. 

The 6-point hint on the 6-4-2 question was about what tv show had an instrumental theme song by The Refreshments entitled “Yahoos and Triangles.” I did not know the name of the song, but I did know that the Refreshments did the theme song to King of the Hill so we got six points and I felt somewhat redeemed.  However, we had lost our hold on first place and were now in second place with an eight point gap behind the Railsplitters.  Luckily, the first question of the final round was about the movie Singles which is right in both mine and Siri’s wheelhouse.  Whether or not it was a coincidence, Adam was playing lots of solid 90’s hits last night which led to a spirited debate about Lisa Loeb’s song "Stay."  I am in the pro camp and Siri is in the con camp, for what it is worth.

We knew that Sisyphus pushes a boulder up the hill and that Bausch & Lomb make contact lenses.  There was an acronym category that asked about the meaning of DefCon.  We spent most of the two minutes allotted complaining that DefCon isn’t really an acronym (although I will say that the internet seems split on this and the OED thinks it is one) but we knew that the Def comes from ‘Defense’ (and not from ‘Def Comedy Jam’). Unfortunately, we guessed that the Con came from ‘Control’ rather than ‘Condition’ so we did not get our bonus points.  We also clearly were not paying attention in 2023 as we did not know that Danielle Steele wrote her bazillionth novel, that Metallica released their first album in seven years, or that Finland joined NATO. 

Going into the final question, Hannah thought we were 11 points down but it turns out that 139+5 is actually 144 and not 134 as she had computed.  I wouldn’t normally tease her about her math errors but since she made me brag about her mathematical prowess earlier in the blog I figure she deserves it.   For the final question, we guessed that Maverick was the only western TV show to ever win Best Drama Emmy and later have a movie made based on it with the original star, so we got all 12 points for the final.  While all of this helped us do well, it was unfortunately not quite well enough and we still fell one point short of the Railsplitters who won the evening.  Damn you, Maxwell Dillon!

Next week, the staff of Fourscore is taking a much-deserved week off so there won’t be any trivia unless we all just show up at Hannah’s house and start reading questions to each other.