Trivia Recap: 3/14

The Players: Hannah (English teacher), Mary (English teacher), Siri (English teacher), Brock (media marketing specialist who does things with graphic design and maybe some animation as well and often has to travel for work so hopefully he's in town on the weekend of my birthday celebration)

Opening Category: Rock and Roll Hall of Famers (Audio)

Hint of the Day: Fingers

***You may notice that the team was very small tonight. Allow me to explain why:

• Darren was eating pie in D.C. As a professor of math, one of Darren's greatest loves is numbers. Therefore, the number 3.14onandonandonandon means something to him. Like, a BIG something. Hence, rather than play trivia with his educated friends, he ventured south to our nation’s capital in order to eat pie with his other educated friends. And pie, they had! Apple, blueberry, lemon custard… The list goes on! In fact, Darren reached out after trivia and shared that the only thing missing from his D.C. pie-eating experience was a creamy scoop of vanilla ice cream. So how very ironic is it that

• Marc wasn’t at trivia because he was serving ice cream to the masses at Mr. G’s?! It’s true, though! Due to an unfortunate scheduling conflict, Marc was forced to wield his ice cream scoop with his teenage employees instead of spending the evening with his educated friends. He was missed – especially because he’s a knower of things and some of the things we didn’t know tonight might’ve been known by him (i.e., NBA shit). You know who else knows some NBA shit, though? 

• Ben. But Ben was playing baseball. Always private, the team was therefore incredibly surprised to receive a photograph of him wearing a pair of funny baseball pants around the time we were preparing for the second question of Round Two. In the photograph, Ben is munching upon a caramel apple and wearing a backwards baseball cap, but I’m of course not allowed to share the actual image. Not with you, anyway. I did forward it to

• Victoria, who is somewhere doing veterinary things. An avid collector of tapeworms, Victoria signed up for a parasitic convention that will go into great detail about hooks, whips, and other wriggly things found in dog/cat intestines.

Round One:

Otis Redding died in a plane crash. Did you know that? We didn’t, but Siri recognized Otis Redding’s voice in the audio clip and so we were off to a strong start! Another thing that was known: Stephen Spielburg directed multiple films in both the Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park franchises. Brock pulled out some scientific equation knowledge before the question was even read and Mary knows some important information about both Judaism and newscasters (because she’s a bit of a news junkie). 

Round Two:

I once told my concert husband Phillip that if I were going to see a show in an arena (I don’t really like arena shows), and if it was going to be the show of someone I don’t actually care about seeing in my life but would enjoy nevertheless, I would choose Pitbull. Obviously, I want all of the artists featured in all of his songs to be on the stage with him… but really, what’s not to like about Pitbull? Here’s something: The fact that Pitbull does not, in fact, sing “Wild Ones.” Nope, that’s Flo Rida, but Mary and I mixed him up with Pitbull and so the team didn’t get the two-point bonus for the second audio clue of the night, A Word in Common. 

Perhaps the best and worst aspect of the evening happened next. Falling under the category of Online Debacles, a clue was read by Adam, a 100-watt bulb went off inside Brock’s brain to light his face with overwhelming enthusiasm, and he knew the answer to be “Boatie McBoatface.” He wrote it down. I wrote it down. Mary almost wrote it down, but missed the “Mc.” So did Brock and I when we proofread her response… which is why we lost those points. The incident has strong ties to an Educated Friends trivia debacle from years past, when Darren mistakenly wrote “Polar Christmas” instead of “Polar Express,” thus costing us many points at the time. Fortunately, we were able to laugh about the error back then and we’re still laughing about it today. 

And speaking of laughter, there was much laughter throughout the evening and not because we were happy about where this particular night of trivia was going. Brock laughed because he is a laugher; you can nearly always find him to be in good cheer. Siri laughed because she said funny things; she is a whiz at one-liners. Mary laughed because I was delirious with exhaustion and not making a lot of sense; she’s also had a rough week at school and needed laughter because it’s rumored to be the best medicine. I laughed because I have a tendency to crack myself up and because my friends are funny. None of us laughed because we were having Fun with Flags or enjoying a category devoted to NBA Players (although we might’ve been laughing had Marc not been preparing banana splits a few blocks away). We did chuckle when Siri shared that “Let your fingers do the walking” was an ad slogan for the Yellow Pages.

Halftime:

I didn’t enjoy the top of this worksheet at all. There were famous people who are famous because they are in movies and do you know what I don’t watch many of? Movies. But Siri and Brock are movie aficionados and so they filled in the answers. We got most of them right, but I unfortunately didn’t check the answers because I wasn’t expecting to know anyone other than Christopher Walken. If I had checked the answers, I might have realized that we had mistakenly listed Grace Slick as the name of some other Grace. I don’t watch movies, but I do love me some Jefferson Airplane, so I likely would have caught that.

The bottom of the halftime sheet was fun because it had to do with Shakespeare and we had three English teachers on the team so… yeah.

Round Three:

I grow hydrangeas and know that the flowers vary in color due to the acidity of the soil. Because of this, we got some points. Siri had Third Eye Blind’s album back in the day and firmly believes that “Semi-Charmed Life” is the worst song on the album. “It’s a good song,” she grants, “but have you heard the rest of the album?” The answer? No, but I’m familiar with the song “Jumper” and, in my opinion, it isn’t as good as “Semi-Charmed Life.”

Here are some other things worth mentioning from this round: Billy Crystal was in a sitcom called Soap, Food Lion is a grocery store and Good Lion is not an animal preserve in Africa, and the Royals do not have barley on their uniforms. Make of that what you will.

6-4-2:

Steve Jobs wears turtlenecks because he doesn’t like bugs. Brock suspected as much early on and I think this has something to do with Brock’s own fear of bugs. Moths, specifically. He has such a fear of moths. In high school, I remember a time when Brock, Phil, and I were hanging out on a warm summer night. We were on Phil’s deck and the light was on, moths swarming around it. Out of nowhere, however, the bulb exploded and the moths startled and flew after Brock. He squealed – terrified and out of sorts – and peeled off his shirt before diving into the pool. I swear he held his breath for three minutes that night, and when he finally emerged from the deep end, he was quaking with fear, shaking with nerves, and blue in the face.

Round Four:

Mary really likes The Crown and Siri really likes British things, which was awesome for the Educated Friends because they knew a lot about Henry VIII. I know all the lyrics to Herman’s Hermits’ song “Henry VIII,” but that wasn’t part of the question. 

A lover of punctuation, Mary also knew that Dr. Pepper officially eliminated the period from its name, and while I am also a lover of punctuation, I refuse to acknowledge this because to write Dr. Pepper without the period looks stupid. Dr Pepper? No, thank you. 

Sidenote: I have never in my whole life tried Dr. Pepper and have no idea what it tastes like.

I don’t feel like talking about U.S. Counties or Five-Letter Words, so I won’t, but I will tell you that the clues for “MOTHER” Knows Best were nonsensical. First, because Adam couldn’t pronounce the words in the clue, and second, because the clue said there were five ingredients and only three were provided. Darren would’ve hated that question because even I, a struggler with numbers, knows the difference between 3 and 5. 🧮️🙄

Final:

Having lost all interest in the game by this point, I think I may have gone to the bathroom. Or maybe I was paying my tab. Or maybe I just didn’t pay attention. Either way, I don’t remember the question or the answer. What I do know is this: next week’s opening category is The Golden Girls.