Trivia Recap: 3/21

The Players: Darren, Hannah, Mary, Marc, Ben, Phil(!)

Hint of the Day: Lightning

Opening Category: Golden Girls

Blogger: Darren’s back!

Yes, readers, we had close to a full team tonight.  I recovered from the hangover of my wild Pi Day adventure to Washington DC (although I am still thinking about this amazing exhibit at the Renwick that you only have ten more days to see and I highly recommend!) and Ben came in from his 372-inning baseball game and Phil materialized out of nowhere like a magical genie and Marc handed the scoop over to celebrity ice cream scooper Jimmy Fallon all so that we could join Hannah and Mary for this week’s trivia match to see if we could help them redeem themselves from last week’s bloodbath.

Ben has a new photography technique.  I’m not convinced it is a great one.

As you can tell from the group photo, Hannah has a new shampoo.  She is very excited about it, and made everyone smell her hair and guess what the scent was.  It was rosemary mint.  She wants me to report that “Phil even took two sniffs. After the first sniff he thought it was a waterfall or springtime but Hannah told him it wasn’t and he said ‘Get back over here!’ and gave it a big second sniff.”

But we weren’t there just to discuss haircare products.  There was trivia to play!  The bar was very crowded tonight with lots of new teams and we actually were stuck in a corner at a counter rather than a real table for the first part of the game, which made the pregame conversation and hair-sniffing somewhat awkward but I did realize that Marc was cramming for the Golden Girls question.  I was expecting it to be something about the four main characters or St Olaf or Quentin Tarantino’s television debut but the question was actually “What was the name of Rose’s boyfriend starting in season five?”  Marc just looked at me and said “Damn….it’s something Highsmith but I’m not sure what the first name was.  I think it was Miles.  Yeah, go with Miles.  I think that’s it!”  I was pretty impressed but when we asked him how sure he was he said, “I’m sure.  I’m sure.  Go one point” which sent me some mixed signals.  But the name was in fact Miles and we got the three points we wagered.  The next question asked for the two state capitals that both have the word ‘city’ in their name and more than 100,000 people and we knew those were the Cities Oklahoma and Salt Lake. 

Then came Three Clues/One Animal, where we get bonus points if we get the animal’s name after the first two clues, which were “This is the national animal of Canada” and “This is the name of a movie starring Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster.”  After listing a bunch of movies with Mel Gibson, Marc came up with The Badger which I thought sounded very familiar so we decided to be bold and go for it rather than wait for the third clue.  We should have waited for the third clue, which was that it was Oregon State’s mascot.  We question whether there is really a difference between badgers and beavers anyways, but I guess there is.  Sigh. 

I’m still not fully convinced this is a real movie.

That was embarrassing, but from there things picked up.  Ben knew about Sega and Mary and Hannah knew that Station 19 is a Grey’s Anatomy spinoff (“Obviously, because it has Bailey’s husband!” they told me, as if I have any idea who Bailey is).  We then aced the audio category by recognizing the musical questions “Where is the love?”, “Do ya think I’m sexy?” and “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” and when I went up to hand in the answer three separate people in the bar said to me “I bet you got that third one, eh?” which makes me think that maybe I talk about REM too much.  But at this point we can all agree that they are the Greatest American Rock Band Of All Time, so really can anyone talk about them too much?

Things continued to go well not only because at this point we got to move to our real table but also because we knew that they signal a new pope with white smoke and that Hertz is a unit of measurement in computer processing.  I recognized the plot of the movie Up in the Air (although the book is much better, as is often the case) and Ben knew it starred Vera Farmiga, although we pondered how to spell it for awhile and I may have scribbled a little knowing that spelling doesn’t count (in hindsight, if I was sloppier when writing ‘Badger’ maybe we would have gotten those points!).  The final question of the first half was about the hockey team that Martin St Louis played for and who he now coaches.  We know nothing about hockey and Hannah really wanted me to put the Toronto Blue Jays while Mary suggested the St Louis Cardinals, which seemed a little too on the nose. And also isn’t a hockey team.  We took a stab in the dark and got the Canadiens correct but did not come up with the Tampa Bay Lightning.

The halftime sheet was kind of a mess, and not just because I spilled some of my very tasty red pepper and gouda soup on it.  The top half asked us to identify celebrities who had ‘foodie names.’  Sure, we got Kevin Bacon and Fiona Apple and even Harvey Milk, but we thought Ginger Rogers was Shirley Temple and we thought Saffron Burrows was Rebecca Pizza.  The bottom half had us identify what TV show or movie different fictional vehicles had appeared on.  We got most of them but somehow none of us remembered that Mach 5 was from Speed Racer and while Marc knew that Thousand Sunny was from some anime show he couldn’t pull the name of it.  And I can’t even remember it now.  So after halftime we were in sixth place, not doing great but not totally bombing it. 

Go, Speed Racer, Go!

The second half opened up with a Triple 50/50 where we had to say whether the Yen, Euro, and Australian Dollar were each worth more or less than a US Dollar at this moment.  We managed to get all three correct.  The next question was our bonus category, “How’s The Weather?”.  Did we choose this as our bonus because we are weather aficionados?  No, dear readers, we did not.  We chose it because the hint of the day was lightning so Hannah and Mary were sure this would be the answer.  But if you have been paying attention you would know that we already had the Tampa Bay Lightning be the answer to a question.  So in short: we were screwed.  Or at least we thought we were, even after hearing the question which was something like “what weather phenomena is measured using the Beaufort Scale and an anemometer?”  We had no idea and were split between ‘wind speed’ and ‘humidity’ when the team voted 3-2 for wind speed which ended up being the correct answer!  So the only reason we were screwed was because we only wagered one point!

But Darren, you are probably saying, how did you vote 3-2 when there were six of you?  Well, at this point Marc had started talking to the members of the team at the table next to ours and was deep into some conversation so wasn’t really paying attention.  Which wasn’t a big deal for that question, but on the next question we were asked which 30 year old actress/singer/business-person has more Instagram followers than any other North American woman.  We quickly rejected Beyonce and Taylor Swift (because Mary knew her exact age to the minute, and also because she isn’t an actress) and settled on Rihanna which seemed like a good guess.  But shortly after we turned it in Marc rejoined our conversation and said “You knew it was Selena Gomez, right?”  Sigh.  Or in the immortal words of Hannah Meeson:

The 6-4-2 question dealt with the fact that the state of Florida has a lot of minor league baseball teams but only one is a AAA team.  I will admit that I would have guessed Texas but my teammates talked me into going for Florida and we were right.  We did pretty well in the final round.  The first category was Pardon My German and I was in the bathroom while my team correctly spelled Gesundheit, probably because Hannah took four years of German which she told us all several times.

Our bonus category was Shakespeare and luckily the question was something that lots of us knew, as it asked what play was partly set in Birnam Wood.  Mary confidently told me that the answer was Beth, but luckily I doublechecked her work to make sure we actually put Macbeth.  (OK, this didn’t really happen.  But Hannah laughed a lot when I made a joke about it after last week’s Boaty McBoatFace incident and so I thought I would recreate that here for you all.  You see, those of you who are deep readers of the blog get inside parts of continuity that the more casual readers won’t get.  It’s a lot like the Marvel Cinematic Universe in that way.) 

Another photo Ben took of “The Avengers of Trivia”.  Great job, Ben!

To finish out the game, we were able to correctly name two of the three countries that have legalized recreational marijuana, and even as he left Phil was still questioning if Thailand has really done so based on his additional research.  Or he was planning his next vacation; it’s hard to tell.  We all remembered Billy Dee Williams’s commercials for Colt 45 (which are undoubtedly the second-best malt liquor commercials ever made) and we knew that Lionel was the first name shared by the co-composer of “We Are The World” and the soccer player who has won eight Ballon d’Or awards, although we had never heard of the famous vibraphone player Lionel Hastings.  Phil was happy that we wagered the points in order 9-7-5-3-1 this round.  Hopefully this pleasure will convince him to come back to play soon, although next week he will be in Las Vegas with a wax statue of Shaquille O’Neal.  And no, I’m not making that up.

Going into the final question, we were still in sixth place but other than the Street Sharks who were running away with it everything was very close.  And Hannah’s math was correct all night, as she wants me to again point out.  The final question was “In 2011, this country became the 11th largest by area in the world and the biggest in its continent.”  Ben knew that was around the time that South Sudan was created as a spinoff of Sudan (that’s what they call it, right?  Or is it a reboot?) and wanted us to put that.  But luckily the team next to us had called it quits and Marc was paying full attention and he is a social studies teacher who knew that Algeria is the largest country in Africa, and probably became largest only after Sudan split!  So we answered Algeria and I think we were the only team who did, because we ended up in second place after a massive comeback!  Congratulations to the Street Sharks who not only beat us thoroughly, but also welcomed a new baby into their team/family this past week.  Congratulations, Kevin and Melissa, and we hope to see Baby [redacted] at trivia soon, although she will count as one of your seven players. 

To give you a heads-up, we aren’t sure what is happening with trivia next week.  Hannah and Marc will be at a concert and Mary is having The Last Supper with her grandparents (which sounds kind of morbid, but she insists is an Easter thing) and a few other people are busy.  Ben and I said we would still try to get a team together, but trivia will be starting right around the time of the Phillies-v-Braves season opener, so one of us will be happy and the other will not.  But stay tuned!