Trivia Recap: 3/28

Trivia Recap 3/28/24

The players: Siri (English teacher), Ben (redacted), Darren (Its complicated), Jimmy (Private Investigator), Tori (Something with paper), Jake (Coffee and bagel magnate), Charlotte (Fish Dancer), Everett (Pre-verbal, so he doesn’t count against our seven people limit)

Hint of the Day: A map of France

Opening Round: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Blogger: Darren

You’ll notice a lot of new names up there, because (as I discussed last week) we had a lot of absences.  Ben and I thought about bailing, but then they postponed the Braves-Phillies game and it turns out that Siri could make it after all and she brought her husband and we lured in a family of four to join us and we were off to the races.  We did not get a team picture despite the fact that Hannah texted me multiple times to say “Be sure to get a team picture,” although I do have a photo I can share of the three year old on the team.

She definitely does not have a cell phone out to watch Ninja Turtles, Adam.

The game started off great, as I have watched enough Buffy to know that Rupert Giles was the librarian at Sunnydale High School.  We then did well at words that start with a T and end with a Y by knowing that Tweety was a bird, Tommy was a rock opera, and Telly was a muppet, although we did struggle with the last one.  We knew about terminal velocity and we probably would have known that France was the country who got a new flag after their 1787 revolution even if it had not been the hint of the day.  Combining this with our knowledge of passed balls and wild pitches meant we had a perfect first round. 

The audio category was “TV Comedies” and we thought it would be theme songs so we still chose it as our bonus.  It was not theme songs. Instead they played clips of sitcoms and we had to name the show.  The first one was The Honeymooners, and luckily Siri figured it out as I was prepared to say I Love Lucy.  Several of us recognized Tony Danza’s voice in the second one and since he was talking about skipping school we correctly surmised that it was Who’s The Boss.  In the third clip we recognized Will Arnett’s voice so several of my teammates thought it must be Arrested Development. That didn’t quite sound right to me given the dialogue but I didn’t stick with my convictions and we put that as our answer, but it was actually Bojack Horseman. 

But that was just the two bonus points and we then continued our hot streak by knowing things about Cadbury Crème Eggs and the movie My Girl even if we couldn’t decide whether her name was Anna Clumsky or Schlumsky or Chlumsky.  I’m not sure what we ended up putting, but we got the points – lets be honest, Adam wasn’t reading that closely.

I guess its Chlumsky

For ‘literary slang’ the question was “What is the name of the literary genre, popularized by Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen, whose eight letter name comes from combining three words?”  We really struggled with this one and as an English teacher Siri was particularly embarrassed not to know it, but at the last second Ben exclaimed “Whodunit!” and we all knew that must be correct.  The final category was Musical Collaborations, and nobody on the team had any idea who were the two musical artists on last year’s hit song “First Person Shooter”.  We named a lot of contemporary musical artists and ended up writing down Bad Bunny and Cardi B because, well, they were people that we had heard of.  But alas it was Drake and J Cole, who to be fair are also people that we had heard of.  Clearly current music is not our thing, especially in the hip hop genre. 

The halftime sheet also went very well for us – the top half consisted of stills from movies with geographical names in their title, and we got them all.  Not just the easy ones like Madagascar and Gangs of New York but also harder ones like LA Confidential and Vicki Cristina Barcelona.  The bottom half involved identifying NBA Team names so Siri got up and walked away to order more beer without even reading that the clues that were supposed to point us to the NBA teams were things like:

• Harald V of Norwar or Abdullah II of Jordan, for example.

• These first appeared on McDonalds menu in 1980

• This 1994 comedy film featured Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster*

• The pseudonym once used by Washington Irving

The rest of the team got all but this final one, which I suspected that Siri would know.  She seemed like she didn’t want to even think about the question because it was NBA-connected, but as soon as she actually thought about it she said “Oh, Knickerbocker obviously” and then started reciting from Sleepy Hollow. I’m not sure how long that went on as I got up to turn in the sheet and order a Turkey Reuben.

*Note that last week also had a question about a Mel Gibson/Jodie Foster collaboration and I had suggested this as an answer, but even I did not think that a Maverick was the national animal of Canada.

So we got a perfect halftime sheet and we were in first place with a comfortable six point lead going into the second half.  Which started with a category on stamp collecting, and luckily Jimmy is an expert philatelist so we were all set.  Except that is not the case at all and was just something that Jake made up, so when we were asked about the first two women to appear on US Postal stamps we were lost.  The hints that they were born in 1451 and 1731 actually made it harder rather than easier, and while we mentioned Martha Washington as a possibility we put Betsy Ross as our revolutionary guess and we had no idea about the other one at all.  Do you?

Luckily, the rest of the round went well.  We deduced that “Spoonful of Sugar” was the song written in response to a child getting the polio vaccine, Ben knew that the word Boondocks came from Tagalong and was a comicstrip, and I knew that quartz is primarily made of silicon.  The final category of the round was words that start with double-letters.  We assumed it would just be aardvarks and llamas because we couldn’t think of any others, but neither of these appeared.  Instead, it was about Eeyore, MmmBop, and the Oompa Loompas.  Did you know that the original name of the Oompa Loompas were ‘Whipple Scrumpets’ and they were racist caricatures of African pygmies?  Now you do, and have another reason to try to reconcile the fact that Roald Dahl was a very problematic person with his great creations.

Next up was the 6-4-2, and the 6 point clue was “I am a word that precedes the word ‘Rachel’ in a 2017 movie that is based on the work of Daphne du Maurier.”  We did not know the answer although Siri thought I should check later with Hannah because she is always talking about Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.  Luckily, we did know that the play Lincoln was watching when he was killed was American Cousin so we got the word ‘cousin’ for 4 points.  After the game ended, I did check with Hannah.

She told me to put it in the blog. So I did.

Despite a couple of hiccups that round, we actually managed to extend our lead and were feeling really good going into the final round.  Was a seven point lead enough to see us through to victory?  One would think so, but the fourth round was bad.  Really bad.  The first question asked which professional sports team had retired the most jersey numbers, and we put the Steelers when the answer was the Celtics.  And the Steelers was a particularly bad guess, as it turns out.  We did manage to get questions right about L Frank Baum and General William “Cump” Sherman, who it turns out invented the phrase “War is Hell.”  In Three Clues/One Number, we had no idea how many sides a hendecagon has but Ben felt very confident that Martina McBride and either Brian Adams or Ryan Adams (I can't remember) had released an album called 16 so we answered for the bonus.  Ben said “I mean, what else could it be?”  In hindsight, I should have pointed out to Ben that there are many many many other numbers it could have been, but I did not fight him.  And it turned out that the answer was one of the infinitely many other numbers (it was 11, to be precise.  A later text had Mary say that she would not have gotten this country music question either, so we didn’t feel too bad), which we would have gotten had we waited for the third clue about the Apollo mission that landed people on the moon.  Alas.  Ben’s bad luck continued with the final question of the round, where we had let him choose European Geography as our bonus category after last week’s heroic African geography victory.  The question asked about the three largest countries in the European Union by area.  We needed to name two correctly but we only managed to name one, which ironically was once again France.  Unfortunately, these missteps meant that not only did we fall out of first place but Smartacus was on fire and now led us by a whopping eight points, although we were still in second.

The final question basically asked “Which historical event overshadowed the first game played at Fenway Park in Boston.”  We successfully answered the sinking of the Titanic, but so did a bunch of other teams.  So this week ended up being a mirror image of last week, when we rose from the ashes at the end to come in second.  Second place doesn’t feel as good when you are there because you fell out of first as when you came back from sixth place, but the gift certificate has the same amount.   And we all had fun.  And most importantly we all successfully avoided drinking any of the ‘Big League Chew’ beer that they had on tap.  As Siri says, sometimes the beers at FourScore are like Jurassic Park where they spend more time figuring out what they can do than what they should do. I’m sure that if you want a green apple bubble gum fruited sour then it is delicious as they know what they are doing, but I’ll stick with an IPA.

Thanks for reading more of my ramblings.  My sabbatical will be over soon and hopefully Hannah will take back over writing her blog then.  But until next week…

We’re Number Two!