Trivia Recap: 4/11

Well, dear readers, this is it.  My sabbatical is basically over and this is the last time that Mary and Hannah can use it as the reason why I should write the trivia blog.  I’m sure they will come up with other reasons and I might even agree to them, but it will no longer be a given and you might instead get to hear other voices.  It’s important to not let straight white men dominate the trivia blog, after all.  

Hannah could not have written it this week anyways, because she was at a concert with Phil that I suspect she will also blog about.  And Ben was at baseball.  And Victoria had lots of phone calls to make. And Marc was supposed to come but also got caught up in meetings. So the team was just me, Mary, Siri, and Brock.  But we were excited to be there to try to repeat last week’s victory.  We did not, however, take a team photo.  We also don’t have Hannah’s illustrations on the answer sheet, so instead I will add some visual interest with this AI generated image that previews several trivia answers and will make more sense the more you read. 

Since we won last week, Mary chose the book Fahrenheit 451 as the opening category, in part to celebrate banned books and in part because she is teaching the book this very week.  In fact, just today she taught the part where Millie overdoses on sleeping pills which was the question!  (Did that need a spoiler alert?  I hope not!)  The next question asked for the name of the sport where contestants pull on either side of a rope to try to get a flag past a certain point.  We all immediately knew that the answer was Tug of War, but we did not know when it stopped being an Olympic event.  Unprompted, Siri said “I know we all want to say 1920 but it was probably something much later like 1960” which sounded reasonable to us but it was, in fact, 1920. 

The next question had three parts about the Apollo 13 mission (yes, the category had the name “Houston We Have A Trivia Problem”.  Ugh.)  and we knew that it was launched from Kennedy Space Center and that Jim Lovell played the Tom Hanks role as captain, but we did not know that the two-person lunar module named after a zodiac sign was Aquarius.  Mostly because the emphasis on “two-person” made us assume they were hinting at Gemini and we were not the only team that fell for this trap!  We also knew that Staples created the Easy Button, although it helped that staples were the hint of the day, and that Saturn was the second largest planet.  Siri also somehow knew that there was a moon named Rhea after a Greek titan, which I had no idea about – I would have guessed it if they had said it was named after a Cheers star, although maybe I would have thought there was a moon named Woody because there really should be.  In fact, if I ever discover a new planet I am going to name all the moons after Cheers characters.

The audio round was songs with “Open” in the title.  We knew Wide Open Spaces and Arms Wide Open, but while some of the younger hipper members of my team recognized Jay-Z’s voice we did not know that he had a song called “Letter Opener” or something like that.  The next question asked “While it is not the happiest pepper on earth, this type of New Mexican Chili Pepper gets its name from a city in southern California.  The answer?  Anaheim pepper.  Get it?  Because Disneyland is the happiest place on Earth?  The next question asked about the tv show whose theme was “Boss of Me” and we aced it.  Because we were in the zone we also guessed correctly that Van Gogh was the Dutch painter who painted The Potato Eaters even though we were just as likely to have put Vermeer.  And the final round was African geography, which we are always great at because Ben and Marc have professional reasons to know this stuff and also because Marc was born in Africa.  Oh, except if you have been reading you know that neither Marc nor Ben could be bothered to show up tonight, so none of us knew what country takes up the majority of the Horn of Africa or what gulf is to its north.  Sigh.

These are the Potato Eaters. 

Every week when I get to this part of the blog I write “The top half of the halftime sheet” and then feel like I should change it rather than using “half” twice in the same phrase, but today I am just going to say that the top half of the halftime sheet asked us to identify famous drummers.  That’s what happens when Hannah isn’t around.  We knew the easy ones like Dave Grohl and Questlove and the ones who aren’t really drummers like Courtney Cox and Fred Armisen and even the hard ones like Karen Carpenter and Max Weinberg to get all ten.  We also got all of the second half, which asked us to match different literary awards with the genres they are honoring, like the Hugos for science fiction, the Spur award for Westerns, and the Casey award for baseball books.  So we were kicking butt and after the first half we were in the lead by three points.

Round 3 opened up with Kids TV, which we chose as our bonus category because among the four of us, our children, and our siblings we realized that we have almost no gaps of time when none of us were children.  And we chose wisely as the question ended up being about Bob The Builder and his sidekicks and his banging theme song.  The next question was one of my favorite of the night: How many US State Capitals are west of Los Angeles?  It turns out there are six, because you didn’t think to include Carson City.  I did, though, and we got the points. 

The next question is one that really would have benefitted from Hannah’s presence.  Or at least her periodic table tank top’s presence, as the question asked about the only chemical elements whose names (note: not symbols) end with the letters T, L, and H.  This was another great question but one that we did not succeed at.  We came up with Cobalt, but not Nickel or Bizmuth and then we kicked ourselves afterwards as you always do with good trivia.  Luckily, Siri knew about Kurt Vonnegut and I was able to name all three movies that costarred Steve Martin and Rick Moranis, so we extended our lead in the third round.

Here is one of them.  Can you name the other two?  Hint: one prominently featured a total eclipse of the sun.  Da-Doo.

The fourth round started with the category Wordly Recipes.  Well, it was really “Worldly Recipes” but Adam had a typo.  The question asked about the key ingredient of baba ghanoush as well as what it was called in Britain.  Brock was confused about our answer and we had to explain to him that the emoji had a meaning related to food and not just what he normally uses it for.  The next category was about the classic game Rock Em Sock Em Robots.  We did not know the phrase that is the name of both a Metallica album and an Al Pacino movie until we got the third clue that it is the last four words of the pledge of allegiance, which gave away that the answer was “Kill ‘em all”. 

There was a question about some world leader who got divorced and then married the duchess of Austria and we had no idea so Siri took a stab and guessed Napoleon and it turned out that was right.  The final question of the night asked which two NFL teams play within ten miles of the Mississippi River.  We knew that the New Orleans Saints would be one correct answer, but Mary and Brock couldn’t agree on whether the Titans play in Nashville or Memphis so we weren’t positive about the other team.  Instead, I put down the Minnesota Vikings because everything I know I learned from Indigo Girls songs and they tell me that the Mississippi is mighty but it starts in Minnesota.  And that was the correct answer. Thanks, Indigo Girls!

At this point I should really tell you that Mary’s math was correct all night long and she gets a gold star from me for her excellent math skills.  In fact, going into the final question her math was better than Adam’s as she correctly had us in the lead by 18 points and Adam thought we were only in the lead by 17.  We didn’t bother arguing, though, because either way wagering zero would allow us to guarantee a win.  Which is what we did, but then it turned out that we knew the answer!  The question asked for the only Best Picture winner from the decade 2000-2010 with five words in its title.

The answer was not “Crash.  No, really, Crash won”

So we won.  Neither Siri or Brock can come next week and I will be uncertain due to my new work stuff, so we let Mary again choose the opening category.  She continued the theme of banned books and chose “To Kill A Mockingbird”, although I find it hard to believe that she will stop listening to the new Taylor Swift album for long enough to come to trivia.  So we will have to see what happens.  We will also have to see what happens with the future of the trivia blog.  Thanks to those of you who read each week, and I am now convinced that it is slightly more than just my teammates and their mothers.  But if you want these to continue, be sure to give us positive encouragement because I am needy that way.