Trivia Recap: 4/25

Hi folks, it's Darren.  Yes, I have a new job and wasn’t going to write the trivia blog any more, but after the lackluster job that Hannah did last week  I knew that we couldn’t leave it to her again.  I don’t really have energy for a full recap, but here are the highlights of a fun night:

1) Due to some last-minute ice cream, veterinary, and napping emergencies it ended up just being me, Hannah, and Mary (well, sort of.  See #8 below).  We did not take a team picture but if you can’t remember what we look like, then this is a pretty good approximation:

2) We almost had a perfect first round, due to our knowledge of the musical Rent, the Hubble space telescope, Julius and Augustus Caesar, and the filmography of Edie Falco.  In fact, we would have if Adam was better at pronouncing things.  You see, one category was about things with the word WELCOME in the title.  We knew that John Travolta got his role in Welcome Back Kotter after joining scientology and that the best-selling debut single by an American band was “Welcome To The Jungle”.  However, when Adam asked us which Florida airport had a big sign saying “Welcome to Conchland” we all heard it as “Welcome to Cop-land”  (well, after hearing a less G-rated thing first) and so we did not come up with Key West.  But those two bonus points were all we missed.

3) We also had a very strong second round, in part because we figured out that the hint of the day being a bowl of rice probably meant that the NFL wide receiver they were asking about was Jerry Rice.  We only missed two bonus questions, one of which was the audio question about storms, because while we recognized Garth Brooks and Stevie Ray Vaughan we did not recognize the female vocalist and I don’t even remember who it was but it was NOT Adele. I did know that Corey Feldman was the voice of one of the Ninja Turtles in the 1990 movie, but did not know which one.  Mary and Hannah had somehow never heard of Corey Feldman, but after I described him as a “bad boy type” Hannah insisted it would have been Raphael.  It was not.

Does he look more like a Donatello or a Raphael to you?

 Or maybe a Miranda?

4) I want to pause to say that last night Fourscore had a special sandwich called the Smokin’ Gobbler, which included Smoked Turkey Breast, Caramelized Onions, Goat Cheese, Fig Jam & Fried Onions w/ Lettuce and Tomato on Sourdough Bread.   Hannah thinks it was the best thing she has ever eaten at Fourscore.  I am not sure I would go that far due to my late lamented maple habanero chicken nuggies, but it was a damn good sandwich.

5) The halftime sheet had us identify pictures of celebrities riding motorcycles.  We got all of them except Steve McQueen.  It also asked us to match translations of the word ‘crazy’ with their languages, such as ‘mambo’ in Swahili and ‘wallgof’ in Welsh.  There was definitely some guessing going on, but we figured out all of them.  Go us!  We were in second place by 2 points at the halfway mark.

6) It turns out we know more about Al Pacino movies than I would have thought, as we somehow reasoned that the movie where he plays a blind lawyer is Scent of a Woman and the movie where he plays a gangster named Big Boy Caprese was Dick Tracy.  We did not know that he plays himself falling in love with Adam Sandler in Jack and Jill, but I am actually sort of proud that I didn’t know that one.  Fun Fact: In Baltimore there is an ‘Al Pacino Ice Cream’ truck that may or may not have any connection to the actor.  Nobody is really sure.

7)After last week’s fiascos, I refused to weigh in on choosing bonus categories this week and Hannah almost chose ‘Vocabulary and Birds.’  It’s a good thing we didn’t because we had no idea what the eleven-letter word is that could mean either a loud chaotic event OR a group of parrots.  (Pandemonium)

8) One of the categories in the third round was African geography.  As has been discussed before, this is right in Ben and Marc’s wheelhouses, but much less so for the rest of us.  So at halftime (after we knew the category but before we knew the question) Hannah texted them to ask for an information dump.  Ben did not come through as he only gave us one single fact.  But readers, it turns out that was the only fact we needed. 

The highlight of the night. Maybe even the year.

9) Another category was Major League Soccer.  In another bit of fortuitousness, I had looked at the list of teams ranked by championships ahead of time and the question asked which two teams on opposite coasts had won the most championships.  I was pretty sure it was DC United and LA Galaxy, and wanted to wager nine points, but Mary laughed and laughed at that idea and said to Hannah that I was being ridiculous.  So we wagered five.  And I was right.  Would this come back to haunt us later when we had to use nine points on either ‘Constellations’ or ‘Explorers’?  You will have to keep reading.

10) It turns out that the name of the sword in Game of Thrones is not, as we put down, “Frank the Winter Sabre.”  It was also not, as the team next to us loudly shouted “White Claw,” but I will admit that their answer was closer to the correct answer of “Long Claw.”

Still looks like a Frank to me…

11) The 6-4-2 category was numbers, and the 6-point hint asked us how many feet were equivalent to 2133.6 millimeters.  My math skills came to good use as I did some mental mathemagic and figured it out and got us all six points.  We didn’t even need the later hints that this number is in the title of films by Kurosawa and David Fincher, or that it is the square root of 49.

12) We almost said that the musician who was in the air force before his musical career and who led a band called the Tennessee Three was Elvis, because he was Hannah’s first crush.  Luckily we hesitated because we knew his musical career actually started before he was drafted, and the third clue gave away that the answer was, in fact, Johnny Cash.

13) Hannah knew about The Outsiders, Mary did in fact know her constellations, and I knew about Killing Eve.  The explorers question was about who allegedly first circumnavigated the earth and everyone in the bar knew it was Magellan before Adam even gave the hint. 

14) The final question was ‘Which candy changed its name from Mars Men in the mid 1980s due to a craze over a new kind of dolls?’  We quickly came up with Sour Patch Kids.  So did most of the other teams but it didn’t matter, as we won!

The Educated Friends, celebrating our victory!

15) As we may have mentioned, a couple of weeks ago Mary decided that when we won we should have a theme of choosing banned books as opening categories because of some of the political nonsense that local school boards are putting people through.  We were on board with this idea, which is why we chose Fahrenheit 451and To Kill a Mockingbird the last two times we won.  But I am not sure Mary thought this idea through, as when we won tonight she and Hannah struggled to think of a third banned book that they knew well enough to choose.  We went with Lord of the Flies, but then Hannah said she doesn’t actually know or like the book.  So you will have to stay tuned to see how that goes. 

16) This is normally where I would leave you with an AI generated image of our team.  But that is so March 2024.  Now I am all about using AI to write songs.  So I present to you a ballad of tonight’s victory: “Champions of Knowledge”.