Trivia Recap: 5/18

Hello readers! It’s Mary, back for another trivia recap!

The Players: Hannah (English teacher), Mary (English teacher), Darren (math professor), Ben (not a physicist).

Opening Category: The Flintstones

Hint of the Day: Tiara/Crown

Round One:

Hannah was excited for the first category because she studied Flintstone trivia in preparation. However, in her studies, she did not learn that Fred Flinstone’s boss was Mr. Slate so we lost a point. The team knew that Mount St. Helen’s was the volcano that erupted forty-some years ago for our first U.S. history question of the night. Ben knew that the volcano was in the Cascades. The next category was Over/Under and we made it our bonus. The first question was about the area and perimeter of a square; Darren knew the answer was over 100 right away. Darren, having lived in Texas before, knew there were over 100 counties in Texas, and we made a lucky guess in knowing you needed less than 100 seconds for some sort of bowling question. I don’t know much about bowling so I didn’t really understand that question. Idioms was the next category. I knew the name of the disciple for the idiom was Thomas for Doubting Thomas. We finished the round knowing our science fiction television shows by knowing the slogan for Heroes and one of the actresses that starred in it.

Round Two:

To open the round, we had an audio question about stately music. We knew the songs “Oklahoma,” “Ohio,” and “Tennessee” and got all of our bonus points. Darren and Ben knew about the Concord airplane for the next question. Sports questions are usually our weakness, but Ben knew that the current NBA player for the 76ers was Embiid. We did not get the bonus. I said to go with Kentucky as the college that Embiid played for, however, it was Kansas. Physics was my least favorite subject in high school and when it came up as a trivia category, I was not thrilled. Ben knew that Enrico Fermi was the physicist known as the architect of the atomic bomb. Darren knew the subtitle for the Superman movie that was a box office bomb of the 1980s, but there was much debate about the name of Lex Luther’s nephew in the film. We listed names that started with “L”. Hannah suggested Lenny but we thought that Lucas seemed like more of an 80’s name. We should have trusted Hannah because Lenny was the answer!

Halftime:

The top half of the halftime sheet consisted of us identifying famous people who had directions (north, south, east, west, up, down, left, and right) in their last names. We struggled to identify two of the ten and lost those points. However, we aced the bottom half of the worksheet and knew the nicknames of several U.S. cities.

Round Three:

Food Brands was the category that started the round. We knew the rhyming cookie brand was Famous Amos but we missed the bonus which was the first name of the man that created Famous Amos. I knew that the Pixar film that features three triplets named Hamish, Harris, and Hubert is Brave. Another interesting piece of trivia about Brave is that the author, Maggie Stiefvater, who wrote The Scorpio Races, which is a novel that Hannah and I teach, wrote a novel that is a sequel to the film. It is called Bravely and it’s on my list of books to read this summer. The third category for the round was called “Crown Me” and we knew that King Charles’s coronation took place in Westminster Abbey, we knew what a Claddagh ring was, and we knew that Crown Royal was made in Canada. Darren knew the answer to the Concepts of Science Question which was the God Particle. Unfortunately, we did not know the answer to the final category which was our bonus. We had to figure out the title of the new Apple TV show that was about a woman who discovers that her husband has another secret life. I thought that it was The Stranger Beside Me. However, Hannah remembered that was the title of a book about a woman who used to work with Ted Bundy. I then remembered that we had talked about that book before and that is where I got the title from. The correct answer was The Lies He Told Me and Jennifer Garner stars in it.

6-4-2:

Before the first clue was read, Ben was trying to convince us to turn in an answer for the six-point clue no matter what. That idea was quickly pushed aside when the first clue was read. We had to name the state that was the halfway point between the North Pole and the equator and the Prime Meridian. It took us to the two-point clue to figure out that the state was Wisconsin.

Round 4:

We did not start off the round on a good note. We did not know the hip-hop artists that performed the song “Princess Diana.” Ben of course knew the answer to the second U.S. history question of the evening which was George Marshall. Darren and I both knew the mother-daughter duo of Diana Ross and Tracie Ellis Ross. Surprisingly, we got another sports question right which was identifying the Lynx WNBA team. One of the highlights of the evening was when Darren immediately answered the question for the Three Clues One Word category. The question asked to identify the last name of an actress who played in Facts of Life and another clue involving math. Darren laughed as he wrote the answer and took it up right away. When he returned, he said, “That’s the sweet spot of my knowledge base: 80’s sitcoms and math.” He even drew a venn diagram to demonstrate this but Ben threw it away before we could take a picture of it. Obviously, Darren answered the question correctly with the response, Fields.

Final Category:

Ben must have been in a gambling mood because he was encouraging us to wager twelve points for the final question since we were in second place. However, when we discovered that the final category was sports geography, (our two worst categories combined!), Hannah and I told Darren to do the math and figure out what we needed to guarantee that we would place. Darren wanted it to be on the record that we did the math because Phil always wants us to strategically calculate our wager as well. Darren thought Phil would be proud of him, so he texted him in our team’s group chat to let him know. Ben also wanted us to note for the record that he continued to insist on wagering the full twelve points despite that the category was sports geography. The final question was read and Ben knew that the country with the largest land area to not host a summer Olympics was India. We ended up coming in second place.

The opening category for next week is British invasion music and it will be an audio clue.