Trivia Recap: 5/23

The Players: Siri, Hannah, Mary, Brock, Ben, Victoria, Darren

Hint of the Day: A scuba diver

Hi everyone, it’s Darren again.  I am not supposed to have to write this blog now that I have a new demanding job and most of my teammates are teachers so are at the end of their school year, but that doesn’t seem to be what is happening and I know that many of you are on the edge of your seats to find out about how the Educated Friends are doing, so I thought I would pick up the mantle once again.  Besides, it is a holiday weekend.  Hannah did tell me that this was an optional assignment for me, because teachers get tired at the end of the year and have basically given up on getting kids to work and Hannah is treating me the same way.  But I don’t want to let the Educated Moms and the four other readers of this blog down.  As you may know, we won three of the last four weeks, although last week we lost a heartbreaker on the final question (“What product released in the early 21st century made the New York Times write that ‘Microsoft is finally hip’?”  We said Zune, but the answer was the Xbox 360).  Would we be able to recover this week?  Well, as you see above we actually had a full roster of seven people this week, in part because it was Siri’s Birthday Eve so we had to celebrate!

The way you can tell it’s AI and not a real picture of us is that Fourscore doesn’t sell cakes like that.

The team that did beat us last week did not show up this week, as they were a group of historians from Gettysburg College and two of them headed to Korea right after graduation.  To acknowledge that, they chose Korean food as the opening category and also they thought it would be hard.  It wasn’t: “According to a 2021 study, the average Korean eats 95 grams of this fermented vegetable dish every day?”  That’s a lot of kimchee, but we knew the answer.  We also knew that the two largest cities in Poland are Warsaw and Krakow, and the question asking for the word that is both the name of a castle on Game of Thrones and a MLB team was right in Ben’s wheelhouse, so we got that one as well.  When they asked for a notorious outlaw duo, the only one we could think of was Bonnie & Clyde, but that was also the right answer.  And we clearly knew not only the name of the desert planet where the first part of Star Wars takes place, but also where it was filmed, and we didn’t even make any jokes about hating sand.  So we had a perfect first round!

The last few times we chose the audio category as our bonus category we got burned, so this week we chose something different for round two to take the pressure off of us, which seemed like a particularly good choice when we found out it would be naming artists covering Billy Joel songs.  None of them started the fire, but the team was collectively able to identify the voices of Garth Brooks, Dolly Parton, and Ariana Grande to get full points.  Luckily, we did get our bonus category correct by recognizing that the Bull & Finch is the actual name of the Cheers bar (NORM!).  We also knew that the first televised presidential debate was between Nixon and JFK, and even though Hannah originally thought that the name of the pink medicine that helps heal rashes was chamomile, we managed to correct that and answer calamine.  (Note that they did not mention that Calamine was also a great turn-of-the-millenium band that did one of my all time favorite tv theme songs.)  The final question of the round asked for the athletic activity whose name is an acronym where you have to be careful not to get the bends.  Now, if you are reading closely then you know the hint of the day was a scuba diver and that is the answer.  But did you also foretell that the bonus question would be to say what ‘scuba’ is an acronym for like I did? 

In any event, we got another perfect round so we were on fire.  Now, if you were Pour House Trivia and wanted to design a halftime round that I could not contribute to, you would have a hard time doing a better job than they did this week.  The top half asked us to identify car companies from their logos and the bottom half asked us to rearrange anagrams for different players who were NFL quarterbacks this season.  Luckily, several of our team members do know about cars and the NFL, but I spent the ten minutes having a conversation with Hannah about crazy school boards and eating my dinner.  I did check that the answers they gave for the quarterbacks were actually anagrams, but that was about it.  I also can’t really tell you much about the answers because I didn’t bring home the halftime sheet, but I do know that we got 19/20, only missing the Aston Martin logo.  This means that coming out of halftime we had 91 out of a possible 92 points, which means not only were we winning at Fourscore, but we were tied for first of all 246 teams playing nationwide at that point, according to the Pour House Blog.

In the third round, Victoria’s expertise helped us know that the question about brains was really about grey matter, and we not only could identify the opera Porgy & Bess from a description but Siri knew that Audra McDonald won a Tony for the revival.  One would think that sculpture would be another category that was far from my areas of expertise but the question was actually about the Kryptos sculpture at CIA HQ, and as someone who has taught a cryptography course many times I knew that answer.  We also knew what Colin Powell’s title was when he was the head of the military but we did not know that he was played by Tyler Perry in Veep.  The category “Tim Cook would be proud of this one” was all about Apple, and we knew that their headquarters is in the shape of a circle and that their staff works at the genius bar, but we could not come up with the four-letter name of Steve Jobs’s daughter that (allegedly) is coincidentally also the acronym for one of their first computers.  Hannah and Siri were just naming four-letter girls names (yes, we did consider putting ‘Siri’.  Get it?)  and supposedly they did say the correct answer of Lisa early on, but the rest of us didn’t hear and we put Emma.  Oops.

My quick internet research says that Lisa Simpson was not named after the LISA computer, but they did do a tribute to it back in the 73rd season.

Every team at Fourscore (and 84% of teams worldwide) knew that the 1989 Disney animated film that had a live action remake last year was The Little Mermaid, so we never even heard the four- or two-point clues. We had never heard of the longest beach in the world, Praia do Cassino, but recognized that was probably Portuguese so it was probably in Brazil and we were correct about that although we were off by 100 miles on how long it actually is.  We knew that Paul Rudd played Bobby Newport in Parks & Rec and also that Michael Schur created the show. The only wagering question we missed all night was about which soccer team has won the last four Premier League titles, which admittedly seems like something we should know but at least our answer was Arsenal which not only is a real team but also was in the championship the last two years!  The last question of regulation play was in fact about pieces of media with the word LAST in their title.  Luckily, we were able to identify The Last Boy Scout and The Last of Us, and Mary knew Morgan Wallen’s Last Night because she is a big fan of people who throw chairs off of buildings. 

Going into the final question we could guarantee ourselves second place by wagering eight points but we had Street Sharks nipping at our toes so we wanted to get the question right: “Appropriately enough, this word derives from Greek words meaning both dull and sharp”.  While you are thinking about the answer, enjoy this image of what it would look like if we had all shown up wearing scuba diving suits to trivia.  And also if we were anime.

Did you figure out that the answer was ‘oxymoron’?  Well we did!  And we got it right and clinched our victory at Fourscore, even if our handful of missteps meant we slipped to only being in seventh place in the world*.  But not bad at all.  Next week I will be at a conference and a bunch of my teammates have graduations to attend.  But Ben half-heartedly said he would hold down the fort, so maybe you will even get a blog out of the deal.  But I leave you now with a song I wrote about our victory.  Enjoy!

*Note that when we say “the world” we really mean “a portion of the mid-Atlantic stretching from just south of DC to Baltimore and up to Gettysburg.   But that doesn’t sound as cool.