Trivia Recap: 6/1

The Players: Darren (mathematician and guest blogger), Ben (not a minor league shortstop), Alex (coffee shop owner), Victoria (veterinarian), and Brock (creative marketing genius, according to Hannah).

Hint of the Day: a goat

This week, Hannah and Mary had to watch students graduate and go to some dumb party so they couldn’t play trivia with us. But we still fielded a great team and even though Ben had agreed to write the blog he changed his mind so once again you are stuck with me, Hannah’s readers. On the other hand, Adam was back after his week away and apologized for missing trivia last week.

The opening category was the Irish Language, and luckily for us Brock knew that if someone walks up to you on the streets of Dublin and says “Slainte!” they are asking you to have a drink with them. We rocked the ‘What a Bummer’ category with our combined knowledge of bumblebees, Dagwood Bumstead, and albumins, and then Victoria explained to us how you administer antibiotics to bumblebees which was really quite interesting. We know about British parliament and mimosas and even remembered that the lead in the movie Son-In-Law was Pauly Shore but we did not remember that the woman in the movie was Carla Gugino, which were the only points we missed all round.

In the music category we recognized songs about brothers by Elton John and The Black Keys, but not by some country artist which was the first time of the evening that we were sad that we didn’t have Mary’s trivia knowledge to help us out. The next question asked “The logo of the production studio named for which comedienne featured a kitten purring to parody the MGM lion.” I was pretty sure the answer was Mary Tyler Moore (MTM studios) but the rest of my team was too busy bickering about whether ‘comedienne’ was really a word or if Adam was saying ‘comedian’ and eventually I just put it down and luckily I was right!

In the next category, Ben knew that the largest National Parks in Montana and Alaska both started with the word ‘Glacier’, although he also thought that Glacier was the only national park in Montana, forgetting the other 11 including a little park called Yellowstone. Victoria was extremely confident (and correct) that Zyrtec was the name of an antihistamine and was telling us the dosage for different breeds of dogs, and we knew that David Beckham played for the LA Galaxy when he came to the US but were torn about what team he left in Europe (the answer, as I suspected, was Real Madrid).

The top half of the Bonus sheet had us name famous sinister characters from movie stills, and we knew nine of the ten but it turns out that Kathy Bates’s character was not actually named ‘Mrs. Martha Misery’ as we guessed it was. On the bottom half we had to name the musical artist who released each set of three albums and we got all of these, thanks in part to the fact that Mary has mentioned to some of us this independent artist that she loves who released albums such as “Red” and “1989”. I think we were all a little ashamed to know so many Justin Bieber and One Direction albums, but it got us points and we were in great shape after halftime, in second place only three points behind the Street Sharks.

The third round also went spectacularly, as Ben remembered the Eddie Murphy romcom Boomerang, and I knew that Apollo Anton Ohno was the three-named athlete who has won more winter Olympic medals than anyone else in history. Alex helped by remembering the book Corduroy, although she also thought that Funny Face won best picture, which it did not. But Gigi did so we still got our points. There was a Norse mythology question about what animal pulls Thor’s chariot, only they also told us the scientific name. Victoria picked up on the fact that it included “Cabra”, Brock remembered the chariot from the movie, and I realized the hint of the day all of which led us to the same answer of Goat. (Loyal readers may recall that this is the second week in a row where the knowledge of the word ‘cabra’ helped get us an answer. We are onto you, Pour House!)

So we had a great night and we placed second, just three points behind our nemeses.

Good night, everybody!

Oh wait, you want to hear about the fourth round? Would you believe me if I told you there was no fourth round last night? I guess not, eh? Well, loyal readers, it did not go so well for the Educated Friends. It took us until the 2 point clue on the 6-4-2 to know that Van Gogh was the painter who accidentally painted garlic instead of an onion (or maybe it was the other way around). We did not in fact know that Uranus has 28 moons named after Shakespeare characters. We also did not know the name of the board game that features a spinner and which is (allegedly) the longest continuously sold board game, having been available since 1860. Or rather, we thought we knew that it was Chutes and Ladders which would have been the Billy Ocean-est moment ever because right before trivia started Victoria was asking me about my mathematical research and I told her about a paper that I wrote about playing Chutes and Ladders with different size spinners so I knew that game had a spinner and I knew it was old. Unfortunately, depending on how you count it is either too old (dating back to ancient India) or not old enough (it was only marketed commercially starting in 1890) and it was not the correct answer, which was The Game of Life. To be fair, Brock had suggested this answer but we thought that game couldn’t be nearly that old and Chutes and Ladders was stuck in my head from the earlier conversation. (Incidentally, while double checking some facts here I got sucked into this really interesting New Yorker article about The Game of Life and I recommend it!) The kicker is that we wagered nine points AND this was our bonus category. ARGH.

The next question was a Triple 50-50 about which battleships went back into commission after WWII, and the two that Ben had a good idea of we got wrong and the one we randomly guessed we got right but that didn’t get us any points. Luckily, I did know what country used Drachmas as currency and several of us knew that Keenan and Kel were on All That and Good Burger, but by that time our fate had been sealed and we had slipped to sixth place.

Mathematically, we could have still come back because we were only 17 points down and we felt pretty good about the category ‘Historical Americans’ for reasons that we aren’t supposed to mention in the blog, but the final question was “This woman, who died in Connecticut fifty five years ago today, was known as ‘the First Lady of Courage’”

(As a side note, I almost always review the famous birthdays and death anniversaries as I sit at Four Score waiting for people to arrive, but I didn’t tonight in part because Victoria and I started talking about my research. Just think how differently the whole night might have gone if it hadn’t been for that one conversation)

In any event, we debated between a few people none of whom seemed quite right, such as Rosa Parks and Susan B Anthony, before settling on Eleanor Roosevelt. But the correct answer was Helen Keller. If you didn’t know that, don’t feel too bad because no team got it correct, meaning we ended the game in sixth place. Not a great showing for the Educated Friends. This was also when Ben decided he didn’t want to write the blog after all because he was just too disappointed in us.

Hannah isn’t coming back again next week, but she did promise she would send us photos so that we don’t forget what she looks like. Hopefully Mary will take a turn writing the blog so that you don’t have to listen to me again. Until then, Happy Summer!