Trivia Recap: 7/13

Players: Darren (Mathemagician), Hannah (novelist extraordinaire), Mary (literary marketing manager), Victoria* (veterinarian), Elliott* (minor league outfielder)

Hint of the Day: Zebra Stripes

Loyal readers, it’s Darren writing this week to report on a fun night of trivia. But before we get to the trivia there is a very important announcement to make. As we may have mentioned in the past, back on St Patrick’s Day 2022 our trivia hosts at Fourscore introduced a special beer, a light stout that they called Irish Wristwatch. (They actually had a second special beer that night, a Lucky Charms IPA that we should never speak of again.) It was a good light stout, but we guess they must have overpredicted its popularity as it stayed on tap for a long time and it became a running joke between us to see when they would actually run out of it, as this special St Patrick’s Day beer made it almost to Halloween. So this year when it showed back up in mid-March we decided to have a pool to predict when they would run out. Several people’s predictions came and went, including my own prediction of July 4th. But today the day came, and it was no longer on the beer list. Danielle confirmed that they had kicked the last of it for the year! I would like to congratulate Alex for correctly predicting the date! We had previously agreed that the prize was just bragging rights and notoriety, but Hannah and I decided that we would also chip in to buy all of Alex’s drinks for the night. The fact that she is out of town on vacation is unfortunate, and purely coincidental.

As you can see from the list at the top of this blog entry, the Educated Friends were pretty shortstaffed tonight as Alex wasn’t the only one out of town. It was mostly just me and Mary and Hannah, although Victoria was there for the second half and we had a special guest appearance from my son Elliott for the first round or so, as he downed a grilled cheese sandwich and a couple of lemonades to get out of the heat.

Last week our nemeses the Street Sharks won and they chose “Ru Paul’s Drag Race” as the opening category. None of us had ever even watched the show, but we had done some research with an assist from Siri (the sometimes teammate, not the artificial intelligence). Unfortunately, we did not research which runners up had an Orioles-themed name, and it turns out that it was not Cal Ripskin, which come to think of it is more of a roller derby name than a drag queen name. Luckily we rebounded pretty quickly by knowing that Texas had more counties than any other state even though I swear that I remember learning that Georgia had the most when I was growing up there. Of course, I also remember learning a trivia fact from that same teacher along the lines that Atlanta would be the most populous city on earth if the oceans raised a certain number of feet. Thank you, Ms. Schwartz!

Look at all 159 counties Georgia has!

The next round was ‘A Cheesy Question’ and asked about a kind of cheese normally found in red wax that sounds like it’s named after a 60’s sitcom but is actually named after a region in France. We almost put down Edam even though we had no idea what sitcom that would be referring to but literally with like ten seconds to go Hannah started naming sitcoms really quickly and hit upon The Munsters and the answer was obvious. We then were able to pin down what year Nelson Mandela was released from jail and Germany reunified because I am old, and while we could not remember what company had the slogan “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good” we did know the palindromic hairstyle that its founder was known for, because how many palindromic hairstyles can you name?

The second round started with relatively easy questions: a music question about songs performed by a trio of Stevies (Ray Vaughn, Wonder, and Nicks), a question about protons and electrons, and one about the stars of A Fish Called Wanda which I was shocked to find out my teammates had never seen. Unfortunately, with Ben absent we did not know our World War II history and we also did not know which NBA team had the most players in the Hall of Fame – we guessed that it was either the Lakers or the Celtics, but our coin flip between the two was wrong. Sometime during this round is when Elliott left us to go back to the gym, because he had only gone two other times today, and Victoria arrived from doing surgery on animals to help us with the much more important task of winning trivia.

The half time sheet started by asking us to name the painters of ten famous works of art. We got nine of them right but could not pull the artist who did American Gothic, and also to match the 90’s #1 Song with its artist. We aced this latter half, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that a few weeks ago Mary and Hannah and I spent an evening singing our way through every top 100 hit from 1994-2000, which I am sure our bartenders really appreciated. After this halftime sheet we felt like we were doing decently but not great, given that we had missed three actual questions and several bonuses . So we were shocked to learn that we were in first place by a comfortable margin.

Not the real American Gothic but Lincoln!

The third round began with `Three Clues, One Music Group’ and we were convinced it would be the White Stripes because of the clue of the day. But instead it was The Eagles, which are in many ways the literal opposite of the White Stripes – did you know that they used to be Linda Ronstadt’s backing group? We didn’t, but we still got our wager and our bonus points. Hannah did know that Linda Ronstadt sang a song called “Blue Bayou” which got us the next question, and we also knew about Law & Order, and Zebra Cakes which were the hint of the day. We did not know which three of the seven wonders of the ancient world had been destroyed in Earthquakes, and in hindsight it seems like ‘The Lost City of Atlantis’ might have been a bad answer for several reasons.

Now, the Law & Order question was in the category of TV FRANCHISES, only the fine folks of Pour House made a typo and actually wrote TV FRANCISES. It was around this time that the Street Sharks asked us to make a pact that if either of us won we would chooses TV FRANCISES as our opening category for next week. We thought that was one of the funniest things we could think of so we agreed.

A typo, and also some insights into the mind of Hannah Rae.

The 6-4-2 round was about cities, and we did not know that San Francisco was named after the patron saint of ecologists but we did know that it was where Haight-Asbury is. We knew that the king in Madagascar was a lemur but didn’t know who voiced him, we guessed at the name of the hat in South Park, and we knew where the original LegoLand was as well as which band had a hit with “All For You” back in the late 90s. There was also a question about the company that started by building wagons and then became a car company that went defunct in the 1960s and it had ten letters and the third was a U, and we almost didn’t get this one but at the last second Victoria knew that it was Studebaker!

At the end of regulation we were 12 points in front of the Street Sharks, so we wagered 0 points to force at worst a tie. The question was “Which US President is the first to be born in a state that was not one of the original 13 colonies?” We knew that Lincoln was born outside the colonies and didn’t bother thinking too hard about if he was the first president since we hadn’t wagered any points, but lo and behold that was the correct answer. And Street Sharks did not get it right so we won the game outright!

We lived up to our promise and chose “TV Francises” as our opening category. We can think of Francis Underwood from House of Cards and Francis Gallagher from Shameless. We have already checked and Frankie Muniz is a Francisco but NOT a Francis. If you can think of other famous TV Francises, please let Hannah know in the comments. Until next week…