Trivia Recap: 8/10

The Players: Hannah (English teacher), Mary (English teacher), Landon (English teacher), Siri (English teacher), Darren (math professor), Victoria (veterinarian), and Brock (artsy marketer of many things)

Opening Category: Triple 50/50: Andor Character or Simpsons Character

Hint of the Day: Sunset

Round One:

Surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly, depending upon who you ask), we did very well with the opening category and even earned a bonus! U.S. Cities, however, was a different story. I forget what the question was -- something about the distance from one place to another -- and Darren and Landon had it narrowed down to Minneapolis and Chicago. I told them to go with Minneapolis because Minnesota continues to come up in my life. ALL THE TIME. I want to go there next summer. I'm actually already in the process of making this happen, so we'll see if it really works out the way I'm hoping it will. But anyway... the answer of Minneapolis was wrong, as was the answer of Chicago. I'm pretty sure the right answer was Kansas City, but I still couldn't tell you what the question was. The best part of this experience, however, was that we learned Landon has a superpower and that superpower is knowing pretty much every stadium (previous and current names, along with dates) in every city in America. This comes into play later in Round Three, so read on, but he may be the greatest asset to The Educated Friends since Darren.

Back to the game!

I've never been to a CiCi's, but that was the answer to Pizza Places, we secured points (sans a 2-point bonus) in Science Lingo, and even I knew the TV Hosts question! All in all, Round One was alright.

Round Two:

As we always opt for the audio clue in Round Two as our bonus, we did that last night. This week the category was called A Musical Tribute and we had to identify the artists who paid tribute to Tom Petty by covering one of his songs. Johnny Cash did "I Won't Back Down" and it was good and all -- I like Johnny Cash as much as the next person -- but my personal favorite cover of that song is the one done by Reel Big Fish. Surprise, surprise! John Mayer covered something, as did Natalie Maines, and so we got 14 points for that question. Actually, our luck continued through that entire round as we knew a thing or two about Dr. Seuss Books, what's Currently in Theatres (it wasn't spelled this way on the Pour House Paper, but I prefer the British spelling so that's what I went with just now), How About A Cocktail? (although Brock was like a step behind all night and said after we discussed how the answer to this one was bellini, "Oh... I missed the cocktail question!" -- but he was sitting right there), and Name That Politician. Sonny Bono! Thanks, Mom, for having me grow up listening to Sonny, Cher, and the other greats from the 50s and 60s!

Halftime:

The top half of this week's halftime sheet required us to identify the film from which a famous actor/actress made a cameo. So there was a picture of the actor/actress and a wordbank of the movies and we got 8 of them right. For the record, I thought the picture of the woman wearing a HAZMAT suit was Hot Fuzz, which is a movie I know absolutely nothing about, but I was one of a handful of book club members who read Kendall's pick of The Hot Zone last summer and I was one of maybe two people who liked it a lot. That being said, no one believed my logic of that film being Hot Fuzz because they told me Hot Fuzz is a comedy. But... whatever.

There was also a question that asked us to identify the woman in the HAZMAT suit, but we got that wrong.

On the bottom, we did great! We had to identify the authors of specific works and all of the authors had two initials: A.A. Milnes, S.E. Hinton, J.M. Barrie, E.B. White, etc.

Round Three:

As a whole, we weren't especially eager to jump into this round, but we did incredibly well! Darren, Siri, and I all thought that Schrodinger was likely the answer to Name That Scientist, and we were all correct, but then Siri and I second-guessed ourselves by wondering if it might in fact be Rorschach... which it wasn't. Darren knew it wasn't Rorschach, but he didn't tell us that until later. We only missed a 2-point bonus, though, so not a big deal. Watery Geography was gotten by Victoria (Baltic) and then we moved into NFL History. This is where Landon donned a cape and amazed us all (especially Mary and me because he is our new coworker) with his brilliance. Let's do a special paragraph just for this portion of the evening, shall we?

The question had something to do with three teams relocating from one city to another in the 1980s and we needed to name the teams. Landon had an air of confidence about him as soon as Adam started reading the question, and then his posture became very rigid and he said with a brief wave of his hand, "I've got this. Cardinals, Raiders, and Colts." I wrote it down immediately. Darren wasn't quite as confident as I was and proceeded to ask some clarifying questions. Mary and I stared at each other in awe as Landon rattled of dates, players, and other random sports-related trivia in response to each of his queries. It. Was. Amazing.

Snack Food Box Art was the next category and Mary apparently knew the answer before the question was asked. I think I was in the bathroom when that conversation happened, though, so I missed it. That was our bonus category and we got the extra points, which was a good thing, and then we went into We Share a First Name. The answer was Charlie and we could earn a 2-point bonus if we knew the last names of all the Charlies referenced. The second was Parker and the third was Watts, but we weren't certain about the first one. Mary suggested Puth because she knows there is an artist named Charlie Puth who has a popular song, and Darren wanted to know if she had anything substantial to back up this suggestion, and I said, "She's trusting her gut," and Mary's gut was right.

6-4-2:

The answer was Kim Basinger and we got it for two points.

Round 4:

We were thrown with One for the Plant Lovers. We got it right because we knew one of the two potential answers (Columbia), but we didn't realize that an orchid and vanilla go together. Presidential Potpourri was about the FFA and the answer was Jimmy Carter, Classic Hollywood had to be Sunset Boulevard and I wrote it down even before the question was asked, there's apparently a 20th Century Play called J.B. that is based on the story of Job and we got that right because Darren suggested Job, and Three Clues / One Animal was easy enough because it referenced Watership Down and we had four English teachers on the team.

Going into the final question, we were in third place.

Final:

Musical Theatre was the category and at first we thought the answer might be Jersey Boys because this was apparently the only "jukebox musical" to never win a Tony... but then Siri suggested Mama Mia and that was right and so we ended up in second place! Yay!

I forget next week's opening category.