Trivia Recap: 8/3

The Players: Brock, Ben, Mary, Darren, Alex, Hannah, Mark. You know what we all do for a living by now or you can look back to previous entries.

So this week it was finally Hannah’s turn to write the trivia recap since this is, after all, her blog designed to promote her writing. And she was planning to. But because of the way we were sitting she felt a little out of the conversation and also she has been busy writing and planning for her book signing that is tomorrow night (Friday August 4th at the Ragged Edge! If you are reading this in time then you should come and you will also get to meet some members of our trivia team, but given how late I am at writing this blog it is probably too late) So instead you get me, Darren, writing the blog this week.

Today was National IPA Day and so the friendly folks at Fourscore had all IPAs on sale and almost all of us were drinking Ohhh Jeees to commemorate the day. Mary stuck with her fruity alcoholic seltzer, despite the fact that our group photo makes it look like she was drinking a stout.

On to the questions: the opening category was “Princess Anna of Arendelle”, which I believe was chosen to make the point that Anna is indeed a Princess and the fact that she becomes a queen in the last two minutes of the sequel movie is not enough to cross her off the official list and make Ariel the first alphabetical Disney Princess, and yes I am still bitter about that question from last week. We did get this question right, and we also did very well on some questions about whether the number of seats in the largest ACC stadium, the number of miles to Mars, and the biggest Jeopardy! winnings were greater or less than 100,000. We correctly surmised that the brined cheese made from sheepsmilk whose name comes from the Greek word for ‘sliced’ is feta even though it is hard to slice feta, and Ben was the first to say that the Colorado River runs through the Grand Canyon. (Note that Brock wants to make sure we recognize that he also knew the name of the river, and it's just that Ben said it first) Also, while we all knew that Paul Reubens (rest in peace) is the actor who played Pee Wee Herman, only I remembered that the movie where he voiced a character named Lock was A Nightmare Before Christmas.

In Memoriam

The second round started, as always, with the audio clue and, as always, we chose it as our bonus question. Luckily we recognized all three songs whose lyrics reference NYC (Walk on the Wild Side, Jenny on the Block, and Harlem Shake). We actually had a perfect round, due to our knowledge of Woody Guthrie’s guitar, Constitutional Amendments, NFL divisions, and chemistry. In fact, while Hannah was wearing her periodic table tank top, we didn’t even need it, prompting Ben to exclaim “Stop flashing your elements, Hannah!” when she took her sweater off.

We powered through the halftime sheet in no time at all, with the bottom half asking us to identify TV shows that were nominated for an Emmy this year from three of the actors on the show and the top half asking us to name a brand of food whose logo features a real life person. Or at least that’s what the instructions said. It turns out that the Quaker Oats logo is not based on a real person. One thing that amused me was that on Wednesday night I went to see The Sting as part of the classic movie series at the Majestic Theater here in Gettysburg and there were members of at least three other trivia teams at the movie as well. Before tonight’s game started I said to one of them “boy it would be funny if there was a question about The Sting tonight!” And then there sort of was as Newman’s Own was one of the brands! By the way, I had never seen The Sting and it is definitely fun to watch and worth seeing, even if it is 50 years old.

I promise that my handwriting is only this bad because we were moving quickly

and I was standing and maybe because it was National IPA Day

Anyways, after halftime we were in first place by a narrow margin. There were sixteen teams playing tonight, which Adam says is a Fourscore record, but to be candid with you, dear readers, the new teams weren’t all that great and at this point the top three teams were the standbys: Railsplitters, Street Sharks, and us. As it always is, the third round was a weak spot for us, and while it turns out that we know more about baseball, streaking, and Pacific islands than I might have guessed, we bombed the two pop culture questions. Modern hip hop is one of our blind spots so we had no idea that Nikki Minaj and Ice Spice are the ones who redid “Barbie Girl” for the movie and half our team didn’t even know that Ice Spice was a person (and, to be honest, I only do because my 15 year old son has been unsuccessfully trying to get me to listen to modern hip hop). We also had never heard of the Denzel movie Two Guns, which I am just now realizing is the second time there has been a Denzel movie that we had never heard of on the night I wrote the trivia blog. This was particularly painful because we had chosen “Films of the 2010”s as our bonus category so we lost a lot of points. Luckily, we got the 6-4-2 after the first hint on a gut feeling that Madonna had written a children’s book, so we only slipped to second place at that point although the Railsplitters were way ahead in first.

We kicked butt on the final round, knowing about the tv show King of the Hill, figuring out the puzzle that was ‘Jonathan Taylor Thomas The Tank Engine’ and recognizing that the hint of the day must mean that bourbon is made out of corn. Most impressively there was a question asking us to name certain stages of the lifecycles of amphibians and we were worried since Skoogmasta Flex wasn’t with us tonight, but Alex thought one would be a tadpole and Hannah knew that Pollywog was a word that might be relevant. With great skepticism I wrote those down and it turns out that they were completely right! In fact, the only points we lost this round were a two point bonus on the “Three Clues/One Novel” because we didn’t come up with Animal Farm quickly enough, which Mary is kicking herself about as I think she teaches the novel. So we had a great round but Street Sharks had a better one because they snuck into a tie with us going into the final question.

The final question was something like “Science has determined that these two British actors have the best voices, so it is fitting that they played evil brothers in different installments of the same film series.” It took us a little bit, but we did figure out that it was Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons. Yippie-ki-yay, Mother Effers! Of course, the other two top teams also got it right so we had to have a tiebreaker with Street Sharks which was “How many IMDB credits did Alan Rickman have when he died?” Ben said 70. Hannah said 135. Brock and I agreed to split the difference and say 93, but we should have listened to Ben because it was 70. I don’t know what the Street Sharks put but it was closer so we ended the night in third place.

Afterwards we all went out for post-trivia drinks at a different local watering hole, because that is now a tradition that we do every week except when we don’t. I had to do a quick bit of parenting so I missed what the opening question will be next week and I was also a few minutes late to the afterparty so I missed the end of a musician playing but she did something that very much excited Hannah but I expect she might want to write her own blogpost about it and I didn’t really understand the excitement anyways. All in all it was another fun and moderately successful night for the Educated Friends.

The exciting thing that happened at ABC

by Hannah

After trivia, as you know if you've just read Darren's blog, the team walked down the street to ABC for a final round of drinks. On Thursdays during the warmer months, there's often a musician providing tunes, and so we were enjoying this woman named Mandy who used to be an art teacher and now works for corporate America (which she hates, but it pays well). The Educated Friends arrived at the tailend of her performance, so we only got to hear a few songs, but then Marc called out, "Encore!" and proceeded to list some bands that she should play. For reasons that may have something to do with IPA Day (but probably just as much with enthusiasm and good cheer), Marc shouted, "They Might Be Giants! That's her favorite!"

I responded, "No it's not! My favorite's Reel Big Fish!"

And then Mandy put her guitar back on and said, "Okay, so I was done but now there is going to be an encore because these guys over here requested Reel Big Fish." And then, even though she was worried she didn't know all the words (she did), she played "Beer" and it was wonderful!

But wait. There's more.

So I filmed Mandy performing "Beer" because I wanted to share it with Crysta Barrett, who is married to Aaron Barrett. If you've read my previous blogs about Reel Big Fish and good things happening in my life, you'll know that Crysta and I are now Instagram friends. So I posted the video in my story and tagged both her and Scott Klopfenstein (because I'm still trying for an Instagram friendship with him). A few hours later, Crysta responded and said "So awesome!" and then she reposted my post on her story. Kind of neat, huh?

Stay tuned because I'm pretty sure my life's gonna keep getting neater...