Trivia Recap: 9/29

The Players: Hannah (English teacher), Kristin (English teacher), Mary (English teacher), Ben (social studies teacher), Darren (math professor), Victoria (veterinarian)

Opening Category: Hocus Pocus (not the magical phrase Jody says whenever she places the plaid hat atop Jeff, the mannequin's, head in Today's Special... anyone remember that show???)

Hint of the Day: A hand with mini hands sprouting from each finger. This one really weirded out Kristin!

Round One:

The only thing we missed was Hocus Pocus; the flame of the candle burns black, not blue. But we got Animals in Advertising (I even knew a car-related thing!), Comic Book Heroes (Kristin came up with the name of Kate Mara and it was the name we needed), and Time for Dessert (I make a mean tiramisu from scratch, folks, so I got the answer of "lady fingers" straight away). US National Parks was all Ben, and unfortunately he didn't even need to draw a map. Utah and Zion for the win!

Round Two:

The musical round (also our bonus category) was all about TV Crime Dramas... and if there's something I watch, it's TV Crime Dramas. This was easy. Victoria came up with "death and taxes" for Potent Quotables, which was correct, and then Kristin came up with "Nolan Ryan" and "the Mets" for Baseball Hall of Famers. This was a "Billy Ocean Moment" because she legitimately watched a 30-minute documentary/YouTube thing about Nolan Ryan right before she came to trivia... and then Nolan Ryan was the answer! How funny is that?! The category of Cover Me (cover songs) was nailed by Darren and Ben; the answer was "I Shot the Sheriff," but before we knew the content of the category and only had the name, I predicted the answer would be "down comforter." I was wrong. And then the final category was Animated Films, which Kristin yet again knew: South Park and Sausage Party. Both R-rated films were top-earning animated films created by the US.

Halftime Sheet:

Victoria basically stole this and filled in the top without anyone's help. The girl knows her herbs! It wasn't until all but two were identified that we even realized there was a word bank! The bottom of the sheet had to do with sports and films. Basically, we just had to identify which sport went with each film title. Not overly difficult. We earned 20 points and Adam drew a heart around our score. We love Adam!

Side note: Adam's microphone blew at the start of trivia and he had to shout all the questions to us. Fourscore was loud tonight, too! There were a lot of people! I spoke to him at the end of the night and his voice was cracking in a way very reminiscent of puberty. In regards to his voice, he said to me, "You know what it feels like? It feels like I just gave a blow job to a cactus." I mean... that's a pretty stellar simile, is it not? The man has a way with words.

Round Three:

Things fell apart a little bit in this round. We did alright with Pop Star Crossword and YA Fiction, but Secret of Acronym and The Night Sky were tricky. Ben did earn us some points in Pardon My Japanese, however, when he came up with a Japanese liquor that tastes like melon. Midori.

It was around this point in time that Kristin confided she'd drooled while reading a text message and said she had worried she wouldn't be much help tonight. She was massive amounts of help, though! Without her, we wouldn't have gotten Sausage Party or Nolan Ryan!

6 - 4 - 2:

Cincinnati company. Longest tenure in the Dow Jones. For six points, I said, "Procter and Gamble." My team was not on board. But I'm sure you've seen the memes about what people read in the bathroom before cell phones came into existence. The answer? The backs of containers. Literally everything is produced by Procter and Gamble and that company is out of Cincinnati. But... we waited until the 4-point clue before we trusted my gut and then we got it right.

Round Four:

Ben got us our United States Vice Presidents, Darren predicted the answer to Streaming Film Sequels would be Hocus Pocus... and he was right (he almost wagered 7 points instead of 9, though, because he forgot that we went low in the last category), the Charmin bears saved us with the answer of "squeeze" for 3 Clues, 1 Word, and Kristin predicted the city of Bath before we even had our clue for British Cities. The last category, Name That Sitcom, was gotten by Darren right away (Will and Grace) and then Adam was like, "For a two-point bonus... there is no two-point bonus." We all laughed. Adam was a champ tonight. No microphone, no free drinks, no free pickles! The man doesn't ask for much, you know?

Going into the Final Round, we had 153 points and were in the lead. My math was wrong, of course. It often is. I've never claimed to be good with numbers, but I'm in charge of keeping score. Darren, the math guru, frequently has to check my work. Addition is just not my strength. So anyway... we had 153 points and were in first place and then we got the final category.

Final Round:

Religious Demographics was the category and we needed to name three countries who have the most Catholics or something like that. I have the wording not quite right and Mary was very particular about it because she knows things about Catholicism, I guess. We got it wrong. We guessed Brazil and Mexico, which were right, but we did not guess Philippines and we needed to. This put us in second place, which is fine, and next week's opening category is birds of prey, which might also be fine since Mary and I just taught Daphne du Maurier's "The Birds" and therefore studied up on some birds of prey.

These are my notes. Aren't they thorough?! And notice the color coding. I always sort through all of Adam's pens in search of two gel pens: one for Ben and one for me. Sometimes there are no gel pens to be found, but this time there were two. I gave the red one to Ben and he rejected it. He doesn't like red. So I offered him the blue one. He said he'd rather use a regular ballpoint pen because they're better for writing on napkins. I rolled my eyes.