Hannah Rae's Blog, page 8

Trivia Recap: 4/25

Hi folks, it's Darren.  Yes, I have a new job and wasn’t going to write the trivia blog any more, but after the lackluster job that Hannah did last week   I knew that we couldn’t leave it to her again.  I don’t really have energy for a full recap, but here are the highlights of a fun night:

1) Due to some last-minute ice cream, veterinary, and napping emergencies it ended up just being me, Hannah, and Mary (well, sort of.  See #8 below).  We did not take a team picture but if you can’t remember what we look like, then this is a pretty good approximation:

2) We almost had a perfect first round, due to our knowledge of the musical Rent , the Hubble space telescope, Julius and Augustus Caesar, and the filmography of Edie Falco.  In fact, we would have if Adam was better at pronouncing things.  You see, one category was about things with the word WELCOME in the title.  We knew that John Travolta got his role in Welcome Back Kotter  after joining scientology and that the best-selling debut single by an American band was “Welcome To The Jungle”.  However, when Adam asked us which Florida airport had a big sign saying “Welcome to Conchland” we all heard it as “Welcome to Cop-land”  (well, after hearing a less G-rated thing first) and so we did not come up with Key West.  But those two bonus points were all we missed.

3) We also had a very strong second round, in part because we figured out that the hint of the day being a bowl of rice probably meant that the NFL wide receiver they were asking about was Jerry Rice.  We only missed two bonus questions, one of which was the audio question about storms, because while we recognized Garth Brooks and Stevie Ray Vaughan we did not recognize the female vocalist and I don’t even remember who it was but it was NOT Adele. I did know that Corey Feldman was the voice of one of the Ninja Turtles in the 1990 movie, but did not know which one.  Mary and Hannah had somehow never heard of Corey Feldman, but after I described him as a “bad boy type” Hannah insisted it would have been Raphael.  It was not.

Does he look more like a Donatello or a Raphael to you?

 Or maybe a Miranda?

4) I want to pause to say that last night Fourscore had a special sandwich called the Smokin’ Gobbler , which included Smoked Turkey Breast, Caramelized Onions, Goat Cheese, Fig Jam & Fried Onions w/ Lettuce and Tomato on Sourdough Bread.   Hannah thinks it was the best thing she has ever eaten at Fourscore.  I am not sure I would go that far due to my late lamented maple habanero chicken nuggies, but it was a damn good sandwich.

5) The halftime sheet had us identify pictures of celebrities riding motorcycles.  We got all of them except Steve McQueen .  It also asked us to match translations of the word ‘crazy’ with their languages, such as ‘mambo’ in Swahili and ‘wallgof’ in Welsh.  There was definitely some guessing going on, but we figured out all of them.  Go us!  We were in second place by 2 points at the halfway mark.

6) It turns out we know more about Al Pacino movies than I would have thought, as we somehow reasoned that the movie where he plays a blind lawyer is Scent of a Woman  and the movie where he plays a gangster named Big Boy Caprese was Dick Tracy .  We did not know that he plays himself falling in love with Adam Sandler in Jack and Jill , but I am actually sort of proud that I didn’t know that one.  Fun Fact: In Baltimore there is an ‘Al Pacino Ice Cream’ truck  that may or may not have any connection to the actor.  Nobody is really sure.

7)After last week’s fiascos, I refused to weigh in on choosing bonus categories this week and Hannah almost chose ‘Vocabulary and Birds.’  It’s a good thing we didn’t because we had no idea what the eleven-letter word is that could mean either a loud chaotic event OR a group of parrots.  (Pandemonium)

8) One of the categories in the third round was African geography.  As has been discussed before, this is right in Ben and Marc’s wheelhouses, but much less so for the rest of us.  So at halftime (after we knew the category but before we knew the question) Hannah texted them to ask for an information dump.  Ben did not come through as he only gave us one single fact.  But readers, it turns out that was the only fact we needed. 

The highlight of the night. Maybe even the year.

9) Another category was Major League Soccer.  In another bit of fortuitousness, I had looked at the list of teams ranked by championships ahead of time and the question asked which two teams on opposite coasts had won the most championships.  I was pretty sure it was DC United and LA Galaxy, and wanted to wager nine points, but Mary laughed and laughed at that idea and said to Hannah that I was being ridiculous.  So we wagered five.  And I was right.  Would this come back to haunt us later when we had to use nine points on either ‘Constellations’ or ‘Explorers’?  You will have to keep reading.

10) It turns out that the name of the sword in Game of Thrones  is not, as we put down, “Frank the Winter Sabre.”  It was also not, as the team next to us loudly shouted “White Claw,” but I will admit that their answer was closer to the correct answer of “Long Claw.”

Still looks like a Frank to me…

11) The 6-4-2 category was numbers, and the 6-point hint asked us how many feet were equivalent to 2133.6 millimeters.  My math skills came to good use as I did some mental mathemagic and figured it out and got us all six points.  We didn’t even need the later hints that this number is in the title of films by Kurosawa and David Fincher, or that it is the square root of 49.

12) We almost said that the musician who was in the air force before his musical career and who led a band called the Tennessee Three was Elvis, because he was Hannah’s first crush.  Luckily we hesitated because we knew his musical career actually started before he was drafted, and the third clue gave away that the answer was, in fact, Johnny Cash.

13) Hannah knew about The Outsiders , Mary did in fact know her constellations, and I knew about Killing Eve.   The explorers question was about who allegedly first circumnavigated the earth and everyone in the bar knew it was Magellan before Adam even gave the hint. 

14) The final question was ‘Which candy changed its name from Mars Men in the mid 1980s due to a craze over a new kind of dolls?’  We quickly came up with Sour Patch Kids.  So did most of the other teams but it didn’t matter, as we won!

The Educated Friends, celebrating our victory!

15) As we may have mentioned, a couple of weeks ago Mary decided that when we won we should have a theme of choosing banned books as opening categories because of some of the political nonsense that local school boards are putting people through.  We were on board with this idea, which is why we chose Fahrenheit 451 and To Kill a Mockingbird the last two times we won.  But I am not sure Mary thought this idea through, as when we won tonight she and Hannah struggled to think of a third banned book that they knew well enough to choose.  We went with Lord of the Flies , but then Hannah said she doesn’t actually know or like the book.  So you will have to stay tuned to see how that goes. 

16) This is normally where I would leave you with an AI generated image of our team.  But that is so March 2024.  Now I am all about using AI to write songs.  So I present to you a ballad of tonight’s victory: “Champions of Knowledge”.

Trivia Recap: 4/18

The Players: Darren, Mary, Victoria, Marc, Hannah

Opening Category: To Kill A Mockingbird

Hint of the Day: Tie (as in )

Round One was really fun.

Round Two was kind of fun but we didn’t get the audio clue and that was sad because I didn’t want to choose it as our bonus category because Grammy Winners didn’t sit right with my gut. Darren wanted to choose the audio clue though and it backfired terribly.

Halftime was fine. We got 19/20 and were tied for third place.

Round Three wasn’t good. We chose Analogies as our bonus even though Cop Shows seemed like a better choice. And it was. We missed another bonus. This is when the game started to be all levels of unfun. I considered going home, but I stayed because no one wanted to write the blog and I needed to know the end of the story since, by default, I was gonna have to write it.

The 6-4-2 was alright. We got Chicago for four points. Chicago puts poppyseeds on their hotdog buns so everyone tests positive for drugs when they’re asked to pee in a cup.

Round Four was atrocious. There are no words to accurately describe it, but I will try. Terrible. Horrible. Abysmal. Rotten. Lame.

The final question was something about actors who retired and then died and we didn’t know the answer.

We lost.

Next week’s opening category is Twentieth Century Musicals. Maybe Darren will agree to write it.

The end.

The Mouser Strikes Again!

I have been awake since 1:45 this morning.

I was actually very excited about going to bed last night. I had changed my sheets and the window was open a little bit and the fan was spinning overhead and so both the breeze and the temperature of my bedroom were ideal. And, I mean, everyone understands that clean sheets are one of life's small pleasures.

Before turning off the light and calling it a day, I checked my email and realized that it was Harvey's birthday! The vet's office had sent a birthday greeting and I felt rather sad that I hadn't realized it was Harvey's birthday, so I called for him and he sashayed in, settling himself against my side and dozing with his belly upright to face the fan. His beautifully soft fur swished in the breeze and a gentle purr rumbled in his chest. He is oft times the epitome of perfection.

Harvey slept with me all night. I know this because, as I've already said, I woke at 1:45. I'm not entirely sure why, but I did. And I wasn't overly upset about being awake because I enjoy lying in my bed and making up stories about Sebastian. Last night, he was touring out west with the rest of Flannel Lobster. Nothing much happened, and I'm sure the scene will never appear in a book, but it's yet another chapter in what I like to refer to as My Head Story.

Anyway... I lay awake until about 3:00, which is when I decided to do some online shopping.

Then I made up more stories about Sebastian.

Then, around 4:15, Augusta started barking and carrying on for no apparent reason. I told her to be quiet. She listened for a brief time and I dozed off for about fifteen minutes, but then I had a dream about dogs barking and the dream happened because my dog really was barking, and so I got up and let both Augusta and Arlo outside.

Outside, Arlo started barking and I had to reprimand him through the open window. Every bit as stubborn as his sister, he didn't listen, and so I got out of bed yet again to let the dogs back in.

With Augusta now available for visiting (it was at this point after 5:00), Harvey decided he ought to relocate and spend some time with his terrier friends. I was sad to see him go, but Petey showed up shortly thereafter and started playing at the foot of my bed.

For those of you who regularly follow my blogs, you're probably experiencing a peculiar sense of deja vu. For those of you who don't, you may want to skim an event that happened in March because just like then, Petey was having a great time down there beside my feet...

Suspecting the problem, I tuned my senses to detect a soft squeak.

Then I swore.

And then I turned on the light to find... a LIVE mouse pinned under Petey's paw!

I like mice and have no major problems with them. I don't necessarily want them to reside in my home, but I also don't want my mouser of a cat to kill them. So I scooped up this little guy (who, after a quick examination, appeared to be totally uninjured) and took him outside to be released among the daffodils.

Thank goodness it was still dark; I was wearing little more than my underwear.

Trivia Recap: 4/11

Well, dear readers, this is it.  My sabbatical is basically over and this is the last time that Mary and Hannah can use it as the reason why I should write the trivia blog.  I’m sure they will come up with other reasons and I might even agree to them, but it will no longer be a given and you might instead get to hear other voices.  It’s important to not let straight white men dominate the trivia blog, after all.  

Hannah could not have written it this week anyways, because she was at a concert with Phil that I suspect she will also blog about.  And Ben was at baseball.  And Victoria had lots of phone calls to make. And Marc was supposed to come but also got caught up in meetings. So the team was just me, Mary, Siri, and Brock.  But we were excited to be there to try to repeat last week’s victory .  We did not, however, take a team photo.  We also don’t have Hannah’s illustrations on the answer sheet, so instead I will add some visual interest with this AI generated image that previews several trivia answers and will make more sense the more you read. 

Since we won last week, Mary chose the book Fahrenheit 451 as the opening category, in part to celebrate banned books and in part because she is teaching the book this very week.  In fact, just today she taught the part where Millie overdoses on sleeping pills which was the question!  (Did that need a spoiler alert?  I hope not!)  The next question asked for the name of the sport where contestants pull on either side of a rope to try to get a flag past a certain point.  We all immediately knew that the answer was Tug of War, but we did not know when it stopped being an Olympic event.  Unprompted, Siri said “I know we all want to say 1920 but it was probably something much later like 1960” which sounded reasonable to us but it was, in fact, 1920. 

The next question had three parts about the Apollo 13 mission (yes, the category had the name “Houston We Have A Trivia Problem”.  Ugh .)  and we knew that it was launched from Kennedy Space Center and that Jim Lovell played the Tom Hanks role as captain, but we did not know that the two-person lunar module named after a zodiac sign was Aquarius.  Mostly because the emphasis on “two-person” made us assume they were hinting at Gemini and we were not the only team that fell for this trap!  We also knew that Staples created the Easy Button, although it helped that staples were the hint of the day, and that Saturn was the second largest planet.  Siri also somehow knew that there was a moon named Rhea after a Greek titan, which I had no idea about – I would have guessed it if they had said it was named after a Cheers  star, although maybe I would have thought there was a moon named Woody because there really should be.  In fact, if I ever discover a new planet I am going to name all the moons after Cheers  characters.

The audio round was songs with “Open” in the title.  We knew Wide Open Spaces  and Arms Wide Open, but while some of the younger hipper members of my team recognized Jay-Z’s voice we did not know that he had a song called “Letter Opener” or something like that.  The next question asked “While it is not the happiest pepper on earth, this type of New Mexican Chili Pepper gets its name from a city in southern California.  The answer?  Anaheim pepper.  Get it?  Because Disneyland is the happiest place on Earth?  The next question asked about the tv show whose theme was “Boss of Me”  and we aced it.  Because we were in the zone we also guessed correctly that Van Gogh was the Dutch painter who painted The Potato Eaters even though we were just as likely to have put Vermeer.  And the final round was African geography, which we are always great at because Ben and Marc have professional reasons to know this stuff and also because Marc was born in Africa.  Oh, except if you have been reading you know that neither Marc nor Ben could be bothered to show up tonight, so none of us knew what country takes up the majority of the Horn of Africa or what gulf is to its north.  Sigh.

These are the Potato Eaters. 

Every week when I get to this part of the blog I write “The top half of the halftime sheet” and then feel like I should change it rather than using “half” twice in the same phrase, but today I am just going to say that the top half of the halftime sheet asked us to identify famous drummers.  That’s what happens when Hannah isn’t around.  We knew the easy ones like Dave Grohl and Questlove and the ones who aren’t really drummers like Courtney Cox and Fred Armisen and even the hard ones like Karen Carpenter and Max Weinberg to get all ten.  We also got all of the second half, which asked us to match different literary awards with the genres they are honoring, like the Hugos for science fiction, the Spur award for Westerns, and the Casey award for baseball books.  So we were kicking butt and after the first half we were in the lead by three points.

Round 3 opened up with Kids TV, which we chose as our bonus category because among the four of us, our children, and our siblings we realized that we have almost no gaps of time when none of us were children.  And we chose wisely as the question ended up being about Bob The Builder and his sidekicks and his banging theme song .  The next question was one of my favorite of the night: How many US State Capitals are west of Los Angeles?  It turns out there are six, because you didn’t think to include Carson City.  I did, though, and we got the points. 

The next question is one that really would have benefitted from Hannah’s presence.  Or at least her periodic table tank top’s presence, as the question asked about the only chemical elements whose names (note: not symbols) end with the letters T, L, and H.  This was another great question but one that we did not succeed at.  We came up with Cobalt, but not Nickel or Bizmuth and then we kicked ourselves afterwards as you always do with good trivia.  Luckily, Siri knew about Kurt Vonnegut and I was able to name all three movies that costarred Steve Martin and Rick Moranis, so we extended our lead in the third round.

Here is one of them.  Can you name the other two?  Hint: one prominently featured a total eclipse of the sun.  Da-Doo.

The fourth round started with the category Wordly Recipes.  Well, it was really “Worldly Recipes” but Adam had a typo.  The question asked about the key ingredient of baba ghanoush as well as what it was called in Britain.  Brock was confused about our answer and we had to explain to him that the emoji had a meaning related to food and not just what he normally uses it for.  The next category was about the classic game Rock Em Sock Em Robots.  We did not know the phrase that is the name of both a Metallica album and an Al Pacino movie until we got the third clue that it is the last four words of the pledge of allegiance, which gave away that the answer was “Kill ‘em all”. 

There was a question about some world leader who got divorced and then married the duchess of Austria and we had no idea so Siri took a stab and guessed Napoleon and it turned out that was right.  The final question of the night asked which two NFL teams play within ten miles of the Mississippi River.  We knew that the New Orleans Saints would be one correct answer, but Mary and Brock couldn’t agree on whether the Titans play in Nashville or Memphis so we weren’t positive about the other team.  Instead, I put down the Minnesota Vikings because everything I know I learned from Indigo Girls songs and they tell me that the Mississippi is mighty but it starts in Minnesota .  And that was the correct answer. Thanks, Indigo Girls!

At this point I should really tell you that Mary’s math was correct all night long and she gets a gold star from me for her excellent math skills.  In fact, going into the final question her math was better than Adam’s as she correctly had us in the lead by 18 points and Adam thought we were only in the lead by 17.  We didn’t bother arguing, though, because either way wagering zero would allow us to guarantee a win.  Which is what we did, but then it turned out that we knew the answer!  The question asked for the only Best Picture winner from the decade 2000-2010 with five words in its title.

The answer was not “Crash.  No, really, Crash won”

So we won.  Neither Siri or Brock can come next week and I will be uncertain due to my new work stuff, so we let Mary again choose the opening category.  She continued the theme of banned books and chose “To Kill A Mockingbird”, although I find it hard to believe that she will stop listening to the new Taylor Swift album for long enough to come to trivia.  So we will have to see what happens.  We will also have to see what happens with the future of the trivia blog.  Thanks to those of you who read each week, and I am now convinced that it is slightly more than just my teammates and their mothers.  But if you want these to continue, be sure to give us positive encouragement because I am needy that way. 

My Birthday = My Best Day!

Guess what's today. Correct! It's my birthday, which just so happens to be my very favorite holiday! I'm going to head over to my parents' house in just a little while because my mom is making a delicious pasta meal to celebrate and she has also baked the greatest dessert of all time: a homemade coconut layer cake with cream-cheese icing and a layer of lemon curd in the middle. It. Is. Amazing.

No doubt, that cake is going to be the highlight of my day, but I'd like to touch on some other excellent things that have occurred in the days leading up to my birthday (because I actually started celebrating my favorite holiday on Saturday). Ready? Here we go...

My friends came over to play the Birthday Trivia Game (I made it up; sorry, but you can't find this amazing game on Amazon) and in playing the Birthday Trivia Game, I got some mad compliments. Like, for example, I learned that my bosom friend Wes thinks that my greatest trait is loyalty, and even though I already knew that he values my loyalty (he promised years ago to take care of me in an apocalypse because I am "loyal to a fault"), it was nice to hear that he remembers I am insanely loyal and will therefore still take care of me.

Phil shared his favorite musical memory made with me and opted for the time we saw Moon Hooch because he witnessed the "pure joy" on my face in experiencing one of his favorite bands. Truthfully, that show really was the greatest musical memory I've ever had -- with Phil or otherwise -- because it was the best show I've ever attended, EVER. In fact, there were three bands (Moon Hooch, The Lucky Chops, and Too Many Zooz) that combined to form one band (Lucky Moon Zooz), so it will be hard to top... but Phil is taking me on a birthday concert date this coming Thursday (we are skipping trivia) so that we can see Moon Hooch at HMAC and eat at Zer0day beforehand and we will probably wear matching shoes (and colors) because we always do.

Brock participated in the Best Art Wine Label Contest (there were three contests and I made out very well) and his reasoning for including Martha's Chard was as basic as a very exuberant, "Because Martha Stewart's face is on the label!" He didn't win for that label (I don't think; in truth, I don't remember...) but he did win for something.

Mary also won for her Humble Bunch label. She tied it back to me being humble and creative and all sorts of other nice compliments and it made me feel really good. That was the Hannah's Personality Wine Label Contest. And then Phil also won for the Best Memory With Hannah Contest. He chose a wine with an airplane-esque thing on the label because we went to Germany together in high school, and we obviously flew there, and part of his prize included a picture of me. (See above for said picture; my mother hates this photograph of me, fyi.)

Want to know more about the prizes for the winners? Each of them got a "tiny mouse plunger" (as Phil likes to call it) that is actually a bottle stopper, along with a really cute ceramic wine glass. And then there were some bonus gifts in each bag to personalize each individual prize (i.e., a photograph of me for Phil). Isn't that fun? I know. I love coming up with gifts for people -- especially when those people are my friends!

A sampling of my wine haul. Note the "tiny mouse plunger" in Martha's Chard... I got one for myself as well!

Siri and I shared some wonderful Strawberry Shortcake memories (it's kind of our thing) and I caught up with BFF Kathy (I hadn't seen her since November!) and Jody drove down from New York because she's the life of every party and knew I needed her at mine!

Okay. Now let's zoom ahead to today, which is my actual birthday.

Today, on my actual birthday, several great things happened but these are the things I want to talk about:

Darren sent me the absolute nicest text because he is apparently in a competition with Mary to send the better text. So far he is winning. Mary hasn't yet sent a birthday text. However, in Mary's defense, she spent the entire day with me and wished me a happy birthday in person and was the only person all day to notice I was wearing a tank top with an 8 on it... because it is April 8th.

I got a lot of other nice texts from my friends... and even my eye doctor, which surprised me.

My favorite red tulips are blooming!

My students were very sweet (for the most part) and some former students even made it a point to swing by my room just to say "Happy birthday!" HaHa was there first thing this morning to express her well wishes, and a few kids I've never even taught swung by as well!

I got to see Baustie! He just happened to be at school for the eclipse and I don't even think he realized it was my birthday, but I always enjoy seeing that man so it was great to get a hug from him.

An eclipse happened. A lot of people seemed to think this was a big birthday deal, and I did check it out, but it was more so the people who made the day special. So many coworkers emailed and popped in to say "Happy birthday!" and so many friends texted to share the same sentiment.

Okay. Now it's time to feed the dogs and corral Harvey so he can accompany me to my birthday dinner and we can both spend the evening with my parents. My birthday is kind of a big deal for my mom too, you know, seeing as she's the reason I'm here... ♥️

Trivia Recap: 4/4

The Players: Hannah, Mary, Victoria, Darren, Ben, Brock, Jenn

Hint of the Day: Mashed Potatoes.  Someone on another team was even wearing a ‘Mashed Potatoes’ baseball cap, which I assume is not a coincidence.

Guys, I’m worried about Hannah.  I’m writing this the day after we played trivia, and last night when I told her that I was feeling both tired and uninspired to write the blog (my day may have involved some day drinking.  Shhhh) she told me “You don’t have to do it.  There is absolutely no expectation.”  Does that sound like the Hannah we know and love?  I know her birthday is imminent and that she has a lot of other things going on, but this was out of character. 

One of the things that I think is distracting Hannah is the topic of book banning.  When I first arrived at FourScore, Mary and Hannah and Victoria were deep in conversation on this topic.  Hannah was on a roll and I think she may use this soapbox to say more in the future.  For the record: I am pretty sure that she is against book bans, although I wasn’t paying close attention as I was studying up for the opening category.  And the aforementioned day drinking.  You may recall that last week Smartacus won, and they chose “19th Century Vice Presidents” as the opening category, so I was quickly reviewing a few Wikipedia pages until Hannah told me that Ben was coming even though he had previously said he wasn’t, and since he is a world-renowned expert on vice presidents I felt comfortable.

Well, it turns out that Smartacus chose that category precisely because they knew they weren’t going to be at trivia this week.  And the question had to do with someone who was only vice president for like a month and even Ben didn’t know the answer.  Luckily, we did know the names of both of the schools that are in both the men and women final fours this year (or is it “Finals Four” the way it is “Attorneys General”?  Hannah, can you weigh in on this one?) (Hannah here! I have absolutely no idea, but I like how goings-on and passersby are made into plurals by adding an S to the middle of the word).  We also knew that mashed potatoes are in shepherds pie (and not just because it was the hint of the day) and that Annie Potts was the voice of Little Bo Peep in Toy Story .  Victoria was “9000%” sure that she knew a bible quote up until the moment we turned it in at which point she apologized strongly and profusely for getting it wrong.  But she in fact got it right, so that whole question was quite a roller coaster ride.

The final question of the round asked for the 17th century poem about Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden and the descent of Lucifer.  Ben was absolutely sure it was Dante’s Inferno , but Mary was worried because she didn’t know who the author of that work was, which might not have been her proudest moment.  Of course, Ben was wrong as the answer was Paradise Lost , so there was plenty of shame to go around.

The next round started off strong. As always, we went with the audio question for our bonus and this week we had to identify three musical artists singing about pina coladas.  I immediately knew Warren Zevon  and we all recognized Snoop Dogg’s voice even if we didn’t know the song.  There was a lot of debate about the third singer but Mary thought it was Garth Brooks and as the saying goes “Always defer to Mary on questions of country music and alliteration” so we went with her and she was right .

The rest of the round we were on fire and Ben deserves a lot of the credit for that.  He redeemed his lack of knowledge about Vice-Presidential deaths by knowing that William Henry Harrison was the first president who died in office. He knew that India and Myanmar are the two countries that border Bangladesh.  And he knew that the Last Word/First Word answer was “Chapelle’s Show Me The Money” and not, in fact, “Billy Crystal Ball.”  Victoria and I made sure we had a perfect round by knowing the two elements on the periodic table whose chemical symbols were the letter S followed by a vowel, which is good since Hannah forgot to wear her periodic table shirt. 

We were on fire going into the halftime sheet.  The top half asked us to identify football teams from their helmets with the logos removed.  We did pretty well on this, but we might have done better if we had looked more at the color version on Adam’s computer rather than just the black and white printout. 

The second half asked us for words that can be made from the letters of WRESTLEMANIA, like the process of soaking meat in a seasoned liquid (‘Marinate’) and the team that plays in Emirates Stadium (‘Arsenal’) and Sarah Koenig’s podcast (‘Serial’) and we got almost all of them but did not know the name of the TV show about Bass Reeves.  So our great game continued and we were in first place after halftime.  Although the part Hannah was most excited about was:

As you can see in that photo, the next round opened with African shorelines.  Despite Ben’s excellent map seen below we struggled to name the three countries on the southeast shoreline of Africa between Sudan and South Africa.

Ben’s excellent map of Africa and/or an ice cream cone

The next question was not much better, as your Educated Friends do not know our military ranks.  However, we do know things that have the initials “P.K.” such as penalty kicks, Amazing Race  host Phil Keoghan, and The Toadies’ song Possum Kingdom .  Ben and I also probably knew a little too much about the movie Yentl (hey ladies, we’re single!), although neither of us could remember the Academy Award nominated song “Papa Can You Hear Me.” There was also a question about word origins that asked for the name of the mathematical object that derives its name from a Greek word meaning sand tray.  While I wasn’t totally sure, I suggested ‘Abacus’ in part because I couldn’t think of anything else that made sense.  New Player Jenn strongly disagreed with this answer (perhaps not knowing that I’m a mathematician) but didn’t have one of her own.  In fact, when we put it down she said that she would buy the whole team a round of beers if ‘Abacus’ was the answer.  And it was the answer, but I don’t think any of us took her up on that offer.  Have I mentioned that I have a giant abacus in my office or a small one on my keychain?

My rainbow abacus

For the 6-4-2 question, we did not remember that the word ‘Barefoot’ is the start of a Neal Simon play that Robert Redford starred in, and one unnamed team member was convinced that the answer was ‘Graduate’ but then we explained to them that plays are not movies and Neal Simon is different from Paul Simon.  Luckly, we did know that Ina Garten is the Barefoot Contessa so we got the clue for four points.  And we were still in the lead.

The fourth round started with ‘Medical Conditions’.  We had chosen this as our bonus category because Victoria is in fact a medical professional.  I had been reluctant because she mostly knows medical conditions that are in animals.  And the question was for the scientific terms for ‘nearsighted’ and ‘farsighted’, and Victoria immediately exclaimed “Dogs can’t be nearsighted!”  Luckily we still came up with ‘myopic’ but not the other one.  I knew about the TV show Mr. and Mrs. Smith , and we all knew about the Liberty Bell.  We somehow got the question about boxing history correct, and Mary not only knew the lead singer of the band One Republic but also knew that the 2023 film that featured their song was Top Gun: Maverick  despite the fact that the film was actually released in 2022.  At this point we were still in first, but you wouldn’t know that if you were following Hannah’s score tally because despite her earlier celebrations, at this point her math was wrong.  Maybe I should give her my abacus?

The final question of the night asked for the real first name of rap artist Nelly, which is also the name of an Ivy League university.  While there was a contingent of our team that thought his first name was ‘University of Pennsylvania’, we did in fact go with the obvious answer Cornell, and that was correct.  Meaning we won the night!  We thought about going with ‘18th century Secretaries of State’ for next week’s opening category to get our revenge on Smartacus, but instead we chose “Fahrenheit 451 (the novel)”.  Despite the fact that she will be a year older and wiser, Hannah won’t be at trivia next week because she will be going to a big book burning carnival, or something like that.  Hopefully she will be back to normal and harassing me to write the blog again.  Otherwise, please send help.

An outtake from the team photoshoot.

Trivia Recap: 3/28

Trivia Recap 3/28/24

The players: Siri (English teacher), Ben (redacted), Darren (Its complicated), Jimmy (Private Investigator), Tori (Something with paper), Jake (Coffee and bagel magnate), Charlotte (Fish Dancer), Everett (Pre-verbal, so he doesn’t count against our seven people limit)

Hint of the Day: A map of France

Opening Round: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Blogger: Darren

 

You’ll notice a lot of new names up there, because ( as I discussed last week ) we had a lot of absences.  Ben and I thought about bailing, but then they postponed the Braves-Phillies game and it turns out that Siri could make it after all and she brought her husband and we lured in a family of four to join us and we were off to the races.  We did not get a team picture despite the fact that Hannah texted me multiple times to say “Be sure to get a team picture,” although I do have a photo I can share of the three year old on the team.

She definitely does not have a cell phone out to watch Ninja Turtles, Adam.

The game started off great, as I have watched enough Buffy to know that Rupert Giles was the librarian at Sunnydale High School.  We then did well at words that start with a T and end with a Y by knowing that Tweety was a bird, Tommy was a rock opera, and Telly was a muppet, although we did struggle with the last one.  We knew about terminal velocity and we probably would have known that France was the country who got a new flag after their 1787 revolution even if it had not been the hint of the day.  Combining this with our knowledge of passed balls and wild pitches meant we had a perfect first round. 

The audio category was “TV Comedies” and we thought it would be theme songs so we still chose it as our bonus.  It was not theme songs. Instead they played clips of sitcoms and we had to name the show.  The first one was The Honeymooners, and luckily Siri figured it out as I was prepared to say I Love Lucy.  Several of us recognized Tony Danza’s voice in the second one and since he was talking about skipping school we correctly surmised that it was Who’s The Boss.  In the third clip we recognized Will Arnett’s voice so several of my teammates thought it must be Arrested Development. That didn’t quite sound right to me given the dialogue but I didn’t stick with my convictions and we put that as our answer, but it was actually Bojack Horseman. 

But that was just the two bonus points and we then continued our hot streak by knowing things about Cadbury Crème Eggs and the movie My Girl even if we couldn’t decide whether her name was Anna Clumsky or Schlumsky or Chlumsky.  I’m not sure what we ended up putting, but we got the points – lets be honest, Adam wasn’t reading that closely.

I guess its Chlumsky

For ‘literary slang’ the question was “What is the name of the literary genre, popularized by Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen, whose eight letter name comes from combining three words?”  We really struggled with this one and as an English teacher Siri was particularly embarrassed not to know it, but at the last second Ben exclaimed “Whodunit!” and we all knew that must be correct.  The final category was Musical Collaborations, and nobody on the team had any idea who were the two musical artists on last year’s hit song “First Person Shooter”.  We named a lot of contemporary musical artists and ended up writing down Bad Bunny and Cardi B because, well, they were people that we had heard of.  But alas it was Drake and J Cole, who to be fair are also people that we had heard of.  Clearly current music is not our thing, especially in the hip hop genre. 

The halftime sheet also went very well for us – the top half consisted of stills from movies with geographical names in their title, and we got them all.  Not just the easy ones like Madagascar and Gangs of New York but also harder ones like LA Confidential and Vicki Cristina Barcelona.  The bottom half involved identifying NBA Team names so Siri got up and walked away to order more beer without even reading that the clues that were supposed to point us to the NBA teams were things like:

Harald V of Norwar or Abdullah II of Jordan, for example. These first appeared on McDonalds menu in 1980 This 1994 comedy film featured Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster* The pseudonym once used by Washington Irving

The rest of the team got all but this final one, which I suspected that Siri would know.  She seemed like she didn’t want to even think about the question because it was NBA-connected, but as soon as she actually thought about it she said “Oh, Knickerbocker obviously” and then started reciting from Sleepy Hollow. I’m not sure how long that went on as I got up to turn in the sheet and order a Turkey Reuben.

*Note that last week also had a question about a Mel Gibson/Jodie Foster collaboration and I had suggested this as an answer, but even I did not think that a Maverick was the national animal of Canada.

So we got a perfect halftime sheet and we were in first place with a comfortable six point lead going into the second half.  Which started with a category on stamp collecting, and luckily Jimmy is an expert philatelist so we were all set.  Except that is not the case at all and was just something that Jake made up, so when we were asked about the first two women to appear on US Postal stamps we were lost.  The hints that they were born in 1451 and 1731 actually made it harder rather than easier, and while we mentioned Martha Washington as a possibility we put Betsy Ross as our revolutionary guess and we had no idea about the other one at all.  Do you?

Luckily, the rest of the round went well.  We deduced that “Spoonful of Sugar” was the song written in response to a child getting the polio vaccine, Ben knew that the word Boondocks came from Tagalong and was a comicstrip, and I knew that quartz is primarily made of silicon.  The final category of the round was words that start with double-letters.  We assumed it would just be aardvarks and llamas because we couldn’t think of any others, but neither of these appeared.  Instead, it was about Eeyore, MmmBop , and the Oompa Loompas.  Did you know that the original name of the Oompa Loompas were ‘Whipple Scrumpets’ and they were racist caricatures of African pygmies?  Now you do, and have another reason to try to reconcile the fact that Roald Dahl was a very problematic person with his great creations.

Next up was the 6-4-2, and the 6 point clue was “I am a word that precedes the word ‘Rachel’ in a 2017 movie that is based on the work of Daphne du Maurier.”  We did not know the answer although Siri thought I should check later with Hannah because she is always talking about Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.  Luckily, we did know that the play Lincoln was watching when he was killed was American Cousin so we got the word ‘cousin’ for 4 points.  After the game ended, I did check with Hannah.

She told me to put it in the blog. So I did.

Despite a couple of hiccups that round, we actually managed to extend our lead and were feeling really good going into the final round.  Was a seven point lead enough to see us through to victory?  One would think so, but the fourth round was bad.  Really bad.  The first question asked which professional sports team had retired the most jersey numbers, and we put the Steelers when the answer was the Celtics.  And the Steelers was a particularly bad guess,  as it turns out.  We did manage to get questions right about L Frank Baum and General William “Cump” Sherman, who it turns out invented the phrase “War is Hell.”  In Three Clues/One Number, we had no idea how many sides a hendecagon has but Ben felt very confident that Martina McBride and either Brian Adams or Ryan Adams (I can't remember) had released an album called 16 so we answered for the bonus.  Ben said “I mean, what else could it be?”  In hindsight, I should have pointed out to Ben that there are many many many other numbers it could have been, but I did not fight him.  And it turned out that the answer was one of the infinitely many other numbers (it was 11, to be precise.  A later text had Mary say that she would not have gotten this country music question either, so we didn’t feel too bad), which we would have gotten had we waited for the third clue about the Apollo mission that landed people on the moon.  Alas.  Ben’s bad luck continued with the final question of the round, where we had let him choose European Geography as our bonus category after last week’s heroic African geography victory.  The question asked about the three largest countries in the European Union by area.  We needed to name two correctly but we only managed to name one, which ironically was once again France.  Unfortunately, these missteps meant that not only did we fall out of first place but Smartacus was on fire and now led us by a whopping eight points, although we were still in second.

The final question basically asked “Which historical event overshadowed the first game played at Fenway Park in Boston.”  We successfully answered the sinking of the Titanic, but so did a bunch of other teams.  So this week ended up being a mirror image of last week, when we rose from the ashes at the end to come in second.  Second place doesn’t feel as good when you are there because you fell out of first as when you came back from sixth place, but the gift certificate has the same amount.   And we all had fun.  And most importantly we all successfully avoided drinking any of the ‘Big League Chew’ beer that they had on tap.  As Siri says, sometimes the beers at FourScore are like Jurassic Park where they spend more time figuring out what they can do than what they should do. I’m sure that if you want a green apple bubble gum fruited sour then it is delicious as they know what they are doing, but I’ll stick with an IPA.

Thanks for reading more of my ramblings.  My sabbatical will be over soon and hopefully Hannah will take back over writing her blog then.  But until next week…

We’re Number Two!

Jack Kerouac

Truthfully, this blog has little to do with Jack Kerouac. I've actually only read excerpts of Jack Kerouac's writing (even though I really should read On the Road at some point) but this afternoon I had several spitfire thoughts ricocheting around my brain and everything came back to grass.

Probably because it's springtime and the grass is growing... *sigh*

So the grass thing started when I was hanging out with my friend Heather. We were talking about octopuses or mushrooms or possibly phoenixes when I glanced out my kitchen window and noticed Neighbor John mowing the grass. Neighbor John has a giant reptile (an iguana, I believe) named Tank who sunbathes with him in the backyard. When my friends are over and they notice Neighbor John in his backyard with Tank, they inevitably halt themselves mid-sentence to instead ask, "What is happening two yards down from you, Hannah?"

Today, I cut myself off mid-sentence when I saw Neighbor John, but it wasn't because he was sunbathing with Tank. Instead, he was mowing the grass. I said to Heather, "Shit. Neighbor John is mowing. He never mows before I do. Now I have to mow." This is a sad thing because I really do not enjoy mowing. Sure, it's a great opportunity to work on my tan, but after 42* years of mowing (soon to be 43; gosh, I love my birthday!) mowing really no longer has much of an appeal. So that was a sad thing that happened.

Since we're honoring Jack Kerouac and his stream-of-consciousness writing style, allow me to veer away from grass and instead announce that my friend Heather, who was also born on the eighth of the month (albeit December instead of April) and has two Hs in her name (just like I do), and I are going to be doing a joint art show at the Garryowen and opening night will be May 8. That's a Wednesday and the stuff that we're making is quirky and whimsy and all things fun. So maybe go ahead and put that on your calendar.

While walking my dogs, I got to thinking about my new friend Travis who is definitely quirky. Recently, Travis mentioned that when he dies, he'd like to be buried in a wooden box packed with grass clippings (something about nitrogen, I think? I'm not a science person...) and have a fruit tree planted on top of his grass-packed box of corpse so his essence could go into the fruit. Figs, specifically. He wants to have a fig tree planted atop his grass-packed box of corpse. And he will probably give the fig a funny name because he always names his fig trees.

While thinking about Travis's grass-packed box of corpse, I bumped into my neighbors Dave and Darlene and wouldn't you know that Dave wanted to let me know (he was almost apologetic about this) that he weeded for me today. I was like, "Oh my goodness, Dave! Do not apologize! You should never apologize for weeding or edging or doing ANYTHING that eliminates the grass on my lawn." And then I told him about how Neighbor John already mowed and how I now need to mow and we have come full circle... which is possibly what Jack Kerouac would do, but I can't know this for certain because I've never read him... which also brings us full circle.

*In editing this (are you proud of me, Mom?), it occurred to me that I haven't actually been mowing for 42 years. I've been mowing since about the age of 15, when I got hired as a lifeguard at the Lake Heritage Swimming Pool and had to spend 4 hours before the pool opened pushing a mower around the massive property that is now maintained by the maintenance crew that consists of grown men with riding mowers. It literally takes them, like, thirty minutes.

Trivia Recap: 3/21

The Players: Darren, Hannah, Mary, Marc, Ben, Phil(!)

Hint of the Day: Lightning

Opening Category: Golden Girls

Blogger: Darren’s back!

 

Yes, readers, we had close to a full team tonight.  I recovered from the hangover of my wild Pi Day adventure to Washington DC (although I am still thinking about this amazing exhibit at the Renwick  that you only have ten more days to see and I highly recommend!) and Ben came in from his 372-inning baseball game and Phil materialized out of nowhere like a magical genie and Marc handed the scoop over to celebrity ice cream scooper Jimmy Fallon all so that we could join Hannah and Mary for this week’s trivia match to see if we could help them redeem themselves from last week’s bloodbath .

Ben has a new photography technique.  I’m not convinced it is a great one.

As you can tell from the group photo, Hannah has a new shampoo.  She is very excited about it, and made everyone smell her hair and guess what the scent was.  It was rosemary mint.  She wants me to report that “Phil even took two sniffs. After the first sniff he thought it was a waterfall or springtime but Hannah told him it wasn’t and he said ‘Get back over here!’ and gave it a big second sniff.”

But we weren’t there just to discuss haircare products.  There was trivia to play!  The bar was very crowded tonight with lots of new teams and we actually were stuck in a corner at a counter rather than a real table for the first part of the game, which made the pregame conversation and hair-sniffing somewhat awkward but I did realize that Marc was cramming for the Golden Girls question.  I was expecting it to be something about the four main characters or St Olaf or Quentin Tarantino’s television debut  but the question was actually “What was the name of Rose’s boyfriend starting in season five?”  Marc just looked at me and said “Damn….it’s something Highsmith but I’m not sure what the first name was.  I think it was Miles.  Yeah, go with Miles.  I think that’s it!”  I was pretty impressed but when we asked him how sure he was he said, “I’m sure.  I’m sure.  Go one point” which sent me some mixed signals.  But the name was in fact Miles and we got the three points we wagered.  The next question asked for the two state capitals that both have the word ‘city’ in their name and more than 100,000 people and we knew those were the Cities Oklahoma and Salt Lake. 

Then came Three Clues/One Animal, where we get bonus points if we get the animal’s name after the first two clues, which were “This is the national animal of Canada” and “This is the name of a movie starring Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster.”  After listing a bunch of movies with Mel Gibson, Marc came up with The Badger which I thought sounded very familiar so we decided to be bold and go for it rather than wait for the third clue.  We should have waited for the third clue, which was that it was Oregon State’s mascot.  We question whether there is really a difference between badgers and beavers anyways, but I guess there is.  Sigh. 

I’m still not fully convinced this is a real movie.

That was embarrassing, but from there things picked up.  Ben knew about Sega and Mary and Hannah knew that Station 19 is a Grey’s Anatomy spinoff (“Obviously, because it has Bailey’s husband!” they told me, as if I have any idea who Bailey is).  We then aced the audio category by recognizing the musical questions “Where is the love?”, “Do ya think I’m sexy?” and “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” and when I went up to hand in the answer three separate people in the bar said to me “I bet you got that third one, eh?” which makes me think that maybe I talk about REM too much.  But at this point we can all agree that they are the Greatest American Rock Band Of All Time, so really can anyone talk about them too much?

Things continued to go well not only because at this point we got to move to our real table but also because we knew that they signal a new pope with white smoke and that Hertz is a unit of measurement in computer processing.  I recognized the plot of the movie Up in the Air  (although the book is much better, as is often the case) and Ben knew it starred Vera Farmiga, although we pondered how to spell it for awhile and I may have scribbled a little knowing that spelling doesn’t count (in hindsight, if I was sloppier when writing ‘Badger’ maybe we would have gotten those points!).  The final question of the first half was about the hockey team that Martin St Louis played for and who he now coaches.  We know nothing about hockey and Hannah really wanted me to put the Toronto Blue Jays while Mary suggested the St Louis Cardinals, which seemed a little too on the nose. And also isn’t a hockey team.  We took a stab in the dark and got the Canadiens correct but did not come up with the Tampa Bay Lightning.

The halftime sheet was kind of a mess, and not just because I spilled some of my very tasty red pepper and gouda soup on it.  The top half asked us to identify celebrities who had ‘foodie names.’  Sure, we got Kevin Bacon and Fiona Apple and even Harvey Milk, but we thought Ginger Rogers was Shirley Temple and we thought Saffron Burrows was Rebecca Pizza.  The bottom half had us identify what TV show or movie different fictional vehicles had appeared on.  We got most of them but somehow none of us remembered that Mach 5 was from Speed Racer and while Marc knew that Thousand Sunny was from some anime show he couldn’t pull the name of it.  And I can’t even remember it now.  So after halftime we were in sixth place, not doing great but not totally bombing it. 

Go, Speed Racer, Go!

The second half opened up with a Triple 50/50 where we had to say whether the Yen, Euro, and Australian Dollar were each worth more or less than a US Dollar at this moment.  We managed to get all three correct.  The next question was our bonus category, “How’s The Weather?”.  Did we choose this as our bonus because we are weather aficionados?  No, dear readers, we did not.  We chose it because the hint of the day was lightning so Hannah and Mary were sure this would be the answer.  But if you have been paying attention you would know that we already had the Tampa Bay Lightning be the answer to a question.  So in short: we were screwed.  Or at least we thought we were, even after hearing the question which was something like “what weather phenomena is measured using the Beaufort Scale and an anemometer?”  We had no idea and were split between ‘wind speed’ and ‘humidity’ when the team voted 3-2 for wind speed which ended up being the correct answer!  So the only reason we were screwed was because we only wagered one point!

But Darren, you are probably saying, how did you vote 3-2 when there were six of you?  Well, at this point Marc had started talking to the members of the team at the table next to ours and was deep into some conversation so wasn’t really paying attention.  Which wasn’t a big deal for that question, but on the next question we were asked which 30 year old actress/singer/business-person has more Instagram followers than any other North American woman.  We quickly rejected Beyonce and Taylor Swift (because Mary knew her exact age to the minute, and also because she isn’t an actress) and settled on Rihanna which seemed like a good guess.  But shortly after we turned it in Marc rejoined our conversation and said “You knew it was Selena Gomez, right?”  Sigh.  Or in the immortal words of Hannah Meeson:

The 6-4-2 question dealt with the fact that the state of Florida has a lot of minor league baseball teams but only one is a AAA team.  I will admit that I would have guessed Texas but my teammates talked me into going for Florida and we were right.  We did pretty well in the final round.  The first category was Pardon My German and I was in the bathroom while my team correctly spelled Gesundheit, probably because Hannah took four years of German which she told us all several times.

Our bonus category was Shakespeare and luckily the question was something that lots of us knew, as it asked what play was partly set in Birnam Wood.  Mary confidently told me that the answer was Beth, but luckily I doublechecked her work to make sure we actually put Macbeth.  (OK, this didn’t really happen.  But Hannah laughed a lot when I made a joke about it after last week’s Boaty McBoatFace  incident and so I thought I would recreate that here for you all.  You see, those of you who are deep readers of the blog get inside parts of continuity that the more casual readers won’t get.  It’s a lot like the Marvel Cinematic Universe in that way.) 

Another photo Ben took of “The Avengers of Trivia”.  Great job, Ben!

To finish out the game, we were able to correctly name two of the three countries that have legalized recreational marijuana, and even as he left Phil was still questioning if Thailand has really done so based on his additional research.  Or he was planning his next vacation; it’s hard to tell.  We all remembered Billy Dee Williams’s commercials for Colt 45  (which are undoubtedly the second-best malt liquor commercials ever made ) and we knew that Lionel was the first name shared by the co-composer of “We Are The World” and the soccer player who has won eight Ballon d’Or awards, although we had never heard of the famous vibraphone player Lionel Hastings.  Phil was happy that we wagered the points in order 9-7-5-3-1 this round.  Hopefully this pleasure will convince him to come back to play soon, although next week he will be in Las Vegas with a wax statue of Shaquille O’Neal.  And no, I’m not making that up.

Going into the final question, we were still in sixth place but other than the Street Sharks who were running away with it everything was very close.  And Hannah’s math was correct all night, as she wants me to again point out.  The final question was “In 2011, this country became the 11th largest by area in the world and the biggest in its continent.”  Ben knew that was around the time that South Sudan was created as a spinoff of Sudan (that’s what they call it, right?  Or is it a reboot?) and wanted us to put that.  But luckily the team next to us had called it quits and Marc was paying full attention and he is a social studies teacher who knew that Algeria is the largest country in Africa, and probably became largest only after Sudan split!  So we answered Algeria and I think we were the only team who did, because we ended up in second place after a massive comeback!  Congratulations to the Street Sharks who not only beat us thoroughly, but also welcomed a new baby into their team/family this past week.  Congratulations, Kevin and Melissa, and we hope to see Baby [redacted] at trivia soon, although she will count as one of your seven players. 

To give you a heads-up, we aren’t sure what is happening with trivia next week.  Hannah and Marc will be at a concert and Mary is having The Last Supper with her grandparents (which sounds kind of morbid, but she insists is an Easter thing) and a few other people are busy.  Ben and I said we would still try to get a team together, but trivia will be starting right around the time of the Phillies-v-Braves season opener, so one of us will be happy and the other will not.  But stay tuned!

Trivia Recap: 3/14

The Players: Hannah (English teacher), Mary (English teacher), Siri (English teacher), Brock (media marketing specialist who does things with graphic design and maybe some animation as well and often has to travel for work so hopefully he's in town on the weekend of my birthday celebration)

Opening Category: Rock and Roll Hall of Famers (Audio)

Hint of the Day: Fingers

***You may notice that the team was very small tonight. Allow me to explain why:

Darren was eating pie in D.C. As a professor of math, one of Darren's greatest loves is numbers. Therefore, the number 3.14onandonandonandon means something to him. Like, a BIG something. Hence, rather than play trivia with his educated friends, he ventured south to our nation’s capital in order to eat pie with his other educated friends. And pie, they had! Apple, blueberry, lemon custard… The list goes on! In fact, Darren reached out after trivia and shared that the only thing missing from his D.C. pie-eating experience was a creamy scoop of vanilla ice cream. So how very ironic is it that Marc wasn’t at trivia because he was serving ice cream to the masses at Mr. G’s?! It’s true, though! Due to an unfortunate scheduling conflict, Marc was forced to wield his ice cream scoop with his teenage employees instead of spending the evening with his educated friends. He was missed – especially because he’s a knower of things and some of the things we didn’t know tonight might’ve been known by him (i.e., NBA shit). You know who else knows some NBA shit, though?  Ben. But Ben was playing baseball. Always private, the team was therefore incredibly surprised to receive a photograph of him wearing a pair of funny baseball pants around the time we were preparing for the second question of Round Two. In the photograph, Ben is munching upon a caramel apple and wearing a backwards baseball cap, but I’m of course not allowed to share the actual image. Not with you, anyway. I did forward it to Victoria, who is somewhere doing veterinary things. An avid collector of tapeworms, Victoria signed up for a parasitic convention that will go into great detail about hooks, whips, and other wriggly things found in dog/cat intestines.

Round One:

Otis Redding died in a plane crash. Did you know that? We didn’t, but Siri recognized Otis Redding’s voice in the audio clip and so we were off to a strong start! Another thing that was known: Stephen Spielburg directed multiple films in both the Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park franchises. Brock pulled out some scientific equation knowledge before the question was even read and Mary knows some important information about both Judaism and newscasters (because she’s a bit of a news junkie). 

Round Two:

I once told my concert husband Phillip that if I were going to see a show in an arena (I don’t really like arena shows), and if it was going to be the show of someone I don’t actually care about seeing in my life but would enjoy nevertheless, I would choose Pitbull. Obviously, I want all of the artists featured in all of his songs to be on the stage with him… but really, what’s not to like about Pitbull? Here’s something: The fact that Pitbull does not, in fact, sing “Wild Ones.” Nope, that’s Flo Rida, but Mary and I mixed him up with Pitbull and so the team didn’t get the two-point bonus for the second audio clue of the night, A Word in Common. 

Perhaps the best and worst aspect of the evening happened next. Falling under the category of Online Debacles, a clue was read by Adam, a 100-watt bulb went off inside Brock’s brain to light his face with overwhelming enthusiasm, and he knew the answer to be “Boatie McBoatface.” He wrote it down. I wrote it down. Mary almost wrote it down, but missed the “Mc.” So did Brock and I when we proofread her response… which is why we lost those points. The incident has strong ties to an Educated Friends trivia debacle from years past, when Darren mistakenly wrote “Polar Christmas” instead of “Polar Express,” thus costing us many points at the time. Fortunately, we were able to laugh about the error back then and we’re still laughing about it today. 

And speaking of laughter, there was much laughter throughout the evening and not because we were happy about where this particular night of trivia was going. Brock laughed because he is a laugher; you can nearly always find him to be in good cheer. Siri laughed because she said funny things; she is a whiz at one-liners. Mary laughed because I was delirious with exhaustion and not making a lot of sense; she’s also had a rough week at school and needed laughter because it’s rumored to be the best medicine. I laughed because I have a tendency to crack myself up and because my friends are funny. None of us laughed because we were having Fun with Flags or enjoying a category devoted to NBA Players (although we might’ve been laughing had Marc not been preparing banana splits a few blocks away). We did chuckle when Siri shared that “Let your fingers do the walking” was an ad slogan for the Yellow Pages.

Halftime:

I didn’t enjoy the top of this worksheet at all. There were famous people who are famous because they are in movies and do you know what I don’t watch many of? Movies. But Siri and Brock are movie aficionados and so they filled in the answers. We got most of them right, but I unfortunately didn’t check the answers because I wasn’t expecting to know anyone other than Christopher Walken. If I had checked the answers, I might have realized that we had mistakenly listed Grace Slick as the name of some other Grace. I don’t watch movies, but I do love me some Jefferson Airplane, so I likely would have caught that.

The bottom of the halftime sheet was fun because it had to do with Shakespeare and we had three English teachers on the team so… yeah.

Round Three:

I grow hydrangeas and know that the flowers vary in color due to the acidity of the soil. Because of this, we got some points. Siri had Third Eye Blind’s album back in the day and firmly believes that “Semi-Charmed Life” is the worst song on the album. “It’s a good song,” she grants, “but have you heard the rest of the album?” The answer? No, but I’m familiar with the song “Jumper” and, in my opinion, it isn’t as good as “Semi-Charmed Life.”

Here are some other things worth mentioning from this round: Billy Crystal was in a sitcom called Soap, Food Lion is a grocery store and Good Lion is not an animal preserve in Africa, and the Royals do not have barley on their uniforms. Make of that what you will.

6-4-2:

Steve Jobs wears turtlenecks because he doesn’t like bugs. Brock suspected as much early on and I think this has something to do with Brock’s own fear of bugs. Moths, specifically. He has such a fear of moths. In high school, I remember a time when Brock, Phil, and I were hanging out on a warm summer night. We were on Phil’s deck and the light was on, moths swarming around it. Out of nowhere, however, the bulb exploded and the moths startled and flew after Brock. He squealed – terrified and out of sorts – and peeled off his shirt before diving into the pool. I swear he held his breath for three minutes that night, and when he finally emerged from the deep end, he was quaking with fear, shaking with nerves, and blue in the face.

Round Four:

Mary really likes The Crown and Siri really likes British things, which was awesome for the Educated Friends because they knew a lot about Henry VIII. I know all the lyrics to Herman’s Hermits’ song “Henry VIII,” but that wasn’t part of the question. 

A lover of punctuation, Mary also knew that Dr. Pepper officially eliminated the period from its name, and while I am also a lover of punctuation, I refuse to acknowledge this because to write Dr. Pepper without the period looks stupid. Dr Pepper? No, thank you. 

Sidenote: I have never in my whole life tried Dr. Pepper and have no idea what it tastes like.

I don’t feel like talking about U.S. Counties or Five-Letter Words, so I won’t, but I will tell you that the clues for “MOTHER” Knows Best were nonsensical. First, because Adam couldn’t pronounce the words in the clue, and second, because the clue said there were five ingredients and only three were provided. Darren would’ve hated that question because even I, a struggler with numbers, knows the difference between 3 and 5. ️

Final:

Having lost all interest in the game by this point, I think I may have gone to the bathroom. Or maybe I was paying my tab. Or maybe I just didn’t pay attention. Either way, I don’t remember the question or the answer. What I do know is this: next week’s opening category is The Golden Girls.