Trivia Earth

Monday I attended trivia night again. Now that it is Daylight Savings Time there was plenty of daylight as I walked to the bar holding the trivia contests. With our recent warm (near 50 F) temperatures the snow is rapidly melting and I had step around or hop over large water puddles on the roads and sidewalks on my way to the bar. It is feeling more like Spring.

Rod didn't attend. I believe he is busy remodeling his downstairs bathroom. It was just Alan and I for our team.

Alan and I did respectable for only two people on a team. In the first contest we started out well as we only had 1 of the first 10 questions wrong. But it went downhill as we ended up with a score of only 13 of 20 correct. That was good enough for the middle of the pack. First place was a tie between the lawyers/judges team and a team of women. This women team numbered three this night instead of the two who won last week.

The tiebreaker question was:

"In what year was the first photo taken of Earth from space?"

In my mind I was thinking of the famous photo showing the entire view of Earth. "The Blue Marble". I thought the photo was taken in 1967 before man landed on the moon when NASA had one of their spaceflights travel away from Earth and circle the moon. I was wrong in two ways. This photograph was taken in 1972. It didn't matter - I was not part of the tie breaker question.

According to Ed (the host) the correct answer was 1959. Huh? I researched the question on the internet and found that even 1959 is wrong. That was the first photo of the far side of the moon. Apparently the first photo of Earth was taken in 1946 from a V2 missile at an altitude of 65 miles.

The women team won beating the lawyers/judges team as the lawyers/judges guessed 1968 and the women guessed 1962. Hooray.

Alan and I did better in the second trivia contest as we got 16 correct. That was good enough for third place as the winning team had 19 correct. The lawyers/judges team was in second place and were shut out for once. The team that won was a team that didn't win often so people felt good about that.

One of the question we got wrong:

"Who piloted the 'Flying Laboratory'?"

Amelia Earhart. She was delighted when Purdue University, where she had served as aviation consultant and counselor on careers for women since 1935, presented her with a Lockheed Electra so advanced she dubbed it "the flying laboratory." Now she could fulfill her ambition to fly around the world.

Another wrong answer:

"Who was John Reid's secret identity in the comics and on TV?"

The Lone Ranger. We had guessed the Green Hornet.

The mystery bags for correctly answering the 'quarters' questions were pretty lame as usual. I didn't pay attention to half the prizes when people opened the bags and announced what they had gotten. T-shirts, padlocks, glue, altoids, etc.

Initially people weren't smoking too much as the smoke in the bar was tolerable. However by the end of the second contest more people were smoking away. Must have been the stress of the second contest, else they could last any longer without a cigarette.

Mom's house is being remodeled to make it more handicap accessible so I returned home right after the trivia contests were over in order to apply a second coat of stain to one of the new doors.