Our team this night was: Darrel, Mona, Dave, Marvin, Jeff's wife Carla, and I. I think Carla is her name. I knew it last night, but this morning I am not so sure. Jeff was still at work and he never arrived until the contests were over.
The bar crowd was not as large this evening. There were fewer teams, and most of the teams were larger than usual except for two powerhouse teams: the lawyer/judge team and the team with the guy from Hawaii. Their teams were at half strength and as a consequence did not do well this night.
I got a seat looking out over much of the bar and the pool tables at the far end. Hardly anyone was playing pool this night though there was an occasional attractive woman playing a game or two during the night.
Trivia night starts out with a quarters question, then goes into the first written answer contest. Even though Ed tells people this is the written round and not to shout out the answers, a drunk 20-something guy sitting at the bar yelled out "Crust" to the first question: "What is the earth's outer layer called?"
Everyone playing gave the drunk dirt looks, but being a drunk it didn't seem to register, even after Ed told him not to shout out the answers. The drunk then shouted "Jewels" to the second question which was not an answer or anything close to the correct answer being a whale's mouth. When challenged the drunk claimed he was calling the bartender's name. Nope. The bar owner came over and after letting the drunk finish his drink had him leave.
Out team did not do well in either contest this night. We finished with 12 and 13 correct in each contest. The 13 was good enough for 3rd place but the winning team had 18 right. Our team was struggling. Even Marvin who is our old cowboys and westerns and 1950s TV shows expert struggled.
For some reason Ed included math questions. "What is the decimal representation of 6/8?" Answer: .75 What kind of trivia question is this?
For the question, "What is the name for 1 followed by 100 zeros?" The team didn't believe my answer of googol and wanted to go with gazillion, bazillion, trillion, or some such imaginary number from childhood. Therefore we got this answer wrong.
Darrel was positive he knew the name of the mechanical shark used to film Jaws, but he couldn't remember it. He spent the contest agonizing over his inability to remember. I wasn't positive but "Bruce" came to mind as I had heard the answer some years ago. I mentioned it but Darrel sitting near me was so focused on remembering what he forgot that he didn't hear me, and other than Marvin sitting on my other side, no one else apparently had heard me as they ended up writing down "Joe" just to write down something.
The people writing the answers were at the other end of the table and couldn't hear me well and that was part of our problem. For the question, "Which acting team first appeared together in the movie, ''Woman of the Year'?", I knew it was Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. I told Dave that. Later I learned he had heard Spencer Tracy but not Katherine Hepburn and therefore wrote down Spencer and Tracy.
Oh well.
I found that handling the quarters bucket changed in how I remembered those answers. Because I would repeat each person's answer loudly so the audience could hear, when I sat down after the correct answer was given I found I forgot which was the correct answer as all the answers given were jumbled in my head.
I would stand in front of the room as Ed would ask the question. For most of the questions there was a pause with no one raising their hand as people pondered the answer. Usually the guesses started slow until people got on a train of thought and started to give variants of the previous guesses.
Sometimes people decided to be silly and try to top the previous silly answer. For the question, "What happened when a missile fell in Cuba?", when the answers of cold war, Cuban Missile Crisis, and similar answers were wrong, the answers turned to Castro shaving his beard, the Cubans siphoning the gas from the missile, and other silly answers. Often I would have people repeat their guess to me as they were long and I wanted to make sure I used their phrasing and not paraphrase it myself. Ironically the correct answer was silly. The missile killed a cow.
People usually were getting the quarters questions correct pretty fast and by the end of the night the bucket maybe only had about $10 in it.
For handling the bucket I got tokens for two free drinks which I used on Mike's Hard Cranberry Lemonade. Even after last week's BL Lime beer - which was ok, I still do not like the taste of beer.After the contests were over Ed stopped by our table and we learned that Al, having had surgery on his prostate, was out of the hospital and back home, and that Rod had finished remodeling his shower.
While the trivia contests didn't seem like they had gone by fast, they were done by 8:30 pm. Many teams left right afterwards, else drifted out soon after. We hung around talking about this and that for almost a couple more hours before I left for the night. I learned about Darrel's current job landscaping and mowing using a huge Jacobson $46,000 mower. Mona graduated from college and is now looking for work. And various other topics.
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