Things You Never Knew About St. Cloud

What can I say... winning is more fun than losing.

This weekend was the annual KVSC trivia contest out of St. Cloud, Minnesota, and as I have done before, I played remotely for Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women. We placed 5th this year, and though you'd say out of 78 teams that that's not bad, it wasn't really so great for us.

I don't know whether "feeling" fairly early on that we were going to lose took some of the wind out of my sails, but for whatever reason, I didn't enjoy myself as much this time around. The questions seemed a lot harder, and there weren't as many that were as memorable as years past, or that led to particularly fun discoveries on odd corners of the internet. (Though one question did send me scrambling to play a particular song on Guitar Hero for an answer at 1:00 in the morning.)

The company was good, in any case.

A Trivial Complaint

Most of you readers will know that I regularly go to a "trivia night" at a local bar/restaurant every Thursday night. This is an event held live, there in the place -- not to be confused with the NTN trivia that you can find in a lot of places.

But this place actually has that running too. So, since the pace of the live game is typically very slow (you get "one song" -- something around 5 minutes -- to answer any given question), a lot of us at our table play the NTN game at the same time.

NTN always runs the same types of games at the same time every week. They haven't changed for years and years, I think. Until about a month or two ago. Now, smack in the middle of the time we're there is this hideously awful and unfun new game called "Blur." It's nothing but celebrity gossip trivia from earlier in the current week.

I don't give a rat's ass what "Li-Lo" or Britney has done this week. (But one or both of them are in there for some damn thing every week.) I don't know most of the answers. On those rare occasions I do know one of the answers, I feel a deep chasm of shame and self-loathing open up inside.

Sure, I could choose just not to play, but it's on every other TV in the joint. You can't help but look up and see it, especially after years of being conditioned to look up at the TVs to follow the NTN game.

Man, do I hate those guys at NTN now.

Thinking of You

I have a Tale From Trivia from tonight, but not about the trivia itself.

At one point, one of the two regular trivia emcees came over to our table. She was asking about one of our players who had shown up late. The weird part? She came straight from the bathroom, walked up to him, and said: "This may sound a little strange, but I was just thinking about you in there."

A little strange?

Oh, she tried to backpedal from/salvage the odd comment a bit by saying, "I'd just noticed you weren't here yet when I glanced over earlier, and I wondered if you were coming." Or at least, she said something like that, I think. My mind was pretty well frozen back at "I was thinking of you in the bathroom." Oh so very many ways to go with that.

• You're a lot like running water, so thinking of you was helpful.
  
• I was wondering if you were doing the same thing I was at that moment.
  
• I was doing something unusual in the bathroom, and it reminded me of you.
  
• I looked down in the bowl, and what I saw made me think of you.
  

I'm sure you can add your own to the list. Or perhaps you can think of an appropriate response to actually give, because all we had was "uh... um... Thank? You?"

sHot iN tHe dArk

A very humorous anecdote came from trivia this past Thursday. I've hesitated to tell it, because I can't quite remember all of the details of the question involved. I've decided they aren't really important to the story.

We were sucking it hard this week. Worst showing in quite some time. Going into the final question, we were in something like 7th place out of 9 teams. No chance of winning. So we decided that we were going to wager the maximum allowable 20 points on the final question, just to see if we could make anything happen.

Well, the final category was basketball. Ugh. Sports is very much the weak subject of our trivia team. And basketball is basically the sport we hold in contempt above (below?) all the others. My brother-in-law said he might know a little on the matter, so we immediately resolved to just go with whatever answer he wanted for our guess.

The question was (and here's the part where the details are sketchy) something like "rank these NBA players from least to most points scored in 2003: Carmello Anthony, Tracy McGrady, Kevin Garnett, and Paul Pierce." (I'm not even sure I have all the players right, so don't bother trying to fact check this.)

So, as my brother-in-law was working away on a legitimate attempt at an answer, I decided I'd scribble a whimsical one of my own. I decided to put the players in alphabetical order (Anthony, Garnett, McGrady, Pierce). Except that just as I was finishing, he finalized his answer, and it happened to be the same as I'd come up with. Well, that was going to blow my entire "see, here's what I'm guessing" reveal, so I decided I had to come up with something else.

Fine, I thought. I'll alphabetize them by the second letter of their last name. I wrote out "Garnett, McGrady, Pierce, Anthony" and showed it to everyone. "Here's my guess." Not that I was ever serious about going with it. We went with my brother-in-law, who with his virtually non-existent basketball knowledge had infinitely more info on the topic than the rest of us.

They read the answers... and it matched my "second letter" system. We'd have lost even if we had somehow strangely decided to go with my guess, but we all got a huge laugh out of it.

And now I know what to do next time I'm in doubt about how to arrange four items.

Avast! There Be Trivia Here!

Shirley Pifko of Stuckey Bowl has been having trouble concentrating since who died?

Where did Jonathan Harker conduct research before departing for Transylvania?

What 1984 film shares the title of one of Atari's earliest games?

What geographical connection do the following numbers have: 10 20 21 25 27 31 42 49 57 60 91 101 109?

These are just a small sample of the over 450 questions served up in 2006's annual KVSC trivia contest. (This year, pirate themed.) Thanks to a particular friend, I was drawn years ago into this small college radio station's yearly salute to Google.com.

Once again, I assisted the team Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women with 50 hours of manic net surfing, trying to answer demonically obscure questions. Once again, we managed to take first place and win it all.

In the past, I took part in this trivia extravaganza in the same house as a number of other close friends. Since the last contest, we've been scattered literally to opposite coasts and several places in between. Truthfully, I didn't expect this year to be very much fun without them. And in fact, it wasn't quite as magical. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that I did still enjoy myself quite a bit. Certainly enough to take part once again this time next year.

But after the exhausting times we've just gone through in the last two days, I can't say I'm quite "looking forward to it" just yet. Once a year is probably just about right.

And, to save you the crazy searching we ourselves went through, the answers to the above are: Buddy Ebsen. The British Museum. Bachelor Party. They are a complete list of all elements on the periodic table with abbreviations that match the postal code of a US state.

Whipped Into a Drunken Stupor

It's been a while since I've brought you a "tale of trivia night," or even a good question that came up. This week, I have the former.

Every time they ask a question, you have "one song" of time to turn in your answer. At some point about halfway through the night, the "one song" for a particular question was Devo's "Whip It." The bar seemed a little more crowded than usual, and many of the patrons seemed far more drunk than usual. The evidence? The team a few tables over turned the thing into a total Cab Calloway-style "call and answer" song. And half the bar took up the cry.

"When a problem comes along..."

"YOU MUST WHIP IT!"

"Before the cream sits out too long..."

"YOU MUST WHIP IT!"

It was both disturbing and can't-breathe-hysterical at the same moment. Even funnier than the next couple of songs that came on, Aha's "Take On Me" and Tom Petty's "Won't Back Down." (The latter was just not silly enough to compete with Devo, despite the Tom Petty impersonations; the former just hurt your ears at the end of each chorus.)

A Presidential Tale

This is a story with anguish and triumph. This is the story of The American President. I mean the movie, starring Michael Douglas and Annette Bening.

I've been a fan of this movie for a long time. It's #76 on my top 100 list. It's sort of a "prologue" to The West Wing TV series, in that it was written by Aaron Sorkin, and featured a few of the same cast members (Martin Sheen and Joshua Malina), albeit in different roles.

It's a movie that, strangely, I did not own on DVD. I was at the store Tuesday night and noticed it on the shelf for $10. I decided to fill that rather signifcant hole in my collection, and picked it up.

On the drive home, I'm sort of wondering to myself, was there ever actually an unmarried president of the United States? I got home and Googled that, and came up with the answer: yes. One. (The answer I'll give in a moment. For now, you can think on this as a bit of trivia and see how you do.)

The next day, I'm browsing some of the web sites I usually frequent. I'm talking literally the next day. And I came across an announcement that a new edition of The American President is due on DVD in April.

Dammit! My $10 was spent just 24 hours too soon. I was still stinging a bit from this on the next night as I attended the weekly Thursday night trivia with my friends.

We get about halfway through the game, when up comes a history question: "In 1812, as the White House was burning, who saved the presidential potrait of George Washington from the fire?"

We came up with the right answer rather quickly: Dolly Madison. After we'd run that up, we had a little time waiting for the next question. So I decided to quiz the table: "Do you know which president is the only one who wasn't married?"

One person in our group in particular went to the trouble of learning all the presidents not long ago. She noticed that presidential trivia was coming up fairly frequently, and so committed the order to memory, along with a few scattered factoids such as "assassinations," "died in office," "political party affiliation," and so forth. But even she didn't know this one.

"James Buchanan," I informed them. And on we went with the trivia.

And then, the second-to-last question of the evening came up. Worth big points. The trivia master spoke over the microphone:

"The category is U.S. Presidents."

The aforementioned presidential trivia junkie smiled.

"Who is the only unmarried U.S. President?"

And we all bust up laughing. We can hardly believe the coincidence. But it doesn't keep us from hastily scribbling Buchanan and running it up.

It turned out that our team was the only team to come up with the right answer. That, combined with a Reservoir Dogs-themed final question that we aced, gave us the win. The prize, as always, $25 off your bill.

So, I'm out $10 for buying The American President too soon (assuming the new version seems sufficiently loaded for me to want it), but the group is up $25 because the fact I'd bought it is the only reason I'd happened to look up this particular bit of trivia during the week.

Crazy, huh?

Oh... as a bonus... for those of you who are fans and just dying to know the Reservoir Dogs question: Which actors played the characters of Mr. Pink, Mr. White, Mr. Brown, and Mr. Blonde? Answers here.

Trivial Concerns

My Thursday night trivia crowd has been going to a new venue for the last month or so. The atmosphere is better, the food is far better, and we just generally seem to have a better time.

But one complaint I must make is the difficulty of questions within certain categories. It seems to me that the "hard questions" in certain categories are much easier than the "easy questions" in others. Some of this you could chalk up to the particular strengths of our group, of course, but I think this goes much deeper than that.

For example, last week, you'd net 4 points for naming the coach for whom the NBA Coach of the Year award is named. This answer to this supposedly middle of the road question was Red Auerbach, which got enough "who?" stares around the bar that I got the feeling this was a far more difficult question that the score would suggest.

By contrast, tonight's penultimate question, worth 10 points, asked which of Shakespeare's plays contains the line "something is rotten in the state of Denmark."

Okay, seriously?

I'll admit, Shakespeare would be "one of our categories," and is likely more difficult for the average bar patron than a basketball question. But seriously, 10 points for Hamlet? It seems to me if you just said to somebody, "name any one play by Shakespeare," you're gonna get Hamlet more than half the time. (You'd probably get Romeo and Juliet from every other non-theater geek that could name any at all.)

My point is, you could easily know almost nothing about Shakespeare and pull Hamlet out of your ass for 10 points. But where is someone who knows nothing about basketball going to pull Red Auerbach for 4 points? There's just a total lack of parity in the scoring here, if you ask me.

I suppose I should be grateful that some of the questions we know nothing about are worth less -- it's fewer points for us to miss out on. Still, I feel more strongly that one of the most valuable questions in the game should require at least a little bit of special knowledge in the category.

Next week, "what is the name of the Vulcan science officer played by Leonard Nimoy on Star Trek?" (20 points.)

The week after, "name the only U.S. state that starts with the letter F." (14 points.)

Watch Your Tongue

Here's a bar trivia question from a few weeks ago to fill in on a night when I don't have much else to talk about.

Place these languages in order according to which is spoken by the highest number of people as their primary lanugage (starting with most prevalent): Hindustani, English, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish.

Answers inside, as usual.

A Special Saturday Edition of Trivia

This afternoon was the bar trivia tournament finals 10 weeks in the making. Teams have been accumulating points over the last two-and-a-half months to become eligible for the big event that took place this afternoon. (We'd amassed enough points for a lock some time ago.) The first place team won $250 cash.

And it was us. Happy day! We actually won by a pretty healthy margin, and had a good time in the process, so a nice Saturday all around.

The questions were a bit more difficult than normal today, as you'd expect. Many more questions in "multiple parts" than usual, and with more parts than usual. Take, for example, this final question:

Please give the exact names (as printed on the board) of the 11 body parts you can remove while playing the original version of the game Operation.

Our team of nine players managed 9 of the 11. See how you manage by checking the comments.

Here's the Pitch

Here's another fun moment from Trivia Night this past week. The question comes:

"At a full octave above a flute, what small instrument is the highest-pitched woodwind?"

Almost immediately, a quick-witted person in the bar shouts out: "My ex-girlfriend!"

The real and not at all funny answer is the piccolo, by the way.

I'm Loathin' It

Our team won the weekly bar trivia tonight, but it was no thanks to our dismal performance on the final question. We answered only one of the four parts correctly. Try your luck.

Put these four items from McDonald's in order by the year they were first introduced:

Happy Meal
Chicken McNuggets
Filet-O-Fish
Quarter Pounder

Answers inside the comments, as per usual. I can tell you these all harken back to the days when McDonald's "food" always came in those styrofoam boxes... blue for the Filet-O-Fish, for example. Then there was the "deluxe double-wide trailer" of McDonald's food in styrofoam: the McD.L.T. Some crap about keeping the hot side hot and the cold side cold, foisted on the public like some bizarre Thermos for your hamburger. Hot Cakes still come in styrofoam, of course.

Man, it's just sad I know all this stuff about McDonald's. Sadder still that even all this useless knowledge was only good enough to get one out of four answers correct.

Hardball

At trivia tonight, we were first place going into the final question. But the subject was sports, our major weakness. Specifically, World Series. Ugh. As a result, we failed to even place in the top three.

So, if you know a "sports guy" who lives in the Denver metro area that you could recommend, our team would be very grateful.

In the meantime, see if you could have helped us answer this: "Name four of the five teams besides the New York Yankees that won the World Series in the 1990s."

Click into the comments for the answers.

This Week's Trivia

We missed first place by 2 points in tonight's trivia. Any one of the three questions we missed along the way would have netted us enough to come out on top. See if you could have helped, had you been there. (Remember, no research -- you have to answer these right there in your "virtual bar," in the time it takes to play one "virtual song.")

1) Which "infantile" singer or band performed the 1999 song "Bills, Bills, Bills?"

2) According to Genesis, on which day did God create the sun, moon, and stars?

And then there was the final, 4-part question, in which we only answered three of the four correctly:

3) Name four of the five countries to be most visited by tourists in 2003.

Click into the comments for the answers.

Why'd It Have To Be Snakes?

You'll be pleased to know that unlike last week, there was no major altercation at trivia night this week. Apparently, there was someone playing on team PT-21 last week that isn't a normal part of their group and he was the instigator of all the ruckus, the one I got snarky with. Whatever.

We had a pretty good lead going into the final question, but our Quentin Tarantino knowledge failed us, and we ended up in second place. See if you being there could have helped us out.

Match these "snake names" to the actors who played them in Kill Bill, Volumes I and II:

Black Mamba
Cottonmouth
Copperhead
Sidewinder

Lucy Liu
Uma Thurman
Michael Madsen
Vivica A. Fox

Once you've made your decisions, click here for the answers.

We mixed up the two "C"s.

Trivia Tussle

The French have a wonderful phrase, "l'esprit de l'escalier." It's the sensation of thinking of the perfect comeback too late after the fact. Tonight, I experienced the thrilling rush of the opposite feeling -- having the right comeback leap immediately into your brain, and saying it.

I also came as close as I ever have to getting into a bar fight.

Right about now, those of you who know me are maybe thinking you've somehow found your way to the wrong blog. But let me make it clear, I wasn't really all that close to getting in a fight -- just as close as I've come. Mostly, the significance comes from the fact that I just don't go to bars that often.

Thursday night is my gang's weekly trivia night, as regular readers of this blog know by now. Our team, named Unprepared, usually places in the top three. For reasons dating back to before I was a regular part of the trivia team, we have a bit of a rivalry with another regular team named PT-21. We usually trounce them.

But in the last week or two, they've been suddenly been placing very high in the standings. No new people in their team or anything -- they just managed to have a nearly perfect game last week, and after two out of three rounds this week, they again had missed only one question.

Well, after the round two standings were announced, we got a little bit snotty. And PT-21 was sitting right at the bar, near the woman reading the questions and scoring the answers. Our team has a bit of a history of writing joke messages to the question readers on the answer slips we hand in, so impulsively (but rather jokingly) we wrote on the bottom of our first round three answer: "How's the cheating going, PT-21?"

Two minutes later: pandemonium. The members of their team are getting into a major argument with the question reader. On the one hand, we're all thinking, "oh crap; we were just playing around, we didn't mean for this poor woman to start getting yelled at." But on the other hand, we're all thinking, "how the hell do you know what we wrote on our slip of paper?" Aren't they basically proving our point?

Well, in the two minutes before that kerfuffle broke out, we'd already written similar barbs on the bottoms of our next two answers, ready to hand in. And we only had a limited number of Post-It Notes, so we kind of had to go ahead and use them.

So in goes our next answer, and the arguing intensifies, and now the manager gets involved. Meanwhile, we're sitting there, letting one of the employees run our answers up to the bar from our table (as per usual). The arguement crescendoes, and a few moments later, team PT-21 moves away from the bar to a table on the other side of the room. But for the remainder of the round, they appear to take turns going up one at a time to renew their yelling with the manager.

Our two-handed feeling intensifies. One the one hand, "Man, these employees really don't deserve to be taking abuse like this!" But on the other, "Why would these people be getting so worked up over something so minor unless in fact they were cheating?"

A few more questions pass, and now the guy that had been coming around collecting answers all night and running them to the bar stops doing so. I have to go to the bathroom anyway, so I grab our answer for the current question and run it up to the bar myself.

A member of PT-21 is there, and starts laying into me. "Why do you have to be so immature, writing stupid notes about us like that?!"

Briefly, I think about saying something snide, but I decide this is so far beyond "not worth it." I say, as gently as possible, "Look, man, I just don't want to get into it," and turn away.

But he steps after me and says, "Hey, come back here and be a man! Why are you walking away from me?!"

"Cause I have to go the bathroom. You want to follow me in there and watch me be a man?"

I have no idea where it came from, or what pushed me to say it. It was just there instantly. And so perfect, I truly had little choice but to say it. I mean, how much would I have hated myself later if I hadn't said it?

Anyway, I turned away again and went to the bathroom. I was not followed.

A minute later, coming back to my group's table, I was still five steps away when they giddily start asking me, "what was that?!"

So I told them the story, culminating my witty rejoinder. One of the group was already cackling as I got to it. She says, "I thought it was something like that. I could kind of read your lips!"

Round three concluded, and somehow, mysteriously, PT-21 had only managed to collect half the points available after moving away from the bar. Now again, we were partly joking when we wrote what we did -- and yet, here they were, proving our point in yet another way!

The final question came, which we did alright on, and we ending up winning the trivia for the night, and $40 off our bill. When the manager came over to comp that for us, we apologized profusely for the trouble we caused. She assured us she knew we were being playful, and that hey, "testosterone and alcohol mixing -- I deal with this sort of thing all the time." Still, we told her we were very sorry to put her in that situation one more time. We also tipped the question reader and question runner for their trouble.

Hopefully, next week will go more smoothly. Which means maybe we won't change our team name to "PT-21 Cheats" or "PT-42 -- Twice the Team They Are," as we were considering early during that third round.

This Week's Trivia

We won this week's trivia contest by 1 point. Both our team and the 2nd place team aced the 4-part final question, which also happened to be the most interesting piece of trivia this time out. The question:

There are 6 U.S. state capitols whose names end in a letter than no other state capitol name ends in. For example, Frankfort, Kentucky, ends in a "t," as no other state capitol does. Name any 4 of the other 5 state capitols.

We hammered this one out by brute force, naming states alphabetically and fishing for someone at the table who could produce the capitol. (I've really got to learn that song Wakko did on The Animaniacs.) Keeping track of the names on a napkin, we found all 5 answers. We were briefly deceived by Juneau, Alaska, until we arrived at Honolulu, Hawaii. (Those non-contiguous states have to stick together, I guess.)

Anyway, the answers: Phoenix, St. Paul, Salem, Raleigh, and Sacremento.

No Fascinating Trivia This Week

I don't have any terribly insightful knowledge picked up from this week's trivia. The questions we missed were either "didn't know it; wasn't interesting" or "couldn't think of the answers in time."

For example, one question was "which three teams in the NBA have exactly seven letters in both parts of their name (city and mascot)?" We were able to get two in time -- one being a gimme, as they were on the TV at the time. The third we came up blank on.

Did you get it? It was the Detroit Pistons, the Houston Rockets, and the Toronto Raptors.

Trivia Replay

Thanks to the annual KVSC Trivia contest, I was able to pull an answer out of nowhere in this week's bar trivia. It was for the highest-valued question outside of the final question, too. The question in question:

"What living room item was first introduced in the late 1950s with the name Lazy Bones?"

While everyone else in the bar was writing down "recliner," I remembered this same question coming up during "the big trivia weekend" (though I can't recall if it was this year or last year). I correctly told my team to write down "remote control," and we were the only team to get it right.

Actually, in the last third of the game, our team came on strong, and the questions being asked were right up our alley:

Alphabetically, what squares on a Monopoly board are first and last?

Place these four cable networks in the order they debuted, starting with the earliest: The Discovery Channel, Nickelodeon, The History Channel, and Lifetime.

(Answers: Atlantic Avenue and Water Works; Nickelodeon, Lifetime, Discovery, History.)

We were on fire tonight, and won by a very healthy margin. Ah... good times.

This Week's Trivia Factoid

This week's "Hmmm" bit of trivia courtesy of the bar: "What race runs 1,036 miles in even-numbered years and 1,131 in odd-numbered years?"

The answer, as we correctly guessed, is the Iditarod. The race runs from Anchorage to Nome, and alternately is run north-to-south and south-to-north, along slightly different routes, hence the different lengths.