The Penultimate Pub Quiz

So, I thought that the quiz this week was the last one of the year, but no! The five first place teams are invited back next Tuesday for a special-edition playoff quiz created by Mike D. I'm hoping for the return of Video Round. Cathy thinks that we should at least get a Picture Round. One person in the crowd requested a World Showcase, but was roundly booed. Or wait: Maybe that was just me making all that noise.

The mere mortals are also invited to participate, so I'm thinking of shuffling my travel plans so I'll be up here that night and head to my parents' place on Wednesday. Also, some people will be back from their exciting trips to coal mines (true story!), and might be able to attend.

We could have used the help this week, to be honest. We called ourselves Hasslers of the Hoff and used Round 1 to demonstrate our incompetence at Geography (Specifically: Volcanoes). Cathy helpfully pointed out that geography was essentially one of my minors in college, but I took stuff like the geography of Ohio and . . . I honestly can't remember the topics of any of the other geography classes I took. Which is sad. However, I can confidently announce that none of my classes would have had anything to do with volcanoes, so it is immaterial whether I attended them and/or learned anything of consequence. I did read Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded in one of my book groups a few years back, but that's about it. So, is it really surprising that we only got 4 points? I didn't think so.


This was about when Mike D pointed out that he actually had a new suit on. That's right: They finally sell his size at Baby Gap.* However, he still has on the same shirt. There was quite a lot of fashion talk that night, actually. He kept picking on one table that seemed to be full of people in sweater vests, and he announced to the entire bar that every week Cathy brings shopping bags from Victoria's Secret and Sephora. (Cathy asked him if he wanted a fashion show, and told him later that the only thing she had in the VS bag was some kind of glitter body lotion. I'll let you imagine the look on his face when he heard that. I found it quite amusing, personally.)


At the beginning of Round 2, Beastly Creatures, we were told that anyone who writes down "Mike D" for any or all of these gets negative 5 points. Boo! We racked up 8 points. One question we missed was about twentieth-century England's most famous practitioner of the Dark Arts. My guess was Voldemort, but Cathy joked to Mike D that she was going to write down Ozzy Osbourne. He scoffed, but then she was cheesed after he announced the answer: Alistair Crowley, who was immortalized in song by said Mr. Osbourne. Grr!

When he announced that Round 3 was Television, we thought we would make up some ground. However, when the dust cleared, we had scored only 3 points. In my defense, these were all shows from before I was born or before my mother let me watch anything besides Sesame Street. And yes, I'd heard of all these factoids at some time or another, but I couldn't access any of them on Tuesday night. For example:

• What British sitcom was the basis for Sanford and Son?
  
• Who played Bat Masterson?
  
• When Flip Wilson dressed up in drag, what was the character's name?
  
• What guitarist appeared on the Smothers Brothers show with a goldfish in his guitar? (Hint: He also recorded "Classical Gas.")
  
• What relation was Maude to Archie Bunker?

So, we had 15 points and were in the middle of the pack at halftime. There were a lot of teams playing — 17, I think — but several of them skipped out at halftime. We probably should have thought about doing the same.

We managed to get 6 points in Round 4, Sports, in spite of ourselves. He would say a word, and we had to write down the sport associated with it. I would like to point out that Cathy once played organized soccer, and yet she didn't recognize "striker" as a term related to said sport. And she has a Lake Erie Monsters ticket package and didn't recognize "two line offside" as a hockey term.

What's that? I'm being petty, and on top of that nobody cares? Fine. Moving on to our best round of the night: Drugs. After cautioning us that this was not Shout Out an STD night, Mike D named a drug and we had to write down what you use it for (if you're following the doctor's orders). Cathy the hypochondriac breezed through these (9 points!), giving me time to gaze upward and notice the horse orgy on the ceiling. Seriously! Cathy snapped a photo with her cell phone. I know the image quality is not that great, but tell me this doesn't look like some kind of crazy equine 69:

Ahem. After all the excitement of trying to decipher exactly what is going on in that piece of artwork, and then discussing who on earth would even think of putting that on the ceiling, we weren't really in the mood for the All Irish Round 6. So, I heartily seconded Cathy's suggestion to write down Guinness for everything. Oh, except when she wrote down Ulysses, because we recognized the first line from that. And the time she wrote down Winston Churchill, because he probably said something about Ireland during World War II. Other than that: Guinness, Fort Guinness, Guinessland, Alec Guinness . . . you get the idea. That gave us plenty of time to chat. According to Cathy's sources, some bar in West Park bought a lot of the furnishings from Brendan's and hired a few of the bartenders. Maybe one day I'll take a field trip there and see what/who I recognize.

After rocking out to a little LCD Soundsystem ("Daft Punk Is Playing at My House" — the only song I like) and handing out a few more raffle prizes (a book about being a Browns fan, another book about the history of WMMS; a few Miller Lite t-shirts; some Guinness beer coozies; etc.), it was time for the moment of truth. Bonjour Kitty was the undefeated loser champion, coming in dead last each week. We were in 9th place, only 16.1 points out of first. Yay, us. Except: Not. Although, since the prize packs were kind of lame (Santa hats? Really? Christmas ornaments with leprechauns on them? Bleh.) it's really just as well. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Anyhow, I'm looking forward to the Mike D quiz next week. I probably won't post much of anything about it, though, because I'm not going to be sitting at a desk for 8 hours with hardly anything else to do on Wednesday-Thursday-Friday. I'm so looking forward to that!

*I can't take credit for this slam. Someone else called it out, he repeated it, and I wrote it down.