From First to Worst

Can we just pretend that the last half of pub quiz never happened?

It started off so well: Cathy and I teamed up with Mike D's parents and assorted librarians to totally rock the opening rounds. I displayed my sadly encyclopedic knowledge of TV shows by getting a majority of the first-round questions and correctly identifying most of the kids' shows depicted in the picture round. On top of that, we managed to get a perfect score on the color round and not disgrace ourselves too badly in whatever the other category was.

So, I knew we were in good shape, but imagine our shock and delight — to say nothing of the disbelief and dismay expressed by everyone else in the place — when we discovered that we were in first place by two points at halftime. Sigh. It was glorious.

Our joy was short-lived, however, because we totally bit it on useless knowledge, "sports," the video round, and the missing link. Garfing up the missing link was a particularly bitter pill to swallow; if we had gotten more than four of the questions right, I probably would have figured out that they were all titles of Beatles songs. But noooo, someone has to ask about stoopid Josh Hartnett movies about vampires in Alaska and Adam Carolla roles in crummy "adult" cartoon shows from the mid-two-thousandsies. Ugh.

However, since the actual last-place teams had vacated the premises by the time the final scores were announced — to be fair, it was getting late and there were three tie-breaker rounds to determine the top-ranking teams — we were in the running for the traditional last-place prize of instant lottery tickets.

We had to have another tie-breaker round, though, to determine the last-place "winner," and I was the only person left from my team. However, the other team was the Jellybrains, and the question was about who wrote "Nothing Compares 2 U," so I took home the tickets, a case of candy canes, and a The Expendables tattoo (shown below). Awesome! Every month I say we should answer everything wrong and take home the last-place prize, but this was the first time I actually did it. So, you know, 2011 is off to a great start!