Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Hanging Round in Bars

I might be spending every Wednesday evening for the foreseeable future ensconced in Peter’s 19th Hole, a golf-themed bar with nine TVs (count ‘em) and a 6-foot-tall papier mache 1920s-era golfer clad in knickers and round spectacles. He’s chained to the bar to prevent anyone from sneaking out with him. Doesn’t exactly sound like my kind of place, does it? What could the draw possibly be?

Trivia! As longtime readers may remember I once worked at Encyclopaedia Britannica, so wouldn’t it be a given that I’d be good at trivia? Well, um, no. I absolutely suckomucho at Trivial Pursuit. I always seem to know the answers to other people’s questions but never the ones I draw.

Fortunately, Trivia Night at Peter’s is not set up like Trivial Pursuit. I got to work with a team of three smarty-pants friends who fortunately knew a lot more about sports, movies, and contemporary music than I did. But since it’s my blog, I must toot my horn just a tiny little bit and say that when the Trivia Maven passed around a model skeleton and requested that we identify specific bones (including the iliac crest and the zygomatic arch), I kicked ass—much to my surprise.

We came in second out of a field of eight or nine (I think), which sounds pretty good, but to be fair I should say that the team that came in first was not a team of four brains (like ours) but a single solitary guy. In other words—one brain. WTF?!

I know exactly why this trivia contest is so appealing to me. It goes back to my childhood during which I was forced to play one dumbass sport after another (kickball, softball, volleyball, basketball, field hockey) and came out every time an utter failure and embarrassment to my team, a fact which my teammates (who had chosen me last) were always very vocal about pointing out.

So, yeah, it’s refreshing after all these years to discover a competitive endeavor that I’m reasonably good at. What would be even better, of course, is if I could dredge up a kid like Joe Knaack from 6th grade from whatever suburban mall he happens to be working at as a janitor and go head to head with him at trivia.

What Knaack? You didn’t know that Ikebana is Japanese flower arranging? What kind of a retard jag-off loser are you? All this would be screamed at the top of my lungs so that Knaack would be sure not to misunderstand what a terrible handicap he was to the team. Yes. I have issues and damage and festering psychological wounds.

Anyway, I’ll definitely be going back next week, and I’ll be taking B who is a movie trivia champeen from way back. He’ll definitely be an asset to the team. I want to win!

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