Trivia Night 7/31/08

With the help of my parents, we fell within a point of a top three finish. That's two weeks in a row we've dropped in at fourth, respectable, but not as good as I expected with my dad playing. He's a smart guy with an incredible ability to retain information. And unlike Breanne and me, he reads the paper and actually follows world news- though there were few newspapery questions this last week.

My parents did help out, though they also constantly second guessed themselves. Anyone who has ever played bar trivia or trivial pursuit or hollered along to Jeopardy! knows that you should just stick with your first instinct. More often than not it's the better one, if not the right one. That was the story of the game for us this last Thursday, as we probably changed 5 or 6 answers from right to wrong.

One round that my dad really helped out in was the picture match up round. Given a list of movies, you had to match up the actor/actress from a long list. My dad rattled these off effortlessly, linking up Jane Russel and other old starlets and stars to films of the 40's and 50's. We missed only 2 of 10, which was actually my fault for claiming to know the male lead in Shakespeare in Love. I did see it in the theatre but I only really remembered Gwenyth Paltrow.

I pulled out some obscure ones in the music round but I also confused Bon Jovi for Guns 'n' Roses, something I can only blame on my poor hearing and high blood alcohol level. I did name Louis Primo and though I recognized Blood, Sweat & Tears, went along with my mom's insistence that it was Three Dog Night. I recognized Midnight Oil immediately as I only had 6 cassettes in the van when I lived in Portland and three of them were the Oil.

We hovered around 4th place the whole night and didn't make up any ground in the last round, which is worth double points. Next week we're going to invite two people we met playing disc golf. Hopefully they're brainy.

Major Trivial Failures of the night

1. Confused Guns'r'Roses with Bon Jovi. Sorry Axl.

2. Failed to identify Oingo Boingo (more of a success than a failure)

3. Drank too much and forgot I had to walk a mile and a half.

4. Drank too much and can't remember any of the questions and so can't even come up with 5 trivial failures.