Today, my trivia team and I will be playing in our sixteenth Sporcle Live “finals.” Our first finals was in August, 2012 at the Majestic Theater in Detroit. Other places we’ve played in Sporcle championship games include CJ’s Brewing Co. in Plymouth (several tournaments), some place with a golf-inspired name in Livonia (I was not present at this game, though my team still played), Buffalo Wild Wings in Ann Arbor, 59 West Banquet Center (several tournaments), and The Riv in East Lansing.

Today, we’ll be playing at CJ’s again, and I’m very excited about that! It’s only about 20 minutes from my house, for one! For the past three years, we’ve made some “hauls” to get to finals games. Driving to 59 West usually took about 40-45 minutes (barring any accidents or other traffic issues). One such traffic issue occurred in 2017, when there was a horrific accident on U.S. 23 involving a semi driver who crashed into several cars stopped in a construction zone. The accident occurred in the opposite lanes, but created enough of a gawker zone to virtually stop traffic on both sides of the highway. That day, our tournament had to be started a bit later because of the traffic delays. We managed to show up about 10 minutes before the scheduled start time.

Our drive to The Riv in East Lansing took more than an hour! Not counting the annoyance of finding a “city” parking spot…Then there was that automated parking structure that wasn’t letting any cars in! Maybe ‘bots aren’t QUITE ready to take over everything yet, are they? This tournament took place in December, so we were a bit worried that snowy weather might be a factor in this trip. We even reserved a room nearby just in case, but canceled the reservation when we found out weather would be OK.

This was the “ParkBot 9000’s” response when cars tried getting into that East Lansing parking garage the day of our tournament, LOL.

I’m also excited today for another reason – I will have FOUR players from my own team playing today, which is a rarity. In the last tournament in April, I only had TWO players from my team available to play. Today, the roster will include me, Mike, Brad, Dave and Evan, whom is a “loaner” (though he has played with us for the past several tournaments). I’m particularly happy about having Dave in the mix again, he has not played in any finals with us since October, 2015. He’s a pretty strong player, and has a knack of knowing answers the rest of us don’t know. I think he will also team up well with the other players on my team. He doesn’t have the best head for names (particularly names of actors/actresses), but will team up well with other players who do. Recently, we were trying to think of who played the character “Billy Bones” in Muppet Treasure Island, which Dave had seen, but the rest of us had not. The only clue we had was he was a “comedian.” Dave described the guy as “curly haired,” “older,” and “British.” After a bit of Q and A with Dave, I managed to come up with the right person. This wasn’t the first time we’d successfully put our heads together on a question in this fashion, either! Sometimes all it takes is knowing HOW to pry a knowledge nugget out of a player’s brain without resorting to using a crowbar!

Scottish comedic actor Billy Connolly in Boondock Saints. Unlike Muppet Treasure Island, this is NOT a movie parents should take their kids to see!

Getting Dave to commit to playing in tournament games has been a bit of a challenge!  He has bailed out last minute a few times, but this time around, he seems very committed to bringing his “A” game and he said he’s very excited to be playing.

There will be some very good teams in the room providing great competition! Only five teams today will wind up going home with prizes. I’m not betting that my team will be one of those teams, but I think we’ll do…all right!

I know there were a couple of longtime league teams that didn’t manage to qualify this time around. I just want to say I’m very, very thankful we managed to make it on the first try this season. I know too well that qualifying for a tournament can be a very rocky road, and I’m happy our route was not TOO rocky this time! I hope that at least a couple of players from the teams that didn’t qualify will still find seats at trivia tables someplace today.  I wouldn’t want our trivia tournament today to be TOO easy, after all! And I’ll let Alicia Silverstone respond to this comment…

How many iconic two-word movie quotes can you rattle off? Here are some besides this one – “My Precious,” “The horror,” and “Bitches Leave.”

Good luck to all of the other teams playing today! I’m really looking forward to next weekend, when my husband and I will embark on a trip “Up North” and do our first camping trip of the season! This was the only weekend that worked for this because of two other trivia tournaments coming up this month. On that note, Go Pods!