A couple of longtime friends living in Virginia were able to join us two lonely ‘Pods for a virtual game Saturday. We teamed up quite well on the questions, only missing two points on the first mystery round and narrowly missing the final question about a movie that I’m not sure any of us actually watched, though we made our best guess about songs that would have been performed in the movie. Yeah, those things happen in trivia games occasionally! Y’all know “those” teams that regularly log perfect or near perfect games AND get the final questions right all the time? Yeah, we’re not one of “those” teams, though we occasionally get lucky! And we got lucky on some of those questions in this game.

Special thanks to Sam and Angela for allowing us the “virtual” time to catch up with them! We miss you…

Here were the questions:

Round One

1 Language – A tilde appears over what letter in the Spanish language?

2 Slogans – What element completes the slogan used by the multivitamin Centrum? Complete from A to (blank)?

3 Board Games – What long-running series of World War II themed board games includes versions subtitled Pacific 1940 and Battle of the Bulge? Sam and Mike were all over this one. And I guess there’s a zombie version of the game now?

4 TV Characters – Nancy Botwin was the main character in what Showtime series airing from 2005 to 2012? We got this one correct on a total guess just based on “I think that show was on around this time.” None of us had actually watched it (isn’t it nice when these things happen in trivia games)?

Mystery Round One –

Athletics – Pick ‘Em

From the following list of events, choose the four that are part of the modern decathlon. Teams will receive two points for each correct answer.

1500 meters, hammer throw, 800 meters, triple jump, 100 meters, high jump, javelin throw

We picked three correct events.

Round Two

5 Islands – Mustang Island and the Padre Island National Seashore are located off the coast of what U.S. state? I mentioned having a college roommate – who was fond of permed hair, blaring polka music from her boombox and guys in mullets wearing wraparound shades who worked for Frito-Lay – who happened to go on Spring Break here, so this is the most random reason ever for knowing a trivia answer (thanks Stephanie)! Also thanks Stephanie’s boyfriend Jeff for supplying us with free chips! We tried to discourage her from breaking up with him because we didn’t want our free supply of chips to dry out (true story)!

6 ’60s Hits – What 1961 single was Ben E. King’s highest charting song on the Billboard Hot 100 as a solo artist? The song re-charted in 1986 when it was on the soundtrack to a film of the same name.

7 LIterary Characters – Which deceased business partner of Ebenezer Scrooge visits in him in ghost form in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens? For a bonus point, how many years ago did he die? We joked about how funny it might be if the reggae singer sharing this guy’s name played the character in a modern retelling of the story. But he’d probably be too chill to be a good scary ghost. Got this for main points and yay Mike made right guess for bonus!

8 Math – What branch of mathematics is the study of triangles and the relationship between the lengths of their sides and their angles? And yup, me, who flunked algebra twice in high school (passed it in college, thank you very much) got this maff question correct. Did I ever take a course in this subject? Nope! But my older brother did. Clearly the genes dictating math prowess were not distributed equally between my brother and I 😦

Mystery Round Two – “RAT” at the end

All correct responses will end with the letters RAT.

M1 Nursery rhyme character whose wife could eat no lean

M2 Mesopotamian structure with steps, similar to a pyramid

M3 Fractional measure of purity for gold alloys

M4 British overseas territory nicknamed “The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean.”

Got all of these correct. We were tied with the always unbeatable Philly based team Bark and Stormy for first with 53 points.

Final category – 2010s Movie Music

In the 2012 film Pitch Perfect, the final performance of the Barden Bellas is an a cappella medley of three hit songs – originally by Jessie J., Simple Minds and Pitbull. Name two of those three songs.

We immediately guessed the correct Simple Minds song (yay we are all old), and Sam mentioned the title of a Pitbull song that we put as our guess. It wasn’t right, but hey…we tried!

We’ll be meeting with another friend or two for a real-live trivia game this afternoon. As always, go Pods, and stay classy, all of you people who built Ziggurats, which were obviously bad for their health (bad dad joke alert)!