Scroll all the way down for the answers.

With just one point dividing the top two non-barhop teams in McShane’s competitive trivia scene in week seven with 14 more weeks to go? Things are starting to get…interesting!

A piss poor 49-point game from us last night knocked us out but good! We’re now at the bottom of the rankings of the top four non-barhop teams who have logged scores every week so far. We kind of braced oursevles for this – since we had our highest-scoring game of the season last week! It’s how we’ve done trivia since the beginning! There is plenty of time left in the season to sink, swim, or…abandon ship.

The Vegas bookmakers have told me that we’re never a good team to bet on to win – but also that it’s not a good idea to rule us out, either (JK, JK). We’re still in the fight for now. We haven’t made the call to “Abandon ship!” quite yet.

About “ships” – we had an odd trivia question involving hobbies of bored sailors that my husband wound up getting correct. Whenever he starts writing an answer down on the slip while the question is still being read, nine times out of ten, that answer is going to be correct!

Sadly, that was one of only a couple of triumphant moments for us in this trivia game – we didn’t win any prizes, and had to rely entirely on luck in the halftime round about AI systems. We chose two different companies as our answer and wrote down X, Y, X, Y. Two wound up being correct! It was almost like that one time I was playing an either-or halftime round at Powell’s several years ago and used a coin to determine my answers (half ended up being correct).

Like that Chuck Berry song says, “It goes to show you never can tell.”

It was still a fairly fun game overall – a teammate of ours celebrated her 50th birthday. We used the occasion to research which celebrities shared a birthday with her, and chose Lisa “Left Eye” Lopez, formerly of the group TLC. We played under the name “Happy Birthday, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopez. Special thanks to Stacy for playing a Lizzo song for the birthday girl by request!

Here were our very, very, very abbreviated questions:

Round One

Time – How many days are in a week?

Kid Lit – What is the name of the big red dog in a book series by Norman Bridwell first published by Scholastic in 1963?

80s Movies – In what city is the 1984 movie Ghostbusters set?

Round Two

Olympics – What country leads the prade of athletes at the Olympics every four years?

Fun With Words – What word can mean an endorsement on a passport – or also be the name of a major credit card?

Famous Family – Singer and actress Solange Knowles is the sister of what well known singer and businesswoman?

Round Three

Native Americans – What Lakota chief died in 1890 and was known for uniting the Sioux people? We zig zagged pretty big here – we initially wrote down the right guy, then talked ourselves out of that and wrote down another guy…so tragic when these things happen in the first half of the game! 😔 Miss for three.

Page to Screen (this one was controversial, at least according to one of the players I overheard complaining about it loudly at the host stand): What Oscar-winning 1983 movie was based on a book by Tom Wolfe? Now initially, I started thinking of the 1983 movie that won best picture, but I knew that couldn’t have possibly have been written by Tom Wolfe…then I thought of a couple of others from around that time, then almost in synchronicity with my husband – “Oscar winning doesn’t necessarily mean best picture.” So I made a guess of another 1983 film that was thankfully correct (I’ve never seen the movie but it got a lot of “Buzz” at the time). I’m not completely sure what the other player’s complaint was, but I think he took issue with the qualifiers “Oscar winning.” The movie did win four Oscars, so…

Hey, we complain about trivia questions during games, too!

From the Latin – What name from the Latin for a shade of blue means “beyond the sea?” This question – and the Lakota chief question – and the upcoming halftime round – would utterly f— our game. Sorry, I should have said [SPOILERS AHEAD]. Oops! Should have wagered higher on that movie question (but it took me so long to come up with the guess – and it was just a guess).

Halftime – Technology

Apparently there were teams in this room who would be really good in this category and I think I heard that at least one team got them all correct (there are benefits to sitting near the host table). But…none of us were strong in this category.

Given the name of the large language model or artificial intelligence, name the company that created it:

H1 Chat GPT

H2 Llama

H3 Gemini

H4 Co Pilot

We managed to get #3 and #4 correct by pure guesses. We needed a little bit of luck here!

Here’s a pic of my notes here where we attempted to brainstorm (you can see that toward the end I started getting a little…desperate with my guesses). Yet three of the four correct guesses are on my list!

We were second from last in fifth with 23, Random Guessers were in fourth with 25; Matty Platters and Spacecats were tied for third with 28, We Were Never Here was in second with 29 and We’d Rather Be At and Three were tied for first with 36.

If you’re looking for us to have a nice comeback in the second half? That ain’t gonna happen!

Round Four

The Human Body – The unguis is the scientific name for the keratin based structure more commonly called what?

Actresses – What actress plays the protagonist June Osborn on the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale? The other woman playing with us said that a couple of her friends deride her for not watching this series. I told her that I read the book in college and that it was super depressing! Teamwork prevailed here – I saw that she started writing down her first name, and thankfully I remembered her last name.

Mascots – What type of animal is Clutch, the mascot for the Houston Rockets? There was some grumbling with this one, unsure if any teams go this correct.

Round Five

Science – What element with a single-digit atomic number is the most electronegative? Miss. I quizzed one of my absent players about this later – who has a degree in biochemistry – yep he knew it! Figures…one team in the room got it correct.

Wars – Which war did Ernest Hemingway write about in For Whom the Bell Tolls? Close, but no cigar on our guess. So…heartbreaking. A miss for four in a game where we couldn’t afford any more misses! If Hemingway were alive and writing about our game, he’d say something about a really dramatic sob and maybe a thousand yard stare (but not be too wordy about it like Faulkner).

Fun and Games (yeah maybe this category will cheer us up, lol) – What toy created in 1996 had a “bounce” version introduced in 2010 at the Hasbro Toy Fair? Kim came up with the right guess, but at this point, we didn’t want to risk another miss, so we used our “answer of the day” for our six points here.

Round Six

Pastimes – What sailor pastime involved carving designs on bone or ivory? This is where Mike got us a precious six points (I love his weird, weird brain – it’s so helpful on trivia nights)!

Animals – The koala is an example of a folivore, meaning that it specializes in eating what?

Expressions – What part of the dog is referenced in an expression involving cures for a hangover?

Those misses during the game really, really hurt us. You might not want to read on if you like happy endings (hey we won’t judge you if you like “those” kinds of happy endings 😉 ). We’re open minded!

All right…here are the standings (we warned you about reading further):

One team was behind us (thank the gods, didn’t write down their name or their points) – we were in seventh with 49, Spacecats were in sixth with 50; Random Guessers were in fifth with 53; Matty Platters were in fourth with 56; Three was in (fittingly) third with 62; We Were Never Here was in second with 63 and Rather Be At was in first with 70. Clearly this team didn’t struggle as much as we did (hats off to ya)!

Speaking of struggling…now for the final question that no teams would get correct! Now are you SURE that you want to keep reading?

Final Category – Fictional Characters

Name the fictional character based on a real person – who was introduced by the software company Tool Works in 1987 – and later referenced in a 2024 documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival?

We put in a guess for a fictional character created in 1985. We bet all but one point (don’t say we’re not occasionally optimistic).

Zero wagers prevailed here – top three teams were Random Guessers, 53; We Were Never Here, 63 and Rather Be At, 70.

Our next trivia outing is TBD. As always, Go Pods, and stay classy, Mavis Beacon!

answers

r1

seven, clifford, nyc

r2

greece, visa, beyonce

r3

sitting bull, the right stuff, ultramarine

h

open ai, meta/facebook; google, microsoft

r4

toenail/fingernail, elizabeth moss, bear

r5

fluorine, spanish civil war (we put spanish american war), bop it

r6

scrimshaw, leaves, dog

f mavis beacon