The Return of Pub Trivia
Since I wanted a big hunk of red meat for my last pre-op meal, the Snook and I ended up over at the Nag’s Head in Glebe. I had the filet mignon; he had the sirloin. Just as we were finishing, we heard someone announce that the weekly trivia comp was about to begin. “Why not?” We hurried over to grab an answer sheet. Needless to say, we absolutely SUCKED on the first round. There were too many questions about rugby league, too many song identifications we didn’t know… At one point, we actually resorted to putting down joke answers. (Which I normally hate, but when the question is “What countries are separated by the Bay of Bothnia?” and you have no clue, there’s nothing else to do but write “Therbia and Herthogivina.”) After that round, we were tied for fifth place and I was seriously considering bailing. It seems that we just needed to work the rust out though, because in the second round we ROCKED THE HOUSE. It’s like you use a special muscle to retrieve information from all the crazy cobwebby bits of your brain, and I just needed to give mine a bit of a warm-up before it was functioning properly. I even won us a jug of beer on a movie identification game. (The hints: made in 1975, featured coconuts as a “special effect” for horses’ hooves, starred Connie Booth… I got it as soon as she said coconuts, but I was worried since it’s such a long title to write out!) We ended up making a stunning comeback to finish second(!) behind an entire quartet of Comic Book Guys (who were so far ahead that it seemed dodgy). And besides, if you’d divided each team’s points by the number of members, we were totally the champions of the night.

Anyway, here were some of the memorable questions:

• Name the Steven Spielberg movies from the taglines: “The Mission is the Man,” “They’re Here,” “He’s Scared. He’s Alone. He’s Three Million Miles from Home.”
• Name the two actors who played the bumbling robbers in Home Alone.
• Name the Sydney 2000 Olympic gold medallists in the men’s 100m, 200m, and 400m dash.
• What vegetable is also known as the stinking rose? (We actually high-fived when she read this out.)
• Which part of the body contains spongy tissue called the “corpus cavernosum”? (We were the only people in the pub to get this right! And we actually wrote our answer down as a bit of a joke, seeing as how we misheard the Latin as “corpus cabanossum.” Go figure.)
• Which Clint Eastwood movie featured the song “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” by Roberta Flack?

And if any of you actually know the Bay of Bothnia, I shall bow down to your superior geography skillz…