Irrelevancies and Nonessentials

Friday night (my second night out of the three in a row last week) was World Trivia Night. My first World Trivia Night was in November 2009 and it was the first time I met someone I knew from blogging in real life. I thought Lynn was jokingly inviting me to trivia night at her house and it turned out she was legitimately inviting me to World Trivia Night at Lansdowne Park with a thousand other people. I didn't give myself too much time to think about it because I was all about trying new things! Not just doing things involving my children! Assuring my husband I definitely probably wouldn't end up dead in an alley because Lynn was absolutely maybe not a serial killer bent on luring stay-at-home-moms to their gruesome deaths.

We haven't missed a year since then except for Covid, and even then it happened remotely. This year was tough - one of our heavy hitters went down with Covid and our team was small. It turned out not to be our worst showing anyway, and it's always a blast, partly because some of us only see each other once a year, partly because it's amusing seeing what we know and don't know, partly because we sneak in an ass-ton of Halloween candy and alternately moan about how we can't eat any more and dare each other to try some of the weirder stuff. This year it was Jelly Belly jellybeans - Lynn tried a green one early on that she declared tasted like rancid grass, but there were at least five different flavours that were green, so we kept trying to find the bad one and then figure out what it was supposed to be - margarita? kiwi? green apple? People kept declaring they were done with the jellybeans and then inexplicably trying one more. 

The game is ten groups of ten questions each, each category has a title and a theme, sometimes explicit and sometimes becoming clear as the questions progress. The tenth category is always the hardest. This year WTN was before Halloween, when it's usually in early November, so all the categories were Halloween-related: Mummies, Frank & Stein, Werewolves etc.

One of the funniest moments for me was in the Zombies category, which was an audio round - a short piece of a song that came out posthumously was played. The third one was Piece of My Heart, so I whispered "Janis Joplin" and started to write it down. Lynn looked at me like I was insane and said "What?" I said "Janis Joplin?" and she said "WHAT?" and I was like Jesus, Lynn, I'm pretty sure it's JANIS JOPLIN. When I first started going I wouldn't volunteer answers even when I was dead certain because I'd be so scared to be wrong, so now I was seriously worried that I'd heard it wrong or something. The round moved on and after it ended in the break I was like Lynn, what the hell? And she burst out laughing and said "sorry, for some reason I couldn't stop thinking Carrie Underwood. She's not even dead, is she?" 

The other funny part was in the Cereal Killers category, which was all about cereal commercials and references. The last one was about the cereal in Honey I Shrunk the Kids, which one guy was certain was Cheerios, but the questions was phrased "a phenomenon named after this cereal would have had the kids repelling each other as they floated in it", and I was extremely confused about what that meant. No one else seemed bothered by it, and I was willing to believe Peter was right, but I was bewildered. I went to the washroom during the break thinking "Vector? No. There's no cereal named Magnet, right?" When they gave the answers, Cheerios was right, but it didn't become clear until I got home and Googled and found out - in fluid mechanics, there is a thing called the freaking Cheerios effect. 

I am not good at general trivia. I don't understand how people are good at general trivia. I am pretty good with pop culture stuff and literature. I am absolute shite at geography, history, cars, sports and science. I often hear or read things and think "I should remember that, it would be a good trivia answer". Three days later I frequently think "what was that thing I was going to remember?" and I have not, in fact, remembered it.

In the spirit of full disclosure, one of the questions in the last category was 'what Russian writer penned The Gambler specifically to pay off his own gambling debts?' Someone guessed Dostoevsky because he was the only Russian writer they knew. It seemed a little too obvious to me, so I guessed Bulgakov. 

It was Dostoevsky. Note to self: it's nearly always a mistake to overthink and/or change your answer. I would say it's a lesson I only need to learn once, but that would be ignoring the lamentable Bronte Incident from Trivia Night at Stoneface Dolly's. It's a wonder anyone still lets me show up, honestly.