Found Everywhere, Commonplace

 At bar night last week Michael said something, realized that what he said hadn't been particularly intelligent, then said "I'm in great shape for trivia tomorrow night". I said "oh, are you guys doing trivia tomorrow night?" Then they all looked at me and I said "oh shit, am I doing trivia tomorrow night?"

We used to do trivia nights at a local restaurant called Stoneface Dolly's but it closed during Covid, which sucks, the couple that ran it was really nice. Our name was The Pugnacious Six - I just sat here for a few minutes trying to remember why; it was because each night was to raise money for a local charity, and the first one was a pug rescue. The next one was for brain injuries, so we toyed with changing out name to the Medulla Oblongatas, but the host couldn't pronounce it so we stayed pugnacious. On our way to trivia this time, I made some comment about someone being at Diminished Capacity, which became our new name (Dim Cap for short). It is usually six of us because a few people hate trivia and Matt is so often out of the country.

We tend to be a very robust group brain, while individually being exceedingly weak in some areas. Tony can tell you what year any song or movie came out. Mark and Matt are very strong in sports and geography. Collette and Dave are wild cards with really good general knowledge and Collette knows what all the British kings and queens look like on sight, which freaks me the hell out. I slay on literature and basically nothing else, although last time we did this I was very proud of the fact that I got a question about an actor's last name being what happens when you do his first name (Rip Torn).

There was a section with musical clues. The first clip was Cruel Summer by Bananarama, which we got because we are old. The second one started, and we were all looking around blankly, then the chorus started and I realized I knew it, at the same time that Michael realized he knew it, and then looked really dismayed that we all saw him recognizing it, because it was Cruel Summer by Taylor Swift and Michael prides himself on his sophisticated musical taste (we call it "he hates anything that has a melody"). The third one was some rap thing we didn't know - we thought it might be another Cruel Summer, but it was not. 

It's a fun mix of questions with different themes and ways of asking. One section had the categories listed and as soon as I saw "Merchant-Ivory films" I knew I had to remember the author of Howard's End and A Passage to India, and I was briefly seized by the terror that I would not be able to summon it up, because if I fail at a lit question you guys, I really have nothing to offer. Fortunately it came to me, PLUS I learned the fun new fact that he briefly served as a private secretary to a maharajah, which seems like a fun thing to be able to put on a resume. 

To demonstrate how much people who are good at one category can suck at another, Collette and I kept trying to answer Kenya for which country's national dance was tinikling, which is dancing between long bamboo poles, until Michael pointed out that the bamboo made it more likely to be an Asian country than an African one (goddammit, I just looked it up and bamboo DOES grow in Kenya, our wrong answer was still possible, screw you Michael). I looked up a Youtube video of tinikling and got a broken ankle just watching. I wish I could think of someone else guessing something dumb. Alas, I cannot, unless you count Collette thinking a picture of Kumail Nanjiani was a picture of "the Indian guy from the Big Bang Theory". I am faceblind but remember names, and Tony knows faces but not names, so he said "no, that's the guy from The Big Sick", which was all I needed - see? Unbeatable group brain. 

Oh! I have another one that I got by guessing. It was film titles that were Latin phrases, and the only one we didn't know was a 1951 film starring Deborah Kerr and the title meant 'where are you going?' I pulled Quo Vadis out of somewhere while everyone else was still stuck on Veni Vidi Vici. 

I can't quite figure out why I enjoy trivia nights so much when I invariably end up feeling dumb and embarrassed multiple times throughout the evening. It's so satisfying when you actually get one? The endless lure of possibility? We did win, although we did so badly on the last section that Michael said he felt like we didn't deserve it. He said this multiple times, actually, until I told him to shut up and drink his giant Oktoberfest beer. 

This is Dave, however, not Michael.