We Won Bar Trivia Again

I mean, when this is one of the handout rounds, how could we have lost? Terp was in town and joined the crew, and thankfully he knew Jeff Gillooly on sight. Watching every single Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan retrospective pays off, eventually.

The round was “People who committed or were victims of crime in the 1990s”

To be honest, though, this was a close one because the wheels really came off in the last round (when every question is worth a point and the last one is worth 5.5 points).

The last question was, how many days will have passed between the release of the original Top Gun and the new one (which comes out next year)? I thought it came out in 1987, but the rest of the team calculated it with summer 1988. Then we learned it actually came out in 1986, so we lost so much of our advantage that we ended up only winning by half a point. A win is a win!

Had Nurse Kelly (on our team) not recalled that Bob Carlisle was the singer of “Butterfly Kisses” (for the “father-daughter song” round) and Friend Sunil not known that 97 was the highest prime number under 100, we would have have been paying full price for our tab that night.

LA Is Really A Small Town, With Excellent Bar Trivia

Chance encounters are the best. I get more than my fair share of good ones.

Yesterday, I had just flown back from a conference/retreat in Sonoma when I got a random message from my high school friend Bryan, who I hadn’t seen since 2001.

Bryan introduced me to blogging nearly 20 years ago by setting up my LiveJournal as part of building elisehu.com for me. (That site got even fancier when Friend Justin added Flash!) Besides websites, our times spent together consisted a lot of Cici’s Pizza (all you can eat for only … 2.99).

So, the reason Bryan reached out is because his Tuesday night bar trivia team only had three other members who could make it, so he took a gamble in asking me to go (not knowing if I could even be helpful at a trivia challenge … little did he know I EFFING LOVE BAR TRIVIA).

Upon joining the team, which we named “Alexa, Sue The National Enquirer,” I met Kat and Kevin.* How did Kat and Kevin meet? Good question. It turns out they met through a matchmaker, and their first date was recorded in full on, wait for it, NPR for a Morning Edition piece that aired a year ago. NPR? Hey that’s where I work!

I am happy to report they are now engaged. And our trivia team CRUSHED IT, coming in first place, winning fifty dollars off our bar tab. But perhaps we should have slacked a little because the prize for second place was a copy of the book, “Conflict Resolutions for Couples.”

*Kevin really showed his chops on a question about the common name for the medical condition ‘circadian dysrhythmia.’ Answer: jet lag.