Not the board game, the bar game.  Yes, it was trivia night at Bless U Pub and I participated.  Now, I am by no means a trivia buff and to be perfectly honest I’m not particularly a fan of these contests.  Suffice to say, there are other things I prefer to do in a bar and I would normally not even make an appearance on Trivia Night.

But last night I encountered a last minute cancellation of a planned dinner at a Brazilian steak house in Itaewon.  So plan B lead me to Bless U.

I imagine most folks are more familiar with the in’s and out’s of trivia gaming than I am.  This Bless U version was decidedly low tech.  Basically,  you’ve got an MC reading questions and teams of players reaching agreement on an answer and writing that answer on a score sheet.  These were last night’s categories:

1. This land is your land, this land is my land
2. Tarantino
3. Before they went solo
4. The Olympics
5. Acronyms

Some of the questions were pretty difficult–for example, naming the five countries that currently have laid claim to land in Antarctica.  Others were pretty easy like in which current state is the Hopi nation located.  I enjoy Tarantino films, but I had no idea what “The Bride’s” real name in Kill Bill was, nor did I know the combination of the briefcase in Pulp Fiction.  With the combined knowledge of my teammates, we managed to do pretty well with the Olympics and Acronym categories, although we couldn’t remember what the second “A” in NAACP stood for, even though it was pretty obvious after hearing the answer.  I hate when that happens.

Anyway, I excelled in the “Before they went solo” category, knowing such tidbits as Kenny Rogers was with The First Edition and Linda Ronstadt played with the Stone Poneys.  The MC was very surprised we knew those answers and one of my teammates, bless her heart, shouted out “that’s why we have an old guy on our team!”.  Ah well.

I also knew that Rod Stewart and Ron Wood had played together in the Jeff Beck Group.  The MC insisted the correct answer was Faces.  Which is just as correct as the answer we gave.  After the contest was done, we looked it up on the internet and showed that Jeff Beck was also a correct answer.  To his credit, the MC gave us the points.

So, when it was all said and done we were good enough for second place.  Our prize was two free pitchers of beer,  Of course, I was pretty much beered out by then and needed to catch the subway home, but it was nice to do well regardless.  We gave one of the pitchers to a non-winning team for their creative answer on what the M-G-M acronym stood for.  They said “lions and tigers and bears”, which was pretty funny when you think about it.  Our maybe it was just funny to us.

Anyway, I wound up having a good time and as a bonus got some material for this blog post.  I’d call that a win-win situation.

Peace out.