Pub Quiz – New Record

The Table of Contents is in the hiz-ouse!!!

66 points. Fifth place. Out of 16 teams. Way more than last time. What can I say, we rock.

Actually, it was only through trickery that we got Ian, our star player, to join in. We had to tell him that without him we didn’t have enough to make a team. (Which technically was true, until about 1pm when Marco told us he was coming. The truth is all a matter of timing.)

This week’s team members were Ian, me, Ann, Julia (the new German intern), and Marco. Everyone contributed. Julia knew a little something something about the birthplace of the MP3 format (the Fatherland) and some art questions, Ann and Marco knew almost all the songs in the audio portion, Ian just generally kicked ass on all manner of random trivia (such as the number of stomachs an elk has, who wears the Fisherman’s Ring, what movie was responsible for Queen’s album “It’s A Kind of Magic”). And I had decent handwriting.

Pub quizes are like poker. You rarely remember the big questions you got right, but the ones you got wrong stay with you. Here are some we got wrong:

• Japan’s national flower (Ian had good reason to believe it was a chrysanthemum, but it turned out to be the cherry blossom)
• Communist leader who addressed the UN in 1960 for 4 hours (Castro, the other white meat)
• First 100 meter swimmer to break some time record (Johnny Weismuller. I actually said that. But I was joking. And Julia said it was Mark Spitz. And I trusted her judgement on men in speedos since she’s German)
• # of gold medals Carl Lewis won (9, we guessed 8 )
• # of people killed in the Tour de France (3, we said 6)
• Japanese island over which the US raised the flag in Feb 1945 (Iwo Jima. I vetoed that because I thought it was not one of the islands of Japan, but just a small island in the Pacific. I should have realized that, as in Trivial Pursuit, the answer is in the question. “Raised the flag.” what else could it be. Duh!)
• Island Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on (Robin Island, we said Devil’s Island)

All in all, we had a good time kicking some Pub Quiz ass. We continued our streak of improving our score (52.5 last time), and consumed numerous large ciders. The inhabitants of O’Shea’s Irish Pub in Rotterdam now know and fear the name “Table of Contents”.

Until next time, loyal listeners.