Tuesday Trivia

I would like to start by giving a heart-warming thank you to the bunk mate who decided to let his alarm ring and ring at 5 am this morning.  Its not like any of us were trying to sleep at 5am.  You are right, we should have been up already.  And why wouldn't you get up to take a shower right after hitting snooze on the alarm after we yelled at you to wake up, making sure to leave the phone in the room so after the 5 minutes snooze time period it would go off again while you were gone.  Thank you so much for keeping me from any sort of sleep I would have had during that time period.  It happens right?  No big deal.  Glad you didn't even feel the need to apologize when you came back in and the alarm was still going off.  Apparently they make them very classy wherever you come from.

So I don't know if I can get much cheerier than that, so I'll just let you all know about my night last night!  It was Tuesday trivia night at a bar called Brewerkz.  One of my coworkers invited me to join since I got stood up by the office match-making lady who is desperate to reschedule her forced arranged marriage dinner with me.  Upon arriving to the bar, I felt pretty confident in my trivia abilities.  As we all know, I have a unique ability to recall names, quotes, lyrics and random facts that serve no purpose whatsoever.  (Mostly song lyrics, tv show and movie quotes)  So needless to say, I thought this competition was right up my alley.  We played in teams, and I was teamed up with two other Americans (a physicist reminiscent of Leonard on Big Bang Theory and a Naval officer) two British guys, an Indian girl and two Singaporean locals.  Obviously, we had a pretty eclectic group and felt pretty good about our chances.

There were about 20 teams participating, all different age ranges and races.  We played 5 rounds, each with a different category.  The first category was: France.  Crap.  I know nothing about France other than they did not invent French fries (or freedom fries).  I was no help in that category.  Next category: South East Asia.  0 for 2.  Let me just point out that the questions had very SPECIFIC details involved, and there was no way I was going to answer any of them unless I lived in France, was head of the country, and also happened to be the curator of the museum and national library.  Anyways, I felt better hearing the third category which was: Common knowledge.  I have common knowledge, there is no way I can screw this up.  Apparently knowledge that is considered common in Singapore is not very common in the States.  There were 3 questions about F1, including who is winning in the F1 standings right now.  They looked at me as a "sports guy" and I had to remind them that F1 is not a sport and I know nothing about it.  They asked about foreign policies in Belgium, units of measurement using the metric system, all kinds of stuff that I did not find common at all.  0 for 3.  I was pretty worthless and starting to lose the faith of my teammates, and furthering the stereotype that most Americans know nothing about history or international affairs.  Crossing my fingers for a sports or movies or song lyrics category, I found out that Annagrams was next.  While trying to do my best Russell Crowe impression in a Beautiful Mind, all my scrambled words only got more scrambled and I was again no help whatsoever.  Pretty sure my coworker was contemplating asking me to leave, and definitely regretting inviting me.  0 for 4.

Last category comes up, everyone is getting restless and we are aren't that high in the standings so we need a good showing.  The category is.... Movie quotes and screen shots!  They passes around a paper with 9 movie screen shots with the characters faces taken out so you just see the scene and their clothes.  You had to guess the movies, and then they played quotes from 9 movies.  I KILLED IT!  I thoroughly vindicated myself, as well as impressed the smart people on our team with my ability to retain useless knowledge.

So what did I learn from this experience?  I don't have any common knowledge, I know nothing about other countries, and I will never be able to crack codes for the CIA.  But if you need to know anything about TV, movies, sports or song lyrics... I'm your guy.  Not sure if its something to be proud of, but I haven't really got much else.