Trivia Triumph

It's been a while since I did a trivia update. That's because I've been doing it close to each week with a team competing at Jillian's. We've been doing extremely well, battling for first place and such, and since it's a series, there hasn't been that much to write about. I'm in this weird limbo status between a sub and a real team-guy. They've given me the last two weeks off so they can seek out more subs and frankly, in just that time, I've missed trivia; the feelings of confusion and insignificance you get when you don't know the answer and all that. Well, last night some friends (and friends of a friend) got together at the K&K on Aurora for their quiz. The thing I like about it is there's a real-live guy there (with the wickedest north-Midlands accent ever) who makes it up and gets progressively drunker as the night goes on. Most of last night's questions were simple to the extreme (What month was Pearl Harbor bombed?) and others were nigh impossible (the visual round), but I had no idea how we were doing. Based on our confusion, I ranked us around fourth place; y'know, respectable but out of the running. I mean, the visual round really raked us over the coals. There were a lot of people from Dancing with the Stars and I DO NOT DO that show, because of its utter sad pointlessness. However, credit should be given to my friend Jim who was able to recognize Johnny Carson beneath a lot of obfuscation. And so it went. It all felt like an honorable defeat. When the scores were tallied up, however, we were tied for first with two other teams. What are the odds?? It all came down to the three of the different teams' members giving a spin to the K&K's wheel of fortune. I don't know why they have one, but it's there. The first spin was in the thirties, the second person hit the sixties, I gave it a last mighty pull and landed on 91. Victory was ours - so was 90+ dollars. Totally not bad. I don't feel so awful about missing the years that Lou Piniella became manager of the Mariners (1993; we said 1992) or that the film A Few Good Men came out (1992; we said 1993). Winning smooths away all that. So there.

Incidentally, my Jillian's team scored a season low in my absence last week - 28 points less than our total from the previous outing. We were in first place, and now we're not. But it doesn't really matter. They can score almost nothing tonight and it'll still be fine. We're going to be in the finals next week. We won the grand prize last season (I wasn't there for that; I was just a sub at that point), so we're going to try to make it two in a row. Maybe we'll get lucky and hit the right categories. That's all you need to win.