And now, the Geek Bowl VIII answers!


Round 1: These Team Names End Tonight
1. If your boxing grandma were 124 pounds, she would be in what boxing weight class, in between bantamweight and lightweight? Featherweight
2. Noam Chomsky was a very cunning linguist, who was born in the latter part of what decade? The 1920s [We guessed 1930s.]
3. Even if you did pull out, your method of contraception would be rated very poorly on what scale, which shares its name with a pretty mineral ball? The Pearl Index [We were between “pearl” and “geode,” but I argued for “pearl” on the thought that it was more likely to be somebody’s last name.]
4. In the nursery rhyme where three little kittens lose their mittens, what food is withheld from them as punishment? Pie [We were thinking “cream”, though that’s not really a food, but Jonathan pulled out “pie” as time was running out.]
5. In that SNL sketch which we have apparently all seen, Turd Ferguson is the alias used by what film star, being played by what SNL cast member? BOTH answers are required. Norm MacDonald playing Burt Reynolds
6. In the movie Super Troopers, which half of “RamRod” was also the director: Ram or Rod? Jay “Ram” Chandrasekhar
7. The more widely accepted word for someone who cannot easily be categorized as male or female is what “I” word, which has its own advocacy group, the ISNA? Intersex
8. Now that she’s split from Al, you could play “just the tip” with Tipper Gore, but her predecessor as second lady is still married. Give that predecessor’s first name. Marilyn (Quayle)
Back to the questions

Round 2: Sexy Songs Of SEX
[Answers are in the questions]

Round 3: Lather and Rinse, But No Repeats
1. In those old toothpaste ads, who fought the Cavity Creeps: Colgate or Crest? Crest
2. True or False: The average cellphone has more germs on it than the average toilet seat. True
3. Which one was a real slogan for Irish Spring soap: “Smell like you’re worth exploring” or “Get a little Irish on you”? “Smell Like You’re Worth Exploring” [Who knew? We guessed wrong on that one.]
4. When you go take a shit during the next scoring break, which toilet should you select if you want the lowest bacteria levels on it: the one closest to the bathroom door or the one farthest from the bathroom door? Closest
5. According to the American Congress Of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which is better: to douche or not to douche? Not to douche
6. True or False: A recent study by the FDA found that antibacterial soap gets your filthy self cleaner than regular soap. False
7. Which has more blades: the manual Gilette Fusion or the Schick Quattro? Fusion
8. Who wrote an 1867 paper entitled “On The Antiseptic Principle of The Practice Of Surgery”: Oliver Wendell Holmes or Joseph Lister? Lister
Back to the questions

Round 4: I Went To Geek Bowl And All I Got Was This Lousy Anal Probe
1. Before being thoroughly debunked, what spoon-bending Israeli proto-douche insisted that his abilities were a gift from extraterrestrials? Uri Geller
2. 108 Ocean Avenue, formerly 112 Ocean Avenue, is an infamous house in what New York town of 10,000, located on an inlet of South Oyster Bay? Amityville
3. Shadow people keeping you from moving? Don’t worry, it’s probably just this phenomenon. Sleep paralysis
4. The Zapruder film is to the JFK assassination as the Patterson-Gimlin film is to what? Bigfoot
5. Peruvians may have been communicating with aliens, or maybe they were just high, when they created what UNESCO-recognized geoglyphs? The Nazca lines
6. The Jersey Devil is a legendary creature said to stalk what area of southern New Jersey, also the name of a classic Sopranos episode? The Pine Barrens
7. The Time/Life books series Mysteries of The Unknown had this many volumes, the same as one of the best episodes of Battlestar Galactica as well as a Smashing Pumpkins song. Coincidence? We think not. 33
8. This volunteer, nonprofit, paranormal-investigation organization is headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, has Dan Aykroyd as a Hollywood consultant, and has a 5-letter acronym for its name, the middle three letters of which are “UFO”. Name it. MUFON
Back to the questions

Round 5: A Pervert’s History Of The United States
1. Mary Todd Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth
2. Gennifer Flowers and Bill Clinton
3. Jerry Falwell and Tinky Winky
4. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
5. George Armstrong Custer and Sitting Bull
6. Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller
7. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg [Great pull and teamwork from Larry and George on this one.]
8. Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein
Back to the questions

Round 6: William Shakespeare, Product Support Specialist
[Answers are in the questions.]

Round 7: Even More Celebrities (We Could Get!)
The Geeks posted the answer video! Here it is:

Just in case that video ever evaporates, here were the answers:
1. Levar Burton: In the Reading Rainbow theme song, following the words “I can” are a couple of two-word phrases. What are they? “go anywhere”, “be anything” [Turns out “go twice as high” does come up earlier in the song, but that’s not what they were looking for.]
2. Steve Inskeep: The day before Morning Edition came on the air, the Iran hostage crisis began. The hostages were held for a multiple of 111 days. How many days were they held for? 444
3. Mondo Guerra: Every Project Runway designer is familiar with Tim Gunn’s famous three-word catchphrase, when he’s less than impressed with a design’s progress. Hint: it shares one word with RuPaul’s. What is it? Make it work
4. Rich Sommer: The man who plays my boss is named Robert Morse. He first rose to fame in 1961, playing a window-washer who rises through the ranks to become a big business executive in what big Broadway musical? How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying
5. Jim O’Heir: Historically, the Pawnee people lived mostly along the North Platte river, in the territory that became what great plains state? Nebraska
6. David Koechner: You might know me as Champ Kind from Anchorman, or Todd Packer from The Office, but I was also Uncle Earl, from what? Hannah Montana
7. Elijah Wood: Alfred Hitchock’s North By Northwest and my early film North are both rightly hailed as classics of American cinema. How many years elapsed between the films’ release dates: 25, 35, or 45? 35
8. Jim Parsons: You probably remember me as a Medieval Times knight in Garden State. A few years earlier, Janeane Garofalo played a Medieval Times waitress in what film that Ben Stiller directed between Reality Bites and Zoolander? The Cable Guy
Back to the questions

Round 8: Random Knowledge
1. Giorgio Moroder worked on the soundtracks of two different movies with “Top” in the title, one in 1986 and one in 1987. Name them both. Top Gun and Over The Top
2. Adam is the first prophet of Islam. What two famous dudes are the last prophets of Islam? Jesus and Muhammad
3. Louis Sullivan was an American architect known as the “father of the skyscraper.” First, with what alliterative three-word phrase is he most closely associated? Second, what devoutly midwestern guy was Sullivan’s most famous protege? “Form follows function” and Frank Lloyd Wright
4. What child development word comes from the Latin for “speechless”? Before babies leave the hospital, they are usually vaccinated against what form of hepatitis? “Infant” and Hepatits B [Infant! Who knew? I learned something that day.]
5. What subatomic particle was thought for a few months in 2011 to have been measured traveling faster than light? What is the name for the edge of the solar system, where the solar wind is stopped by the interstellar medium? Neutrino and heliopause [I think this was my favorite moment of the night. Jonathan and George debated between “neutrino” and “tachyon” for the first question, and then we settled as a team on “neutrino”, based on our faint memory that neutrinos had been in the news a few years ago, and that tachyons may only be theoretical, not observed. The second question, though, really flummoxed us. Brian tossed out “event horizon,” but we quickly rejected that as a black hole term. I thought for a second about “corona”, but quickly realized that’s just the outer edge of the sun, not the solar system. We had to wait until all the questions had been read and all our answers settled except this one. Suddenly Jonathan lit up and said, with complete certainty, “I GOT IT.” He scribbled down “heliopause”, and as soon as I saw it, I knew he was right. Seriously, I got the chills. It was like watching a spectacular catch or a slam dunk. Just awesome.]
6. What monarch instituted the tradition of the white wedding dress by wearing a white lace dress at her 1840 wedding? What Romantic composer wrote the theme most of us know as “Here Comes The Bride”, or the “Wedding March”? Queen Victoria and Richard Wagner
7. What old bearded man was the subject of Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Portrait Of A Man In Red Chalk”? Vincent Van Gogh’s “Man In A Red Beret” was a portrait of what other artist, who was involved in the ear-cutting incident? Leonardo da Vinci (it was a self-portrait) and Paul Gaugin
8. Finally, here’s that Friends question you’ve all been wanting. Which two of the 6 central characters on Friends also worked as servers at Central Perk? Joey and Rachel

Pre-Emptive Tiebreaker: Take the number of years Facebook has been a company as of February, and add the number of years Hitler served as Fuehrer of Germany. Multiply the total by the year in which the Colosseum was built, and then subtract the resulting number from the actual population of Amityville, New York as of the 2010 census.

In other words:

Amityville 2010 – [(years of FB + Hitler as Fuehrer) x year of Colosseum] = ?

[This is where it came in pretty handy to have been making close notes of the questions throughout the game — I remembered that they had named Amityville as a town of “about 10,000”. We decided Facebook had been around for 10 years, and Hitler Fuehrer for 12, and that the Colosseum was built in A.D. 70. So that made 10,000 – 140, and based on Don’s proclivity for declining number guesses in questions like this, we put 8765 as our final guess.]

The tiebreaker answers:
Amityville 2010 = 9,523
years of FB = 10
Hitler as Fuehrer = 10
year of Colosseum = 80
The magic number = 7,923

[As it turned out, the tiebreaker didn’t matter for us, because we won by 1 point. However, it did make the difference between #2 and #3 teams.]
Back to the questions

All credit to Geeks Who Drink for a fantastic event. Looks like next year it will be held in Albuquerque! Who wants to rent a van?