Paul O'Brian writes about Watchmen, trivia, albums, interactive fiction, and more.

>SUPERVERBOSE

Geek Bowl XI question recap

By the numbers: I’ve been going to Geek Bowl for 8 years now, the last 4 of which my team has been made up of the same 6 people. Ever since that team coalesced, we have placed either first or second in every Geek Bowl we’ve played in… until now. Geek Bowl XI was not our night, and we ended up in a 4-way tie for 15th place. Now in perspective, that is 15th out of 212 teams — still a damn good showing! But it’s not where we’ve been, and not where we wanted to be. As I recap the questions and answers, I’ll narrate where we misstepped — it was a lot of going the wrong way on coin flips, and a lot of almost-but-not-QUITE-right answers, along with some plain knowledge gaps.

Before that, though, I’d like to raise a glass to my team, who this year was named Mothra Hoople:

Group photo of Team Mothra

Going clockwise from the top left, that’s Don, Jonathan, Brian, George, me, and Larry. This shot was taken before all of us were fully decked out in our MOTHRA t-shirts, but it does showcase the pink hats we wore to honor Brian’s wife Tina, who’s currently undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. Part of what makes Geek Bowl so enjoyable for me is the chance to play trivia with these five guys, who are all smart, funny, and good company. Wherever we end up placing at the end of the night, Geek Bowl is always a great time because I’m on this team.

Part of what I love about us is the teamwork, synergy, and trust we’ve got going. Those qualities were put to the test this year, as things started to unravel for us and we struggled against difficult conditions to find our way towards answers. There are some fierce, intense competitors in this group, and it’s tough when we start to feel the game slipping away from us. But you know what never happened? Bitching. Finger-pointing. Sarcasm. Pettiness. There was some self-recrimination going around, but nobody ever got pissy with anybody else about an answer, even when people (myself included) had fought for answers that turned out to be wrong. Believe me, that is not a given in a team trivia game.

Part of what helps us hold things together are the rules we’ve evolved over the years. Here now in their annual presentation:

Mothra’s Rules Of Pub Trivia

  1. Read/listen to the damn question.
    1. Read it again.
    2. Pay attention to the category.
  2. Don’t interrupt the question/audio; let it finish before guessing out loud.
  3. If you think of an answer, say it/write it.
    1. Make sure at least two other teammates hear/see it.
    2. If you heard a teammate suggest a good possible answer that’s not being discussed, throw it out there again.
  4. Everyone look over each answer sheet before turning it in.
  5. If the answer is a name and surnames are enough, we don’t need to write the first name.
  6. If spelling doesn’t count, don’t sweat it.
  7. If an answer is used once in a quiz, nothing prevents that answer from being used later in the same quiz (the Quincy Jones Rule).
  8. Avoid facetious answers (the Ernie Banks Rule – so named after we got a question wrong in a practice round when somebody jokingly said that Ernie Banks, aka “Mr. Cub”, was “obviously from the Mets,” and then our non-sporty scribe dutifully wrote down “Mets.” Heh.)
  9. Put an answer for each question, even if the whole team believes it’s probably/certainly wrong. You can object to that bad answer, but have a better answer at the ready.

These may sound easy to follow, but they are not. I personally failed on rule 3A this year, as I’ll explain below. Rule 1B is incredibly easy to overlook when focusing on a single question. And rule 9 can be a tough standard to live up to when time is very limited and ticking down before your eyes. Still, this overall structure gives us the best shot at effectively pooling our collective knowledge in a way that is quick and efficient. We had a rough go of it this year, but I know we’ll be back, because this is an excellent team that works very well together.

But enough about Mothra, how about the event itself? Geek Bowl was held in Seattle this year, in a bit of a strange venue. We convened in a cavernous building called “Smith Cove Terminal.” Near as I can tell, this is a place you go when you and 1,000 other people are getting ready to go on a cruise. Everybody gathers in the terminal building, which is pretty much a huge long rectangular hangar (though without the super-high ceilings) and mills around until they board the ship.

The way Geeks Who Drink used this building was to set up a stage at one end, and screens throughout, placed strategically among the couple-hundred tables set up for the teams. There were four bars placed around the edges of the rectangle, and six food trucks parked outside. At the other end of the rectangle from the stage were chairs set up for spectators, who pay the same price as contestants.

At this point, the Geek Bowl organizers have earned a reputation for a smooth, well-run event, and while most of that still held true, I feel like the venue was a miss this year. Every year prior to this one, Geek Bowl has been held at some kind of theater or arena, a space physically and acoustically set up to focus attention on a stage. The cruise ship terminal had none of these properties, and as a result, sound was muddy and distorted while sightlines were dismal, especially for teams placed behind us (we were about a third of the way back from the stage.) I think the intent was that cameras would film the stage action and that therefore teams wouldn’t need to see the stage directly, but the cameras were placed oddly, generally capturing side-views of the action, and for some reason the director repeatedly delayed cutting away from PowerPoint slides to the camera feed. Add to that the long, slow lines at the food trucks (most of which left before the first break), and the fact that one of the two men’s bathrooms on our level was closed shortly after the first round ended, and you get a fairly frustrating participant experience.

I feel for the Geeks — this event has gotten bigger and bigger, and I’m sure it is a major challenge to find a place that can provide a stage, sound system, and video clearly visible to all areas, and can also provide enough space to set up a couple hundred tables and 1200 chairs. Geek Bowl 10 was in an arena, and even so a number of teams weren’t able to sit at tables, having to make do with fixed arena seating instead. Along with that, the venue must provide some kind of food and drink options (alcohol a must, given the the company’s name and reputation), and not charge an exorbitant amount for rent on a Saturday night. And the flooded bathroom thing this year was just bad luck. But nevertheless, I hope next year returns us to more of a theater/arena type configuration — it just works better for this kind of event.

The Geek Bowl Format

For those of you who aren’t familiar with how Geek Bowl works, not to mention my recaps of it, I’ve got some explanations and disclaimers for you. This is pretty much copy-pasted (with a few adjustments) from previous years’ posts, so if you already know the drill, feel free to skip down to Opening Ceremonies.

As I’ve done in previous years, I’m going to recap the questions and answers here. A few caveats about this, though. First, the Geeks are pretty careful about their intellectual property, and the agreement we’ve worked out is that I won’t post these recaps until at least a week has elapsed since the Geek Bowl. (Though all things considered I’d have a hard time getting this together in less time anyway!)

Second, I consider these recaps a tribute to the excellent question writers of the Geek Bowl, and an advertisement for a really fun event, but I am in no way officially associated with Geeks Who Drink, and I have not been supplied with question material. The recap below is not a verbatim representation of the Geek Bowl 11 questions. It is reconstructed from my notes and memories, which are very fallible. I do take photos of some of the question slides — cameras are allowed at Geek Bowl as long as they can’t receive data. However, even those slides are very frequently paraphrases rather than verbatim reproductions of the questions as read. I am certain I have left out some of the cleverness, some of the humor, and some of the pinning precision. Anything in the questions and answers below that is wrong or crappy is my fault, not theirs.

The GWD question material leans heavy on pop-culture and light (though not zero) on sports. In between, there is plenty of academic trivia: history, geography, science, and so forth. They have also always tried to make a point of being edgy, often self-consciously so. This has evolved over the years from “We insist on sex, cursing, and gross-outs” to “Don’t be surprised when you encounter sex, cursing, or gross-outs.” Especially at Geek Bowl, it used to feel like there was some obligatory raunch, and that those questions were kind of pandering, lowbrow stuff that didn’t really match the rest of the quiz. Now the raunchy stuff is just as erudite and clever as anything else in the question set, and its prominence has been toned way down, but it’s also always still there.

Here’s the format: each team has its own small table, with 6 chairs. Quizmasters read questions from the stage, and the questions are also projected onto large screens throughout the venue. One round is all-video, meaning rather than anyone reading questions, the whole round is encapsulated in a video presentation on the screens. Once all the questions in a round have been asked, a two minute timer starts, by the end of which you must have turned in your answer sheet to one of the roaming quizmasters. (Though round 3 had a 4-minute timer, for reasons that will become clear in the recap.)

The game consists of 8 rounds, each with its own theme. Each round contains 8 questions — usually, each question is worth one point, so there’s a maximum possible score of 8 points for each round. However, some rounds offer extra points — for instance, Round 2 is traditionally a music round, with 8 songs played, and one point each awarded for naming the title and artist of the song. In a regular GWD pub quiz, it’s usually only Round 2 and Round 8 (always the “Random Knowledge” round) that offer 16 possible points. However, in this year’s Geek Bowl, two other rounds offered additional points: we could see from the pre-printed answer sheets that question #8 in Round 3 would have 8 answers, for a total of 15 answers in the round, and that there were two answer spaces for each question in Round 4, for a total of 16 points available in that round.

Finally, a team can choose one round to “joker”, meaning that it earns double points for that round. Obviously, you’d want that to be one of the 15 or 16-point rounds, unless you really believed you wouldn’t score above 8 in any of them, which is highly unlikely. We discussed our jokering strategy ahead of time, and decided on thresholds. We used to have a threshold of 14 for the music round, but a super-tough round 8 in 2015 made us back off from that. So this year our threshold for Round 2 was 13, and the threshold for Rounds 3 and 4 was 12. If we felt confident in getting at least that amount, we’d joker the round, and if we didn’t feel that good about any of them, we’d wait for Round 8.

Opening Ceremonies

This year the show began with “Principal Dicker” (John Dicker is the CEO of Geeks Who Drink) introducing a Seattle history pageant staged by a faux 5th-grade class, actually a bunch of GWD quizmasters. This consisted of a bunch of mini-skits portraying events like Captain Vancouver’s arrival and Jimi Hendrix learning to play guitar, each of which bizarrely ended with square dancing. This felt a little flat to me, though I can’t tell whether that’s from the aforementioned audio/video issues or because it just wasn’t that funny.

The fun factor went up a few notches after that, though, with this awesome thing:

With that, let’s start the recap! Our team’s experiences are listed in [square brackets], and the answers are provided in a separate post.

Tiebreaker

After the Love Boat video, some Geek I couldn’t see very well mentioned that there were 212 teams playing this year, and that the event was sold out, but there was one more Seattle guy who had wanted to participate, so they invited him to say a little something onstage… and out walks Ken Jennings! Not sure why I didn’t see this coming, given that Jennings lives in Seattle and is no stranger to big trivia events, but for me it was a very pleasant surprise. Jennings was his usual witty and charming self, as when he got in a dig at the top prize money — “$11,000? So, that’s like a Daily Double for me, I guess.”

Jennings then read the “ceremonial first question.” As they’ve done the past few years, the Geeks asked a tiebreaker question whose answer is a number calculated from various trivia answers. Unlike the past few years, the tiebreaker was the very first question asked, probably to give Jennings something meaningful to do. The question was this:

Take the sum of the current ages of Donald Trump’s wives, and multiply it by the number of commercially available varieties of Newman’s Own salad dressings. Subtract from the result the number of sites administered by the National Park Service. Or, to put it another way:

(W x D) – P

where W = Trump’s wives’ ages summed, D = number of Newman’s Own salad dressing varieties, and P = sites administered by the National Park Service.

See the answers

Round 1: Sound Off

With the tiebreaker out of the way, we launched into Round 1. The Geeks love wordplay, and they love bringing together unexpected categories, hence Round 1, whose title was “Sound Off” and whose subject was “noises and inlets.”

1. Slick Goodlin was Bell’s sound-barrier test pilot, before the Air Force took over the X-1 project and filled the seat with what captain?
2. The Inside Passage is a handy way — and in fact pretty much the only way — to get to what U.S. state capital?
3. In 2016, what microblogging company invested $70 million in Soundcloud? [This was the one question in this round we really struggled with, debating back and forth between two answers before finally settling on… the wrong one. Sorry to say, I was one of the people arguing for the wrong answer.]
4. Bahia de Cochinos is the local name for what inlet that was newsworthy for a few weeks in 1961?
5. Dr. Dischord collected all sorts of terrible noises, in what classic kids’ book by Norton Juster? [Amusingly, one of our warmup topics from earlier that day was kid-lit. I would say “Preparation FTW!”, but since we came in 15th I guess it’s more like “Preparation For This One Question!” FT1Q!]
6. Dionne Warwick still can’t tell us how to get to what city of 1 million at the southeast tip of San Francisco Bay?
7. Orfield Labs maintains a room so quiet it will make you hallucinate, in what Central Time city that is also home to U.S. Bank stadium?
8. The laryngeal inlet connects your larynx to what similarly named other part of the throat?

[We ended up with 7 correct answers in this round. So far, so good!]
See the answers

Round 2: Not The World’s Oldest Profession

Round 2 is always a music round in a GWD quiz, and for the past several years at Geek Bowl, they’ve hired one band to cover the 8 songs in the round (in snippets of around 30 seconds), as well as to entertain the crowd during scoring breaks. In past years, the band has had some kind of comedy or novelty quality — The Dan Band from 2015 is an all-male group that foulmouths its way through all-female songs, and Metalachi from 2016 is, well, heavy metal mariachi.

This year, however, the Geeks played it straight by hiring the Brooklyn disco-flavored band Escort, who are fronted by Adeline Michèle and feature choreographed backup singers and the works. It was clear that Escort is a good band, but the acoustically hostile room really worked against them, at least from where we were sitting. We could barely make out a word Michèle was singing much of the time, and our attempts to lip-read from the screens were foiled by the video director’s strange reluctance to cut from a static slide reading something like “Question 5” to an actual feed of the band. We’d generally get to see them perform each song partially and eventually, but it was frustrating to be stymied in our attempts both to see and hear what the band was doing. Our only hope was to recognize a melody or bass line, which worked some of the time. On the other hand, the Philly team Independence Hall And Oates was at the table right behind ours, and they ended up taking 2nd place in the whole Bowl, so maybe acoustics wasn’t our biggest problem.

In any case, the theme of this round was professions — either the title of the song or the name of the artist would contain the name of a profession. That name may or may not be spelled correctly, and that profession may or may not be legal, but it would be in there somewhere. When I first posted this recap, all I could do was list the answers, since I had no way of recapping the questions. However, since then the Geeks have posted video of Escort (sounding much clearer than they did to us.) Thanks, Geeks!

[We got a total of 11 on this one, missing #3 and #5 completely, and getting the song wrong on #8. We certainly didn’t feel good enough about it to joker. So combined with our previous round, that gave us a total of 18.]
See the answers

Round 3: Justice Is Served

Round 3 of a typical Geeks Who Drink quiz is typically some sort of gimmick round, but the vast majority of the time, they boil down to either a round of 50/50 (i.e. “this or that”) type questions, or a speed round in which you have something like 2 minutes to name 8 members from some category. In Geek Bowl, round 3 is pretty much always 50/50, and sometimes is combined with something else, as was the case this year. The questions were on the topic of justice:

1. Who sought justice in the form of a “pound of flesh”: MacBeth or Shylock?
2. If you go to jail looking for justice, that’s what you’ll find: just us. This is a paraphrase of a quote by whom: Richard Pryor or Tupac?
3. Yes or no: is the Department of Justice headed by the Secretary of Justice?
4. Who is directing this year’s Justice League movie: Ben Affleck or Zack Snyder?
5. That statue of a blindfolded lady you see in front of courthouses: did the Romans call her “Justitia” or “Prudentia”? [We were so sure about our answer on this one. Too bad we were wrong.]
6. Who was married to 1990s baseball star David Justice: Halle Berry or Holly Robinson?
7. Poetic Justice was the sophomore film from what director: John Singleton or Mario Van Peebles?

Then question 8 was in fact a speed round. We had an additional 2 minutes on top of the usual 2-minute timer to answer the following question: “From 1991 to 2016, eight justices left the U.S. Supreme Court, one way or another. Name them.”

[We felt really good about all our answers to this round, and confidently jokered. Then we found out later that we’d gone the wrong way on #2 and #5, as well as misstepping on one of the eight justices. So we ended up with 12, doubled to 24, and added to our previous tally of 18 for a total of 42. Well, even if we’d known in advance we were only getting 12, we still would have jokered per our agreed-upon threshold. But it was a bummer to do worse than we’d anticipated.]
See the answers

Round 4: I Once Was A Man From Nantucket

This was my favorite round from this year’s Geek Bowl. The premise was that each question was a limerick that described a memoir written in the last 15 years (with the publication year provided in the question). We had to name the title and author of each book, for a total of 16 possible points. The questions were tough, but so cleverly written that I enjoyed them even as they were killing us.

1. (2013)
I grew up educated as hell,
And I told other girls to as well.
The Taliban fussed,
And they shot up my bus —
Now please, may I have a Nobel?

2. (2011)
I guess I’ll just come out and say,
Since I know that you’ll ask anyway:
A dude with a knife
Cut my face; I was five.
Now let’s talk Sarah Palin, OK?

3. (2003)
While rehab unscrambled my brain,
I got root canals sans Novocaine.
Too hardcore for AA
I was — oh, by the way,
I made most of this up on the train.

4. (2014)
I hope I don’t sound like a whina —
I’m obsessed with myself and that’s fine-a.
Surely no one will mind
If I talk of the time
I found rocks in my sister’s vagina.

5. (2011)
Once I threw my kid out in the cold
for not listening — she’s three years old.
I’m a bad Chinese mama
(From west Indiana),
But hey, controversy is gold!

6. (2008)
If you’d like to write undeterred,
The running shoe sharpens the word.
But six miles a day
Isn’t easy, I’d say —
It’s not like I’m some wind-up bird.

7. (2016)
My friends quit their jobs ’cause they’re bored,
And got cell phones that I can’t afford.
This redneck malaise
Fosters social decays —
How’s the South gonna rise up? Good Lord!

8. (2012)
I don’t make child porn, I’m no creep —
But my settlements never come cheap.
And if you think twice,
You’ll see it was nice
When I likened that girl to my Jeep.

[As much as I enjoyed the writing in this round, the results for us were quite brutal. We got a total of seven points. In a 16-point round. OUCH. Added to our previous tally of 42, that brought us to 49. This is a great example of the Geeks trying to shake up the results by pouring a lot of points into one topic area, which some people in the room were inevitably going to nail, but many others were going to flail. This time, we were in the latter group.]
See the answers

At this point, the Geeks took a scoring break. Escort played, and men stood in long lines for the bathroom. After the scores were tallied, answers were shown for rounds 1-4, and then the team rankings were displayed onscreen. We were in 30th place.

Round 5: Checks And Phalluses

Remember how I mentioned that although the raunch has been toned down, it’s also always there? Well, here it is, once again presented in an ingenious and fun way. Round 5 was a video round, in which the Geeks presented 8 different rebuses whose answers were world leaders. They provided the years in which the leader was in power, but other than that we were on our own. Each of these rebuses (well, all except one) hinged on a dick joke — a key to each one was some slang for penis.

Previously I had just listed the answers here, but now the Geeks have posted the video, so I can just present that. Thanks, Geeks!

[The was the one and only round we aced in Geek Bowl 11, and about half of those answers are thanks to Jonathan, who was not only lightning-fast at figuring out the rebuses, but was also aware of some world leaders about whom the rest of us were clueless. Thank you Jonathan! So 8 points on that brought our total up to 57.]
See the answers

Round 6: Muppety Womenfolk

There are quite a few women who participate in Geek Bowl, but they are still a minority — I’d say the room averaged about 70%-75% men. In response to this, the Geeks often try to include female-friendly categories, and this year that meant a round about feminism. Well, half about feminism and half about the Muppets, because, um…

1. In 1975, Jim Henson created a weekly bit called “The Land Of Gorch” for what nascent TV show?
2. Though they most likely wouldn’t be friends with each other, both Richard Nixon and Lucretia Mott belonged to what historically Christian sect, which was also called The Society Of Friends?
3. The least essential of their early movies, The Muppets Take Manhattan featured a cameo by what then-Mayor of New York City?
4. The second-wave feminist cornerstone The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, and the third-wave classic Gender Trouble by Judith Butler both drew on the 1949 book The Second Sex, by what renowned social theorist?
5. Kermit The Frog made an unexpected cameo as a shopper at Dustin Hoffman’s titular store, in what 2007 box office bomb?
6. Rebecca Walker coined the phrase “Third Wave Feminism” in 1992, ten years after her mom published what Pulitzer Prize-winning novel?
7. The Muppets used a dream to weigh in on the Duncan family’s house-rebuilding decision, on a 2013 episode of what Disney Channel series? [Talk about a topic we have no idea about. Half of us have no kids, and the other half’s kids are either too old for the Disney Channel or are uninterested in it.]
8. We all know women only make 78 cents for every male dollar, but which group makes a measly 54% compared to white men: Black women or Latinas? [This was the first coin-flip of the day we debated on and actually landed on the right answer.]

[We blanked on #7, and had yet another EVER-SO-CLOSE but wrong answer on #5 (see the Answers section), leaving us with 6 points in that round. 57 + 6 = 63 as our running total.]
See the answers

Round 7: Geek Kune Do

A couple of years ago in Albuquerque, the Geeks hired a dance company to perform famous dances from movies. This year was a variation on that — they hired actors with expertise in stage combat to re-enact famous fight scenes from movies. Unfortunately, while the dancers at Albuquerque were very easy to see, the long rectangle of Smith Cove terminal made it quite tough to make out details of the fight scenes, and the side-angle camera views and garbly acoustics didn’t help matters. Not only that, each fight scene was performed only once for some reason, making the visual/audio even higher stakes than normal. We muddled through nevertheless.

It’s tough to describe these scenes without giving away the answers, so I’ll just give the answer first and then a brief description of the fight scene.

1. Shaun Of The Dead (the scene where the characters fight a zombie with pool cues, to Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now”.)
2. Bridget Jones’ Diary (the scene where Colin Firth fights Hugh Grant, to The Weather Girls’ “It’s Raining Men”.) [We were not familiar with this movie, so guessed “The Adventures of Priscilla Queen Of The Desert” based on the musical accompaniment.]
3. Oldboy (the scene where a hammer-wielding character takes on 25 guys.) [Okay, here’s where I screwed up rule 3A. We didn’t know this scene automatically, so we were discussing it under a lot of time pressure. I knew there was a famous fight scene in Oldboy where one guy takes on a lot of other guys. So as everybody was throwing stuff out, I said, “What about Oldboy?”, but did not do a good job of making sure everyone knew that answer was on the table. Because the discussion was fast-paced and a little chaotic, nobody else heard me. I had not seen the movie, and did not know that the solo fighter was carrying a hammer, or else this would have been a lock. Instead, we cued off the hammer and went down a different path, guessing Avengers: Age Of Ultron, thinking of a Thor hallucination scene. George had remembered him being overcome by enemies in that scene, which does happen but in a fairly different way.]
4. Fight Club (the scene in which Edward Norton kicks the crap out of himself.)
5. Kill Bill, Vol. 2 (Uma Thurman vs. Daryl Hannah in a trailer.)
6. The Karate Kid (come on, could there be any doubt which fight scene it is?)
7. Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (This was an amusing twist on the “fight scene” concept — a bitter argument between George and Martha in which no blows are exchanged but plenty of blood is drawn.)
8. Happy Gilmore (Adam Sandler vs. Bob Barker)

[Brian rocked the dance questions in Albuquerque, and he was great at these fight questions too. Given that his main gig is a podcast about cover songs, I have to wonder if his expertise extends to covers of movies as well. Anyway, we whiffed on #2 and #3, giving us 6 points for the round and a total of 69 for the game thus far.]

After this was another scoring break, during which Escort played again, and the Geeks showed a couple of videos, starting with the annual “In Memoriam” tradition. Let’s watch it, and then let’s talk. Warning, though, there are spoilers within for: Stranger Things, Supernatural, Westworld, Orange Is The New Black, The Walking Dead, Star Wars: Rogue One, and Game of Thrones. If you’d like to avoid those, you can skip to 4:47 for the part that’s relevant below.

So, the woman at the end was Cindy Stowell, who won an incredible six times on Jeopardy! while suffering from Stage 4 cancer. I didn’t know Cindy personally, but she was a frequent Geeks Who Drink player in Austin, and a participant in my online trivia league. Between the many testimonials I read there and the fundamentally moving nature of her story, her episodes were very emotional for me. Her appearance as the capstone of the Geek Bowl In Memoriam video was absolutely perfect, and devastating. Anybody with any connection to her story was misty-eyed to say the least. Well done, Geeks.

After that was a silly fake movie trailer for “Geeks Who Drink: The Movie”. This couldn’t help but fall a little flat after the emotional peak of the In Memoriam video, and it was also quite difficult to hear for various reasons. Oh well. At last scores were tallied, the answers shown for rounds 5-7, and the ranks displayed: we’d moved from 30th to 23rd.

Round 8: Random Knowledge

As I say every year, Round 8 is always “random knowledge”, i.e. no particular theme, and questions that can span any domain. In the pub quiz, the point values vary from question to question, but in Geek Bowl each round 8 question is always worth two points.

1. Other than Jesus Christ himself, which two Old Testament dudes are the first two people mentioned in the New Testament?
2. a) The bark of the cinchona tree gives us what anti-malaria medicine? b) Usually it’s cassia bark that you’re actually buying when you pick up a jar of what common spice? [We were all pretty on top of the first question, but I think it was Jonathan who got part two for us.]
3. Besides the University of Connecticut, what two schools have won the NCAA Women’s Division 1 Basketball Tournament in this decade? [We had some debate about whether “this decade” meant “in the last 10 years” or “in the 2010s.” This is the one question on which GWD’s writing could have been a little sharper. It turns out to have meant the latter, since there are actually a whole three non-UConn teams that have won in the past 10 years.]
4. After the split from the chimpanzees, but before the rise of Homo, there were two genera of bipedal hominids, whose names start with a vowel. In fact, they start with the same vowel. Name them.
5. a) In 2017, Rockstar Games is publishing a much-anticipated sequel to what old-timey 2010 game? b) However, despite our letter-writing campaign, they are still not updating their XBox 360 launch title about what indoor sport? [We had no idea on part two, so we tossed around bunches of indoor sports, and ended up perfectly nailing the right one. Too little, too late, sadly.]
6. Name each popular, bygone blog from its final three post headlines. a) “My So-Called Life”, “Roller Derby”, and “The TED Conference”. b) “How Things Work”, “Letters From Our Exes”, and “How Guilty Should I Feel?” [We could only think of one popular, bygone blog, so we filled it in for both blanks.]
7. a) What German composed the famous wedding march for his suite from A Midsummer Night’s Dream? b) The characters getting married in the play were what Athenian duke and Amazon queen? [Happy to say our answer for part two was my contribution.]
8. a) Editor Anna Wintour’s proxy in The Devil Wears Prada went by what name? b) Wintour cut her teeth as a fashion editor at a Guccione-owned erotic magazine for women, which shared its name with what brand of paper towels? [Jonathan got us to part one, and George nailed part two. That guy really knows his… consumer products.]

[Not a terrible final round for us — 12 points, same as Round 2. But it would have taken a lot more than that to get us on stage. Our final total by my reckoning was 81 points. Interestingly, the final standings of Geek Bowl showed us at 83, which makes me wonder whether they took some of our close-but-not-quite answers after all.]
See the answers

I’ll end with the one video the Geeks have released thus far, which is actually an amalgam of two videos played at Geek Bowl. The first part, in which Marty Walsh (the mayor of Boston) welcomes Boston teams and announces the location of Geek Bowl 12, actually played right after Ken Jennings’ opening question. The second part, with the Neil Diamond music, played as teams were leaving the terminal.

Looking forward to it, Boston!

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1 Comment

  1. Lee Ann R

    Thanks so much, Paul! Sounds like I missed a good time.

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