Sunday, September 28, 2008

You Shall Never Be Hungry Again!

Fantastic week at trivia this week. Not because we won - we didn't - but because trivia was actually hard. At least, we thought it was hard. We have a veritable smorgasbord of missed questions for you, my trivia-hungry readers. Dig in!

1. Who won ESPN's award for "Wide Receiver of the '80s?"
2. What was the first animated film to be nominated for Best Picture?
3. What was the title of Alexandra Ripley's much-anticipated sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind?
4. What superstar lamely told Madonna that her show was "neat," during the documentary Truth or Dare?
5. Which hip-hop heroes collaborated with heavy metal band Anthrax to remake the hit "Bring the Noise?"
6. What fast food chain has begun selling Brazil nut chocolate chip cookies, in an effort to benefit rainforest communities?
7. What self-described "Architect of Rock and Roll" helped cut the ribbon at the opening ceremonies of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

Note - we actually missed eight questions, but I am unable to verify the answer to the eighth, or even to find a reference to the incident the question is about. So, out it goes.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Where'd you go?

Three reasons for last week's lack of posts:

1. My laptop died, thus depriving me of my usual entry to the Internets.
2. We missed zero questions at trivia. I could have taken some from the stash I save for just such an occasion, but those were on my laptop, in a folder I don't usually back up - see reason #1.
3. Heroes premiere + no TiVo = no more watching OTH on Mondays.

I hereby promise to miss trivia questions this week.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Trivia: Still More Fun Than Studying

This week did not go nearly as well for us as last week. But, as usual, our loss is your gain, because more misses for us is more questions for you. I know there's a subset of my tiny tiny readership that will have no trouble with the halftime question...

1. What does the "W" stand for on a WAP phone?
2. Who was the first African-American to grace the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue?
3. Halftime: Name the last seven films to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
4. In what year was the original Playstation released?
5. Which Peanuts character was dressed in clothes designed by over three hundred fashion designers in a 1990 retrospective at the Louvre?
Final:
6. Which English-speaking nation stopped minting one- and two-cent coins in 1991, when the cost to produce them exceeded their value?

Monday, September 8, 2008

Is "Oedipal" the word I'm looking for here?

Okay, so going into episode two, let's recap where everyone is:
Lucas is married... to Brooke! No wait, it's Peyton! Um, it's Lindsey? No, it's a dream sequence, and he's in the airport, waiting for... Peyton, which is exactly what we expected all along. They're in Vegas, getting married, or maybe they're not, I'm not entirely sure, because I spent a lot of the episode watching on mute because I was on the phone with the f.
Dan is not dead after he was hit by a car... but he's in the hospital. No, wait, he's in a room made up to look like a hospital room, and his fake nurse is - wait for it - Fran, the Nutjob Nanny! This is her elaborate revenge scheme to get Jamie back. I get the feeling that this week, she will make Dan re-write his last book so that her favorite character doesn't die.
Nathan's back hurts.
Haley is doing something.
Skills is sleeping with Nathan's mom. Yeah.
Mouth is leaving for Omaha, and wants Millie to go with him. Millie decides to go, but changes her mind, because Brooke is going to war with her mom for control of the company. How exciting! Brooke, ever the martyr, tells Millie to go, and the show's two "unattractive" people ride off into the sunset. Even more exciting, Brooke is attacked by a masked man as she locks up the store for the night. Is it an Oedipal plot? Find out in two minutes!

Sunday, September 7, 2008

You Can Do What You Want to Do

I'm disappointed in the difficulty level of the trivia lately. It's one thing when a team gets a ridiculously high score for the week; any given set of questions could be right in one team's wheelhouse. But, and I know I've harped on this before, when the top three teams are within two points of a perfect score, that's just no leeway for teams to get anything outside their areas of expertise.
Anyway, on to a story of our only miss: Each round, we're given the categories for each question in advance. This, in theory, helps us decide how many points to bid on the first two questions. To pass the time between questions, our team usually tries to come up with possible questions for the later categories. On occasion, we have been able to come up with the exact question - last week, I correctly predicted that the Just Shoot Me question would ask for the name of the magazine (sadly, this clairvoyance did not help us correctly answer the question). On rarer occasions, the category is so obvious that we have come up with the correct answer without a question. Tonight, the category was "backup dancers," and we figured the answer simply had to be K-Fed. When it wasn't, we were so stuck that we were unable to come up with anything. So that's question one, question two is the only other question we really had to think about, and then there's two I made up. Please to enjoy.

1. What future superstar was a backup dancer in Janet Jackson's video for "That's the Way Love Goes?"
2. What rap star suavely blamed his teammates after he was cut from a tryout for the Toronto Raptors?
3. What is the oldest continuously used auto raceway in the U.S.?
4. In Calvin and Hobbes, what are Calvin's parents' names?

Monday, September 1, 2008

Or, you could watch the RNC

We're just over an hour from the premiere of One Tree Hill, and when we last saw the gang, Lucas was sitting in the airport with two tickets to Vegas, proposing to his phone. We also saw Brooke, Peyton, and Lindsey on their respective phones. Who is on the receiving end of the proposal? Well, if it's Brooke, that would just be weird. As for Lindsey, she just got done telling Lucas that, when she told him she was seeing someone else - thus causing him to flip out and assault a high-schooler, possibly costing him his coaching job - she was lying. "Hey, sorry I f%$@ed with your mind and screwed up your life" doesn't strike me as the sort of thing that would lead to a proposal. Seriously, if it's Lindsey, this is going to be a short season of recaps.
Also to be answered: Will Mouth really quit his job and move to Omaha? Will Millie the Absurdly Gorgeous Frumpy Girl go with him? Is Dan finally dead? Will everything this season be Nathan's fault? Will Skills have a meaningful plot line? Tune in tonight and see!

It's all right, 'cause there's no Saved By The Bell!

This week was "90's sitcom trivia," and, despite having watched a great deal of television in that decade, I learned just how much I don't know about 90's sitcoms. For example, I did not know that JAG, Melrose Place, Dawson's Creek, and Beverly Hills, 90210 were sitcoms. I'm on the record as being against "theme nights," and the inability of the organizers to stay inside their announced themes is one reason. Having to type "On [show], [question]" over and over is another.

1. On The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, what is Will's father's occupation?
2. And where did Will and Carlton attend college?
3. On Full House, what was Jesse's original last name?
4. On Everybody Loves Raymond, what unusual quirk does Raymond's brother Robert have when he eats?
5. What is the name of the magazine where the cast of Just Shoot Me works?
Final:
6. On Seinfeld, what food caused Jerry to end his fourteen-year non-vomit streak?