Trivial conquest

I went out to just my second-ever night of bar trivia on Greg's invite, joining him, a couple people he knows, and Leah at the Globe. We won, which is a lot better than I did in my previous bar trivia effort (in Washington with Shannon, two years ago). Of course, this team was also more balanced than that one. For example, Round One would have been a disaster for a lot of people, as its theme was the Muppet Show and many of the questions were not at all easy - but Greg grew up on the Muppet Show and we ended up getting ten of ten. As it happens, there were seven total rounds and we led after every single one of them for an amazing wire-to-wire victory that had teams around us grumbling, jokingly I hope, about us being "ringers," whatever that means. (Seriously, what's a "ringer" in bar trivia? Is bar trivia supposed to be for stupid people and so having actual smart people show up isn't fair?)

The "matching" round was geography, matching names of Central American and Caribbean countries to blank maps of said countries, which of course I thrashed (three of the 13 teams there actually managed a perfect score in this round, but I wonder if any of the others could have done it without the names of the countries presented as a list - I really wish I'd gotten on Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? back in the day, although it's hard to get to that final round when the second round is kind of a crapshoot and is, if it can be considered a test at all, a test of memory and not geographic knowledge).

The prize for winning was a $50 gift certificate... for the bar! So I guess we're going back at least once, because there's nothing like a smoke-filled environment if you really enjoy overpriced hamburgers. We also got t-shirts, but so did everyone. The entry fees apparently go to an MS charity, though, so you can't complain either way. And it was pretty fun. We all got along - no big fights over answers - and chuckled over various bits of conversation. Everything I was wearing is saturated with cigarette smoke, but I'd still do it again.