Quiz Night

Quiz night is a big thing in the Bermuda ex-pat social calendar.  Many of the local pubs hot a weekly trivia quiz.  This is a lot different than going to the pubs in Canada and joining in with an electronic board and playing online with strangers from other bars.  The Bermuda Quiz has a live host, usually with a UK accent that makes understanding the questions an additional challenge.  Teams attend regularly, and rivalries take root over years of competition.  Prizes are considerable...lots of alcohol to take home, T-shirts, money, vouchers for the pub.  For example, the last Quiz I was at had a chance to win $625 in a one shot challenge at guessing high and low on cards at the end of the official Quiz.

People don't just attend the Quiz, they study for the Quiz.  They sometimes assign things to members of the team -- memorize state capitals and African geography, read all the newspapers for current events, sport history, watch old movies online...etc.  I, however, am not one of those people.  I will sometimes come along if lured to fill an extra seat with the promise of beer and nachos.  Occasionally my brain fires to life with obscure historical information like which ruler had a beard tax, at what Henry the VIII's 3rd wife's name was, but unfortunately 80's music is never a topic.

That's what happened this week, as I tagged along with Helen and Christine to go to the weekly Quiz at the Swizzle Inn.  Now, it turns out I am not totally dead weight with my unprepared brain.  I knew how many points a D tile is worth in scrabble, what country uses ".mt" as its Internet domain, the capital of Rhode Island, which state has the largest part of Yellowstone Park, picked Eddie Murphy's voice out of a sound clip, and strangely solved the riddle of which song was released in 1991 on an Epic Record label from an album called Dangerous that had a color in the title.  From the 10 famous comedy movies, the only 2 I recognized were Airplane and Dumb and Dumber...but so did everyone else.  Christine and I had to have a serious discussion about how many territories are in Canada now, but fortunately we got it right.  I did quite well on the word puzzles...but the rest of the quiz was left to Helen, Christine, and Judy to drag us into a sad 6th place.  Fortunately they knew things like who sang the theme song from "Die Another Day," recognized movie clips from things like "A Night at the Opera," "The Pink Panther," and a myriad of other things.  I now know that the Golden Gate Bridge is NOT the highest steel bridge structure, and which is the second largest of the United Arab Emirates.  If we would have known what year Sesame Street debuted in the US we would have had 5th, and had we not been so confused about David and Goliath (which Christine heard as the lion) and debating why we were talking about lions instead of giants, we might have put the right answer down, which Christine eventually said, and made 4th.  It was a fun night anyway.   At least I knew a few answers this time and didn't feel totally dumb!