![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Trivia Night
Nov. 9th, 2008 10:58 amSo, last night I took part in a trivia contest. My team did pretty well; we finished fifth out of fifty-five tables - out of the money, but still very respectable. I didn't get home until nearly midnight, which is about par for the course.
These contests are as much social events as they are anything else; in particular, everybody brings food. I brought a bag of chips; the people who organized our table - and made up half of it - supplied two buckets of KFC and a gooey butter cake. (This morning brought me intermittent minor GI distress....) Beer and soda were supplied by the contest organizers.
There were also, as usual, other activities - a silent auction, door prize drawings, and so on; the big event was the auctioning off of time-shares in a vacation home in Ireland. (The man who initiated the contest is a history teacher at the local community college; he immigrated here from Ireland twenty-some years ago, and wanted to establish a scholarship for someone following the same path. The contest, with auxiliary activities, raised several thousand dollars.)
The contest itself was pretty good; the questions were reasonably hard, and there were some neat twists. Normally each round has a topic (these included "Ireland" and "Green"), but this time two rounds were "mystery topics"; each answer was a pointer towards the real topic, and naming that real topic was worth bonus points. (The first one had answers such as "lead", "Pistol Pete", "egg white", "billiards/pool", "Candlestick Park", and "the Green Berets". Our table didn't get the mystery topic, but it was groaningly obvious when it was announced.)
It was about as much fun as you can get for $15.
These contests are as much social events as they are anything else; in particular, everybody brings food. I brought a bag of chips; the people who organized our table - and made up half of it - supplied two buckets of KFC and a gooey butter cake. (This morning brought me intermittent minor GI distress....) Beer and soda were supplied by the contest organizers.
There were also, as usual, other activities - a silent auction, door prize drawings, and so on; the big event was the auctioning off of time-shares in a vacation home in Ireland. (The man who initiated the contest is a history teacher at the local community college; he immigrated here from Ireland twenty-some years ago, and wanted to establish a scholarship for someone following the same path. The contest, with auxiliary activities, raised several thousand dollars.)
The contest itself was pretty good; the questions were reasonably hard, and there were some neat twists. Normally each round has a topic (these included "Ireland" and "Green"), but this time two rounds were "mystery topics"; each answer was a pointer towards the real topic, and naming that real topic was worth bonus points. (The first one had answers such as "lead", "Pistol Pete", "egg white", "billiards/pool", "Candlestick Park", and "the Green Berets". Our table didn't get the mystery topic, but it was groaningly obvious when it was announced.)
It was about as much fun as you can get for $15.
