I’ve been on a serious trivia kick the last few weeks. I've been watching Jeopardy! daily. I've been playing weekly at a bar, and I started playing this game called LearnedLeague, where you get six questions every weekday, and you compete head-to-head against some random people. It’s all on the honor system, and you assign defensive points based on which questions you think will be the most difficult for your opponent. For me, pretty much every question is difficult. I average around two correct answers per day. (Friday I only got one right. I have yet to be completely shut out; my record for correct answer is five – and I lost!) But that isn’t abjectly terrible, as my record is 5-8-4, and the only people who would ever want to do this are hard-core trivia nerds, so I’m kinda-sorta holding my own.
My biggest flaw in trivia is near total ignorance in several key areas: art, classical music, opera, Greek mythology (most of the ancient world actually), religion, Shakespeare, and very recent pop music. That still leaves a decent number of categories in which I’m either excellent (sports, math, Gen-X pop culture, word play/vocabulary), pretty good (movies, TV, science, current events), or mediocre (literature, history, geography). So, as reflected in my record, it all adds up to below-average-but-not-completely-awful.
Retention, sadly, is also becoming an increasingly worse problem for me. I just don’t have that iron-trap memory that I once had. I actually got a math problem wrong the other day. I knew exactly what this thing was and how it was used, but I couldn’t for the life of me come up with the term in question. It was so frustrating. I had some sort of mental block that wouldn’t let me remember it. That’s totally an age thing. That type of thing just didn’t happen to me in my twenties. I mean, it’s not like I’m a decrepit old man, but I’m a little slower and little less sharp than I used to be. That’s just how aging goes.
My Sunday night bar trivia is a good palate cleanser, however. We just dominate the competition. We've not taken first place only three or four times over the past three years. Last week, our best player wasn’t there, and we still won by like 100 points. I was coming through with a lot of correct answers, and it was nice to remember, oh yeah, against “normal” competition I’m not half bad. My father-in-law wants me to go on Jeopardy!, because I get most the answers (er... questions) right when we watch it together, but I’m not sure he realizes two key things about the show: a) They don’t just let you go on it because you want to; there’s a very competitive tryout/audition process; b) all the contestants on it know almost all the clues all the time. Everybody is so knowledgeable it effectively becomes a game of buzzer speed, betting strategy, and luck.
Speaking of Jeopardy! contestants, the aforementioned best player on my trivia team has an audition in a few weeks. He’s been trying for like 15 years, and this is the first time he’s gotten this far, so he’s pretty excited. If he gets on, he will be the eighth person I know personally to be on the show. That's crazy. Almost all of them come from the crossword puzzle community. There’s a huge overlap between Crossworld and Trivialand. (I also know a guy who won almost $3 million on a trivia game show.) Personally, I don’t really have much desire to try out for Jeopardy!. I don’t feel like I’m good enough, and I don’t really want to put in the work to try to get good enough. Sports Jeopardy!, on the other hand, I’d love to go on that show -- if it still existed. I did try to sign up once for it, but the website was temporarily down, and I never went back and tried again. So, I guess I didn't want to be on it that badly.
In other news, today is Father's Day. (Why isn't it Fathers' Day? Doesn't the day belong to all fathers? If it's singular, I'd prefer it be Father Day or Fathers Day with an attributive noun instead of a possessive. Anyway...) It's kinda a made-up holiday, but I guess it's nice to have my family be extra nice to me for an hour or so (that's usually how long it lasts).
Alright gotta run -- literally I'm going for a jog.
Until next time...
Okay, that’s all I got for today. Until next time…
My biggest flaw in trivia is near total ignorance in several key areas: art, classical music, opera, Greek mythology (most of the ancient world actually), religion, Shakespeare, and very recent pop music. That still leaves a decent number of categories in which I’m either excellent (sports, math, Gen-X pop culture, word play/vocabulary), pretty good (movies, TV, science, current events), or mediocre (literature, history, geography). So, as reflected in my record, it all adds up to below-average-but-not-completely-awful.
Retention, sadly, is also becoming an increasingly worse problem for me. I just don’t have that iron-trap memory that I once had. I actually got a math problem wrong the other day. I knew exactly what this thing was and how it was used, but I couldn’t for the life of me come up with the term in question. It was so frustrating. I had some sort of mental block that wouldn’t let me remember it. That’s totally an age thing. That type of thing just didn’t happen to me in my twenties. I mean, it’s not like I’m a decrepit old man, but I’m a little slower and little less sharp than I used to be. That’s just how aging goes.
[I would have won a LearnedLeague match had I remembered Louie Anderson once hosted "Family Feud". I used to watch that show all the time. I just couldn't come up with it. Super frustrating.]
[Dimebag Darrell of Pantera. I would have won a LearnedLeague match had I known what band he was in. Pantera was my second guess, but I went with Insane Clown Posse. It was a bad guess, not just because it was wrong, but because I know the two many people from ICP are named Jay and Violent Bob or something like that.]
Speaking of Jeopardy! contestants, the aforementioned best player on my trivia team has an audition in a few weeks. He’s been trying for like 15 years, and this is the first time he’s gotten this far, so he’s pretty excited. If he gets on, he will be the eighth person I know personally to be on the show. That's crazy. Almost all of them come from the crossword puzzle community. There’s a huge overlap between Crossworld and Trivialand. (I also know a guy who won almost $3 million on a trivia game show.) Personally, I don’t really have much desire to try out for Jeopardy!. I don’t feel like I’m good enough, and I don’t really want to put in the work to try to get good enough. Sports Jeopardy!, on the other hand, I’d love to go on that show -- if it still existed. I did try to sign up once for it, but the website was temporarily down, and I never went back and tried again. So, I guess I didn't want to be on it that badly.
In other news, today is Father's Day. (Why isn't it Fathers' Day? Doesn't the day belong to all fathers? If it's singular, I'd prefer it be Father Day or Fathers Day with an attributive noun instead of a possessive. Anyway...) It's kinda a made-up holiday, but I guess it's nice to have my family be extra nice to me for an hour or so (that's usually how long it lasts).
Alright gotta run -- literally I'm going for a jog.
Until next time...
Okay, that’s all I got for today. Until next time…
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