An Almost True Trivia Story

    Hubby Bruce and I went to a local restaurant and stayed for the weekly trivia game.  We’d heard about it and, heck, you can win free food.  Since we like their pizza, why not have an extra large, thin crust, double cheese with mushrooms on half and pepperoni and green pepper on the other half, on them?  Oh, may I mention we are pretty good at trivia?  It’s been a while since we’ve played Trivial Pursuit, a game from the 1980s, but when we did, we beat the socks off our kids. 

Once the rules were explained, mainly no cell phones allowed with which to google the answers and no shouting them out, we chose a name for our two-person team.  Being the well-educated sophisticates we are, we cleverly decided upon Team Malcolm.  (In case you don’t know, Malcolm is our last name.)

We began.  The first question: How many days are in a fortnight?  I jumped on that one, writing down the number 14.  Correct, of course.  Then I got one about the Joint Chiefs of Staff right and Bruce got Pulp Fiction. It went downhill, at lightning speed, from there. 

After ten minutes, we were doing so poorly that when they asked five questions about television theme songs from the '90s, I hollered, “We didn’t even own a TV back then!”  Not true, but I was hoping for a little sympathy at our wretched showing.  When none was forthcoming, we left at half-time having learned a couple of lessons.  #1.  Just because I beat a radio DJ out of a pizza twenty-one years ago by stumping him with Bruce’s question:  What was Li’l Abner’s legitimate day job?  Answer:  He was a mattress tester for the Stunned Ox Mattress Factory.  Yes, just because I won that one, doesn’t mean we know quite everything.  #2.  Never assign your real last name to your team because Amelia Island, Florida, where we live, is a small place and word of any humiliation spreads quickly.  Examples of such: So far this morning, the mailman asked me if I know what color the sky is and a store clerk asked how many toes are on a human being’s left foot.  While I’m pretty sure the sky is blue, I’m thinking the toe thing might be a trick question.  Is that with our without webs and do webbed toes count as one or two toes?  Hmm.  I’m still thinking this one over …

(Reprinted from 2014 and written by Jane Marie Malcolm because she found it and thought it was still cute. Remember, she's the funniest person she knows.)