Random trivia

I just saw that Wikipedia news stated that China announced the discovery of the tomb of Cao Cao. This is probably not relevant to anybody, but when I was teaching English in Beijing, I played a variation of 20 questions and Botticelli with my coworkers as an "exercise." Basically I wrote down the name of someone famous that we would all know on a card, and gave the card to someone to have as their person. Its very interesting to see what the pool of known figures is between you and a person raised on the other side of the Earth, and I guess I was surprised by how small the pool was. At the time, in the summer of '08, even Barack Obama was only known by like 75% of my coworkers. My favorite people to use ended up being people like David Beckham, Hilary Clinton, LeBron James, Mao Zedong, Kim Jung-Il, Thomas Edison, the Pope, Sun-Yat Sen, Pu Yi, Bruce Lee, etc.

Red Cliff was a popular movie at the time, a Chinese made film that crossed over to the American audience moderately well. It was about famous battles during the Three Kingdoms Era, and especially this famous general Cao Cao. So I had my coworkers explain these stories to me and started incorporating Cao Cao into my 20 questions game. There's my 2 cents. Now if only I was the hero in Slumdog Millionaire and went on a quiz show and was asked a question about Cao Cao for $1,000,000.

I have just come back from back to back trivia nights actually, the first at Johnny D's in Somerville, and tonight at Joshua Tree in Allston. They both use Stump Trivia, which I have learned is a game produced uniformly by a company and distributed to bars nationwide. So the questions are very professional and its organized quite well, and pretty different from Tombs Trivia. Either way, there are questions and you have to answer them. At Johnny D's, me and my Belmont Hill friends did pretty well for ourselves, but finished around the 30th percentile. The highlight of the night for me was getting "Valhalla" correct on a pseudo-guess, and then answering the question about what "female head of the Washington Post during the watergate scandal later ran a Fortune 500 company?" I didn't really know but I remember Katherine Graham, I believe from a Time Magazine article way back a decade ago, and guessed her and got it correct.

Tonight, it was just me and 2 other people. Somehow, our skills complemented each other enough for us to be in contention heading into the final round, when one of our trio had to leave to catch a train. So it was up to my friend Chris Jarrell and I. We were able to guess Ford Field for the location of the 2009 NCAA final four, and Jack Nicholson for the home of where Roman Polanski's sexual assault took place. Then in the final round, there were 2 questions where you wager an even number from 2-10. If you get it correct, you get that many points. If you get it wrong, you lose half that amount. The first question we didn't know and lost 2 points. The second question was what country assumed the presidency of the EU council after the Czech Republic in April of 2009? Well I took a course on the EU while studying abroad in the EU, went to most of those countries, and saw President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic speak at Georgetown in October! And....I didn't know the answer. I knew that I had read it somewhere and could cross off a bunch of countries, say Portugal and the UK, but I didn't know. Chris was thinking France or Belgium and was desperate enough to try to call for help, but in a rash move I put Sweden down, wagered 10 points, and ran the question in before Chris could change it. Then I heard from someone that the answer was Belgium, and was like, ah fuck. Oh well. 5 minutes go by before the trivia presider, who in a bizarre coincidence was a former acquaintance Katie Pope, announces the answer: SWEDEN. I actually jumped up in the bar, it was kinda embarrassing.