My soror Andrea hit me up with a message at work Monday asking about an event the Science Center was having. It seems every month they sponsor a Sci After Five function where it's Team Trivia. You can get up a group of up to 9 people to square off against other teams to test your trivia knowledge. It was short notice, but I was down. If there was one thing I liked doing, it was making good use of my vat of useless trivia.
Since it was October, their theme for this month was Halloween. That meant folks would be coming in costume. I was arriving straight from work so no costume for me. Andrea came up with the idea of wearing our paraphernalia and we could be the team of Green and Gold, but there wasn't enough time for me to go home to get a shirt. Therefore, both of us just had on our gear from the work day. If anyone bothered to ask (which they didn't, of course), our costume was supposed to be People with Jobs.
They had a contest for the folks who did bother to show up in costume. The entrants were a little shabby as they displayed little imagination. One guy was dressed in all white complete with white make-up and called himself the walk guy from the 'walk/don't walk' sign. It probably would have worked better if he didn't have long hippy hair and glasses. I don't recall the walk/don't walk guy looking like that. The best one there was this gal who was the spitting image of Amelia Earhart and she never even entered the contest. She missed her chance to win the prize of one whopping ticket to the IMAX.
As far as the triva itself, the categories had me a little worried from the jump. Two of the ten categories dealt with science. That was my weakest subject in school. It turned out it wasn't Andreas's forte either. We didn't fare so hot on a vast majority of those questions in both of those categories. We lucked up on some of them, but pretty much bombed them overall. We learned quickly that when November rolls around, it would be in our best interest to have another individual who excels in that area.
One of the categories was "Horror Movie Villains". If there was one area where I knew I could nail it, that was it. Unfortunately, so could everyone else. The questions were WAY too simple. They basically just showed slides of the villain WITH the name over the picture and all you had to do was name the movie they came from. They could have at least made it challenging and asked questions about the horror movie villains origins.
Where they messed up was when the showed the picture of zombies and all it had above it was "Zombies". That could have been any dozen of movies. What they were looking was was "28 Days Later". I argued that the answer should have technically been "Night of the Living Dead". Since several flicks could have applied anyway, the answer should have been George Romero's classic which started the whole zombie craze. Not that it would have mattered if we got it right or not though. By that time we were so far out of the running that it made little difference.
I did find out some interesting things that I can now add to my trivial bank. Things like a chicken can live 18 months without i's head (Mike the Headless Wonder Chicken). Or that American's on the average spend $44 for Halloween candy. Or that our state insect is a ladybug. I didn't even know there was such a thing as a state insect. Most of all though, I learned that the next time we do that, it would be most beneficial to have folks with diverse knowledge to better our odds. Maybe then we wouldn't come in 8th place out of 10 teams. But at least it wasn't last.



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