60s Music Trivia: 20 song snippets from the 60s: Martha Rae and Vandellas, Hermin’s Hermits, The Archies, Build Me Up Buttercup, Bully Wooly… I realize in my music fog that my formative days missed these by a few years, although Mike and all our friends were right in there (sorry about being the “young” one here!). For them, within a few intro bars, snappy recognition, jumping in the seats. Even obscure titles. I’m more like, that sounds familiar; no idea who is singing (except the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Johnny Cash, artists who never go away in popular culture). At one point, the emcee tempts us by offering an extra point for all teams who come up and dance; in light speed, the dance floor is full of enthusiastic baby boomers, moving really well. I’m not that fast or motivated, but: Oh, that’s me too.
Progressive Trivia: 20 questions from all over the trivia spectrum. Our team of 5 is Hawaii France. The room is filled with competing teams. This is the second day; Mike and I missed the first when the team did pretty well: 15 / 20. Now we need to see if we can contribute a little to the team. Luckily, three French related questions: What is the flavor in Cointreau? What is the literal translation of crème brûlée? How do you spell turquoise? (orange, burnt cream, turquoise!). But: How old was Jimmy Hendrix when he died? (Jim knew it: 27.) How many of Santa’s reindeer have names that start with D? (We found only 2, but there are 3: Dasher, Dancer, Donner). Apparently there had been comments the previous day that the questions were too US-centric, so they included this: What is the name of the street on which the neighbors live in the TV show Neighbors? Neighbors, what is that? Turns out to be a popular Australian show, and the street is Ramsay. Oh well. What is the only year that can be expressed in Roman numerals in descending order? My trivial analytical mind, or analytical trivial mind, jumped at it: 1000, 500, 100, 50, 10, 5, 1: MDCLXVI or 1666. Useful knowledge? While I zoned out and felt culturally dumb during the music trivia, this one was great fun because it took our entire team to answer the questions; we balanced each other very well. One question was, On what classic movie was the animated movie Chicken Run loosely based? I remembered having seen Chicken Run, a claymation about chickens that are plotting escape from their coop (what motivated me to see this one?) but had no idea about its inspiration. Jim listened to my spare plot description and said, That sounds like The Great Escape. Correct! 15 / 20. Addicted; more tomorrow.
