Things that happened at trivia yesterday
May. 8th, 2012 06:17 pmYesterday I went with some of the math people (Hunter, Ari, Dave) to trivia at one of the bars around here. I do not like bars but I do like trivia, and the noise level was tolerable so yay.
Hunter had been reading about Dieudonné modules and as an exercise was trying to come up with a nontrivial example of one. He thought he had one but of course we didn't have paper so on the way there we were arguing over whether his construction worked. (It did.)
The point is, when it came time to name our team, someone suggested it would be really funny to name our team "Dieudonné modules" and see if the announcer could pronounce it. I protested that this was kind of mean, but I didn't have anything better and we went with it.
The first round had a number of really easy questions. Now, the format was that the bulk of it consisted of 10 questions, and for each question, you got to pick how many points it would be worth, from 1 to 10; you couldn't repeat them. So when they asked what country Mt. Fuji was in, we immediately wrote down Japan, 10 points. Well, that was stupidly easy. Everybody's going to put down 10 points for that one, aren't they? And hold on wait why is the slip still on the table? Holy crap we never actually turned it in! Ari, run!... nope.
Of course, we just reassigned our 10, meaning we only lost 4 points because of that, but it's still a bit embarassing. (And no, an extra 4 points would not have been enough for a victory.)
More surprising: I encountered Karen Schroeder from high school[0] there, who apparently is at Michigan studying bioengineering now. I had no idea. Neither did she; she recognized me when I turned in an answer and came up to say hi; of course, I pointed out that Dave was also here. I guess she must have been more surprised than we were.
Her team was called "Bob Loblaw's Law Blog", but the announcer didn't have any trouble pronouncing that, unsurprisingly. However our name worked better than expected -- the first time he had to read it, he explicitly said that he couldn't pronounce it, and resorted to spelling it out. Later he came up with a decent approximate pronunciation...
Last question of the second round asked, there are three TV shows that ended their run on top of the Nielsen ratings. Name two of them. Well -- we got the other one wrong anyway, but one of the ones we said was M*A*S*H, and apparently that wasn't one of the answers? Karen's team did the same. I am very confused by this; I think they must have gotten it wrong, not us...
-Harry
[0]I forget, did she do Quiz Bowl back then? I really don't remember yes or no.
Hunter had been reading about Dieudonné modules and as an exercise was trying to come up with a nontrivial example of one. He thought he had one but of course we didn't have paper so on the way there we were arguing over whether his construction worked. (It did.)
The point is, when it came time to name our team, someone suggested it would be really funny to name our team "Dieudonné modules" and see if the announcer could pronounce it. I protested that this was kind of mean, but I didn't have anything better and we went with it.
The first round had a number of really easy questions. Now, the format was that the bulk of it consisted of 10 questions, and for each question, you got to pick how many points it would be worth, from 1 to 10; you couldn't repeat them. So when they asked what country Mt. Fuji was in, we immediately wrote down Japan, 10 points. Well, that was stupidly easy. Everybody's going to put down 10 points for that one, aren't they? And hold on wait why is the slip still on the table? Holy crap we never actually turned it in! Ari, run!... nope.
Of course, we just reassigned our 10, meaning we only lost 4 points because of that, but it's still a bit embarassing. (And no, an extra 4 points would not have been enough for a victory.)
More surprising: I encountered Karen Schroeder from high school[0] there, who apparently is at Michigan studying bioengineering now. I had no idea. Neither did she; she recognized me when I turned in an answer and came up to say hi; of course, I pointed out that Dave was also here. I guess she must have been more surprised than we were.
Her team was called "Bob Loblaw's Law Blog", but the announcer didn't have any trouble pronouncing that, unsurprisingly. However our name worked better than expected -- the first time he had to read it, he explicitly said that he couldn't pronounce it, and resorted to spelling it out. Later he came up with a decent approximate pronunciation...
Last question of the second round asked, there are three TV shows that ended their run on top of the Nielsen ratings. Name two of them. Well -- we got the other one wrong anyway, but one of the ones we said was M*A*S*H, and apparently that wasn't one of the answers? Karen's team did the same. I am very confused by this; I think they must have gotten it wrong, not us...
-Harry
[0]I forget, did she do Quiz Bowl back then? I really don't remember yes or no.
