Trivial Pursuit

So my old friend Kenny invited Wifey and me to join him and his wife Joelle at Kendall's World of Beer, for Trivia Night.  It's in Downtown Dadeland, a place close by we rarely visit, and truly ought to.  Even on a Tuesday night, plenty of people were out and about.


World of Beer serves, you guessed it, only beer, but you can order from surrounding restaurants and they deliver to you.  For us, it was Lime Mexican.  My friends Mike and John ended up joining us, and Kenny's boy Adam was home from his small Minnesota college, whose name I never recall.  I figured that with this group, NONE of the young uns had a chance against us at trivia.  But then...


Turned out the themes were Disney and modern music.  I figured that Adam, 20, could help us with the music thing, but the kid only likes 80s rock and roll.  In fact, he was a hindrance -- one song I thought was by Usher was -- Adam picked Maclamore, and we lost the question.  It hardly mattered, though -- we fared embarrassingly poorly anyway.   But we DID drink beer, and ate Mexican, and so it was still a fun night.


But the event triggered a traumatic memory for me -- from back in 1985.  The game Trivial Pursuit was all the rage, and UM had a university-wide contest.  Each of the different colleges and schools had teams, and the winners met for the championship.


Mike, Jeff, our friend Cheryl, and I put together a law school team, and we breezed though the preliminaries -- quickly being crowned law school champs.  We went on to the finals, where we also easily vanquished the competition.  Cheryl knew movies, I knew literature, Mike knew history, and Jeff knew current events.  We ALL knew sports well.


The prize was actually something we coveted -- all expense paid trip to Key West for all the winners.  We focused.  We were going to win.


I believe it came down to us and the Engineering School nerds.  We filled all our slots, and had one final answer -- for the championship.  The question was which country has the greatest per capita number of sheep.


I recalled a neighbor from Long Island -- she had visited a cousin in New Zealand, and returned home talking about sheep -- sheep EVERYWHERE.  So I said it was New Zealand.  Mike thought it might be Australia -- and it was a far bigger country.  We went back and forth, and finally the group think decided to go with my first impulse -- New Zealand was out answer.  NO!  Australia was correct!


The engineers answered their question and won.  They got to take their T squares and calculators to Key West.  We had lost -- spectacularly.


For my next birthday, everyone bought me sheep related gifts.  Stuffed sheep.  Recipes for cooking mutton.  There was even a satirical high school yearbook by Don Novello called "The Blade,"which featured various pictures of sheep in place of the high school seniors.


Last night's loss didn't sting as much.  We just lost out on a $30 gift certificate for the beer.


We decided we're going back, on a night with REAL trivia.  Like the tidbit I heard on the way over:  the classic swing song Pennsylvania 6-5000 is about a phone number, and it's the longest in service number in the US.  If you dial 212 -736-5000 you will get the Hotel Pennsylvania in NYC.  Now THAT is cool trivia...


I bet the hipsters who knew Salt N Pepa, and Beyoncé didn't know that...