Battle of the Erudites

For those who don’t know, for the last couple months Mackenzie and I have been part of a trivia team that competes Tuesday nights at a local sports bar, Harpo’s, in Boulder. It is run by a company called Geeks who Drink, which organizes trivia nights at bars in the Mountain West (Colorado, New Mexico, etc.) and, randomly, Virginia. The capstone to the Geek season was Geek Bowl IV, which was held the Saturday before I left for Russia. In general, we do pretty well at trivia, though our performance at the Geek Bowl was disappointing.

On Wednesday nights in Ulan-Ude at the local Spanish restaurant, Carlos VII, they now have trivia. If you ever happen to be here, stop by, although you’ll probably need to register beforehand. And remember, playing trivia in a foreign language is difficult. The first step, of course, is to make sure you understand the question. Next, figure out if you know the answer. Some questions were hopeless. For example, one question gave two lists of individuals and groups; list one included New York, Republicans, Richard Nixon, and Madonna, and a few more, while list two had Atlanta, Democrats, Nick Carter (no, not Jimmy Carter) and Grace Kelly. You had to answer how these two lists differed (give up? The first refers to Pepsi, and the second to Coke). Needless to say no one got this question right.

There is also the issue of translation. An example: one of the questions asked the name of the islands that are exactly opposite Greenwich, England. These are the Antipodes (a World Heritage Site!), one of a set of island groups belonging to New Zealand in the sub-Antarctic. Something that makes this even more tricky is that there are two ways to pronounce the name: the correct, American way (An-ti-podes) and the ‘proper’ British way (An-ti-po-des). When I said my answer, I said it the British way (trying to get in touch with my ancestors, perhaps), so our team captain wrote down the answer ‘Антипский’, which reads ‘Antipskii’. Unfortunately, we got this question wrong; they are sticklers on spelling here. It didn’t matter, though, as we ended up in second place regardless (see the photo of our captain’s hand collecting the winnings).

The folks at Geeks who Drink could pick up a few tips from the Siberian version, and vice versa. First, the quizmaster (who was a little too spiffed up for my tastes) went around the crowd and asked each team to introduce itself. This followed an impromptu solo from a special guest visiting for trivia from some far-off city in Siberia (Novosibirsk maybe, I forget). Thankfully, I was not asked to sing. Second, the between-round breaks featured more singing by a local talent who belted out Whitney Houston (And Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiii will always luv you!) and No Doubt (Don’t Stop, which was actually pretty well done). I kept waiting for her to sing Michael Jackson’s ‘PYT’, though it might have been a little over the top. Lastly is the question of money. I like our trivia set-up because the price is right, i.e. free. Here, it was around five dollars a head (R150), with the winning team taking home around R10K, divided among team members.