The Dan's Papers Trivia Team Is Unstoppable
21 teams enter. 1 team leaves victorious.
And once again the winning team was Dan’s Papers‘ own Thursday Night AA.
Last’s week’s pub quiz at Townline BBQ in Sagaponack had an unprecedented 93 players attend, beating the previous attendance record by 25 people, according to quizmaster Paul A. Johnson.
This week’s topics included a round in which every question or answer had to do with the word “one.” For example: In Tom Hanks’s directorial debut That Thing You Do! what was the band’s original name? Before they were The Wonders, they were The Oneders.
Another round dictated that every answer be a number. What is the loneliest number since the number 1, according to the song popularized by Three Dog Night? Two.
One round was general trivia knowledge, such as, What is an elephant’s second incisor also called? A tusk.
The activity round was a crossword puzzle, and the topic was 2014. How soon we forget. For the life of us, we couldn’t remember who Kevin Ward was, and who killed him. When the answers were announced, we were reminded he was a Nascar driver, and he died when he was struck by a race car driven by Tony Stewart. It was determined that Stewart was not at fault. I also could not recall the name of Matthew McConaughey’s character in True Detective, despite being in the middle of watching the season on Blu-ray. It’s Rustin Cohle.
For the first four rounds, we were either tied for the lead, or close to it. At the end of the fifth round, we held the number 1 spot despite our missteps. But we knew all that could change in the six and final round: the dreaded audio round.
The audio round is always fun, but it is often extremely challenging. The topic this time was movie quotes. Teams needed to identify the movies by one or two lines of dialogue. Some came to us easy, such as The Matrix and Clerks. It took some deliberation to get to Gangs of New York. We pieced together A Few Good Men, and another Jack Nicholson movie, though we still can’t remember if it was As Good as It Gets or Something’s Gotta Give. (Which one has Helen Hunt and which one has Diane Keaton?)
We handed in our answer sheet believing we completely bombed, and probably fell not only out of first place, but totally out of the money, i.e. out of the top three.
It turns out that we did bomb, but so did everyone else. Though we only got half the answers correct, everyone else did poorly as well. We ended the game with 50 points, beating the second-place team by just one point and the third place team by just two points. In fact, there was also a three-way tie for fourth, with each team having 47 points. This game really did come down to the wire. Good thing we’ve watched Clerks 20 times.
Before our hard-fought victory, Thursday Night AA was in a tie for first place in the race for the Townline Trophy for Trivia Excellence. Now we are a full three points ahead in the season standings. However, we know it’s premature to make room in the Dan’s Papers trophy case for the Golden Pig, and we can’t slack off now.