Last fall, a friend asked me to join his Pub Trivia team. This sort of thing is totally my cup of tea–you readers may think you already have a fair sense of the depths of my nerdiness, but you don’t know the half of it.
Little surprise, then, that the trivia took, and over the months I’ve learned–and imbibed–a lot. The team has even made a little money. But the single most important and immutable thing I have learned at Pub Trivia is this:
The answers you don’t know on Tuesday night will be dropped in your lap by a fickle fate on, roughly, Wednesday morning. Right after you don’t need them anymore. You can practically set your watch.
For example, in January we missed a question about something that happens in the first few pages of the Watchmen comic book. Later that week, one team member received from his brother, as a late Hanukkah gift, Watchmen. A quite late Hanukkah gift, I might add.
Then last week we were asked who wrote the song “Me and Bobby McGee,” and were stumped. We made a respectable if uninspired guess of Willie Nelson; the answer turned out to be Kris Kristofferson; we grumbled and sighed and hit each other upside the head, and eventually came in second.
Fast forward to last night. I’m working on the laptop with the Grammys on as background noise, glancing up only occasionally. Hey, who’s that strolling across the stage and into my living room? Oh, look at that, it’s Kris Kristofferson, introducing a Janis Joplin tribute. What’s that he’s saying? Oh, it’s “I wrote ‘Me and Bobby McGee,'” more or less. Oh, Kris Kristofferson! You sing, you write, you act, you probably dance and juggle, you’re a Rhodes Scholar, but oh, your execrable timing.