Trivia Night

Last night, my roommate Megan and I went to a local Irish pub where one of our friends is a waiter. It was trivia night, and he had told us it would be easy and fun and there might even be some free drinks and appetizers involved. Now, that brings together some of my favorite things--food, alcohol, and trivia. I am not the most competitive person in the world, though I do thoroughly enjoy winning. I tend to do pretty well in games like Trivial Pursuit, as does Megan, so we figured we'd have a good time.

And yes, a good time was had once we joined a few of our other friends at the pub and ordered a round of drinks. But HOLY COW that trivia was HARD! There were seven rounds of ten questions, and each round had a category. Last night's categories included WWII Aviation, Irish History, and Gangs/Crime. Right. Needless to say, I think we maaaybe got one question correct in each. Our best category of all was Broadway Musicals. Sad, I know.

It was during the round in which the category was "Nasty Little Things" that we all began losing our momentum and thinking maybe we should have stayed home and watched Beauty and the Geek after all. Even the free cheese fries some guy brought over couldn't raise our spirits. America's most poisonous snake? Ummm...rattlesnake? No. Poisonous spider that has no fangs? You got me. Birthplace of killer bees? Your mom. But then the question that Fate seemed to have determined came up: Name the many-legged, poisonous arthropod whose front legs have evolved into fangs.

That was when a light bulb went off over my head. It was just like I was Bridget Jones in the second movie, where she's at the lawyer's dinner and they are going through all the boring lawyer-y questions, and suddenly they switch to pop culture and she KNOWS the answers. And what was the answer in this case? You guessed it. CENTIPEDES!! I swear, I can't make this stuff up. Centipedes are taking over my life (though I actually haven't seen too many recently...I wonder if they are laying low before a big rebellion of some sort?). My face broke out into a huge smile and I jumped up and nearly shouted the answer, "CENTIPEDES! IT'S CENTIPEDES!" Megan and Ethan and Chad looked at me like I was on crack.

"I promise, it is centipedes," I pleaded.

Chad shook his head. "Are you sure it isn't millipedes? They have a lot of legs too."

"I will CUT YOU SO HELP ME GOD if you don't write centipedes on the effing piece of paper!" I think Chad took me seriously, because he quickly scrawled down my answer and didn't look me in the eye for the rest of the night.

And low, I was correct! I think we only got one more response right in that round, and in the following rounds, but we didn't end up in last place so I like to think it was a successful night. Oh and we also won a t-shirt for coming up with the best Your Mom joke (everyone else in the bar was at least ten years older than us, which was good for them in terms of useless trivia, but good for us in terms of stellar Your Mom jokes). When I went down to my room later that night, I silently thanked the centipedes for at least giving me some useless trivia knowledge. And for not rearing their legs-turned-fangs yet.