How About a Juice Box With Your Wednesday Night Trivia?

Wednesday night’s game was one heck of a roller coaster, hitting on a wide array of topics.  But some of our powerhouse teams certainly shined above the rest as we begin the countdown to World Series XVI.  Overall, we welcomed 107 teams across across 14 venues:

ROUND 1:

Wednesday’s opening round began rather harmlessly, with a question on different uses of the word rage, one of which is as the French translation for the word rabies.  We continued with a look at 20th century U.S. Presidents, and this item of native jewelry:

The final question of the first round proved to me much more difficult than anticipated, as we closed with the catch-all category of Over / Under, asking our teams to tell us whether each of these items was more or less than 50:

1)  The number of Earth days in the orbital period of the planet Mercury.

2)  The number of years for which NBC’s “Today” (or “The Today Show”) has aired.

3)  Measured in yards, this is the width of a regulation American football field.

Mercury has the shortest orbital period of any planet in the Solar System, but it still takes nearly three Earth months for Mercury to make one revolution around the Sun (88 days to be exact).  Meanwhile, “Today” is one of the longest-running TV shows in American history, celebrating its 65th anniversary next month.  Finally, an NFL field is laid out with these dimensions:

If you can’t read that, the width of an NFL field is 160 feet, or 53 1/3 yards.  Only 38% of our teams earned their wagers here, with just 12 teams answering all three of these clues correctly to earn a two-point bonus.  Three teams: FOWL (Memories), Stephen Hawking’s Karaoke Machine (Memories), and Roaming Gnomes (Bennigan’s – Clarksburg) notched the only perfect scores in the first round.

ROUND 2:

Our field had no trouble with Wednesday’s audio question, which featured three floral songs: “Kiss From a Rose” by Seal, “Build Me Up Buttercup” by The Foundations, and “Edelweiss” from “The Sound of Music”.  Next up, we asked our teams about the latest chapter in this horror film franchise:

We continued with a question on this backyard game:

The second round featured 11 perfect scores.

HALFTIME:

Wednesday’s halftime page featured pictures of the ensemble cast of the current film “Murder On the Orient Express”.  We saw an overall average of 15.6 points, with 13 teams recording a perfect score.  Here are Wednesday’s top scores after the first half:

• Dave Martinez School of Management (Bennigan’s – Clarksburg):  90
• FOWL (Memories):  90
• Fan Club (The Tavern):  89
• Kitten Mittens (Quinn’s on the Corner):  89
• Sexual Chocolate (Memories):  88
• Southpaw Fish (Valley Grill):  88

ROUND 3:

As expected, the third round featured Wednesday’s most difficult questions, but tonight’s edition was slightly more difficult than usual.  Overall, we saw a combined correct answer percentage (on wagering questions) of just 54%, as we stumped most of our teams with questions on Classic Video Games and Shakespeare.  Even the NFL question was a toughy:

–> From Week 2 through Week 6 of the 2017 NFL season, which NFC team set a dubious league record by losing five consecutive games, all by three points or fewer?

It’s been a tough year for this west coast team:

While most of our teams struggled to keep their head afloat, Dave Martinez School of Management (Bennigan’s – Clarksburg) easily racked up a perfect score of 36 points, the only team to do so on Wednesday.

6-4-2 QUESTION:

Exactly one dozen of our Wednesday teams snagged six-points by hearing this clue:

–> Born in the United Kingdom in 1874, who wrote the books “The Story of the Malakand Field Force” and “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples”?

No, we were NOT going for a typical literary figure, but rather this gentleman:

ROUND 4:

The final round included questions on Mariah Carey and the thymus gland (though, not specifically Mariah Carey’s thymus gland), before moving on to a little South American geography.  When asked to name any two of the three countries which border Venezuela, most of our teams performed very well by naming Colombia and Brazil, both of which are correct.  But only nine teams earned two bonus points with this third correct answer:

(image courtesy of ontheworldmap.com)

But even that was not the most difficult bonus question of the night.  We saved that for the Three Clues question which concluded our final round:

CLUE 1: The name of the tallest mountain in Switzerland.

CLUE 2: The FIRST name of a civil rights activist born in Alabama on February 4, 1913.

Only a handful of teams even ventured a guess at this point, leading to just four teams earning bonus pint with the correct answer of Rosa.  Needless to say, we did not see any perfect scores in the final round.  Here are Wednesday’s top overall scores heading into the final question:

• Dave Martinez School of Management (Bennigan’s – Clarksburg):  165
• Stephen Hawking’s Karaoke Machine (Memories):  160
• Sexual Chocolate (Memories):  158
• Kitten Mittens (Quinn’s on the Corner):  156
• Witiots (Nido’s):  154

FINAL QUESTION (47.6% success rate):

–> Introduced in the 1940s, which brand currently produced by Minute Maid was given its name as a reference to the surplus of vitamins it provided?

Just under half of our teams answered correctly with Hi-C.  Congratulations to Sexual Chocolate (Memories), who was the only team to earn the Perfect 21 on Wednesday by answering all wagering questions correctly.  They are on an amazing roll, as this was the third consecutive week in which the team has recorded this feat.  These were your top overall scores from Wednesday:

• Stephen Hawking’s Karaoke Machine (Memories):  172
• Dave Martinez School of Management (Bennigan’s – Clarksburg):  170
• Sexual Chocolate (Memories):  166
• Roaming Gnomes (Bennigan’s – Clarksburg):  166
• LOWL (Memories):  165
• Gold Team (Bennigan’s – Clarksburg):  158
• Fan Club (The Tavern):  157
• Kitten Mittens (Quinn’s on the Corner):  156
• Fourth Place (Belles’):  155
• HoJo MoJo (Bennigan’s – Frederick):  154

TONIGHT’S WINNERS:

Valley Grill in Middletown, MD:  Shakeweight  (Next week’s first category: 1970s Punk Rock)