We Went Down Under for Tuesday Trivia!

Our Tuesday teams are gearing up for the Summer Fling Finals this weekend!  Tonight’s game featured 96 teams across 14 venues, and quite a stinger of a final question:

ROUND 1:

Tuesday’s first round opened with a three-part question on two-letter answers, before moving onto to snack time with a question about ginger snaps.  Apparently, nobody actually knows why ginger cookies are the only ones called snaps.  We also discussed the tenth anniversary of this “influential” reality TV show:

In a change of pace, the first round included our most difficult bonus question of the night.  While most of our teams knew that physicist Stephen Hawking wrote “A Brief History of Time”, only four teams knew the subtitle of this work: “From the Big Bang to Black Holes”.  As a result, dozens of teams racked up a score of 34 points after the first round, but we saw just ONE perfect score in the first stanza: Bertie Botts’ Every Flavour Team (Quincy’s South).

ROUND 2:

Our nightly audio question featured songs with “royal” titles.  Most of our teams had few problems recognizing the songs “Caribbean Queen” (Billy Ocean), “Duke of Earl” (Gene Chandler), and “Two Princes” (Spin Doctors), with 27% earning bonus points by knowing all three.  Our next question concerned a unique occurrence from the world of baseball:

–> For a brief period in 1990, which Oakland Athletics slugger was joined on the roster by his twin brother Ozzie?

For all of nine games, Jose Canseco played alongside his twin brother in the Oakland outfield:

We followed with our most difficult wagering question of the first half, asking for the character whose name is alphabetically first on the list of official Disney Princesses.  Surprisingly, there are very strict guidelines for what constitutes an official Disney Princess.  In spite of the enormous popularity of the film “Frozen”, the character of Anna (or Elsa) is NOT on the list.  Instead, the honor of being alphabetically first goes to this character:

Only 44% of our teams answered correctly here, with about half of those adding on a two-point bonus by knowing the name of her love interest: Eric.  The first half concluded with our nightly Three Clues question, with Tuesday’s version asking about a foreign country:

CLUE 1: This is the most populous landlocked nation on Earth.

CLUE 2: According to the Rastafari faith, the Second Coming of the Messiah was a man that served as Emperor of this country.

Exactly one-third of our teams earned a two-point bonus with the correct answer of Ethiopia.  Indeed, followers of Rastafari consider former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selasse to be the Second Coming of the Messiah.  Most of the field waited for the third and final clue, which referenced Ethiopian delicacies such as beef kitfo, lamb tibs, and injera.  With a slightly easier set of bonus questions in the second round, nine teams notched a perfect score of 36 points.

HALFTIME:

Tuesday night’s halftime page had our teams matching pictures of college football helmets to their respective teams, as well as answering questions with “POWER”ful answers.  The halftime page played to an average score of 17.2 points, but the final question on the page prevented many teams from a perfect score.  We asked for the subtitle of the recent documentary film “An Inconvenient Sequel”, which only a handful of teams knew was “Truth to Power”.  As a result, we saw more than a dozen teams score 19 points, but only the Clavins from Blue Parrott in Florida snagged a perfect 20.  Here are Tuesday’s top scores after the first half:

• Stink Floyd (Monkey La La):  89
• Probably Worth a Google (Monkey La La):  88
• Beer Pressure (Senor Tequila’s):  88
• Momo (Cugini’s):  87
• Kellie’s Heroes (Top Golf – Ashburn):  87
• Give Us Your Beer Money (Primanti Brothers):  87

ROUND 3:

The second half began with a look at Greek mythology, as we asked for the three mythological figures who respectively killed the Hydra, Medusa, and the Minotaur.  We apparently found the wheelhouse category for several teams, as 27% of our field notched the full 11 points with a nine-point wager and a two-point bonus, answering correctly with Hercules (or Heracles), Perseus, and Theseus.  We followed up with a question on Soviet leaders, which is always a good time to post this fun picture:

Finally, we concluded the third round by asking a question about the film “The Prestige”, which featured a small role for this classic rock star as one of history’s greatest scientific minds:

Yes, that’s David Bowie portraying Nikola Tesla.  With a surprising number of mythology experts in the field, we once again saw nine teams sweep the third round with a perfect score.

ROUND 4:

The final round featured our most difficult wagering question of the night, which was asked with a potential crossword-style hint included:

–> Released in February of 1977, what is the one-word title of the album that spent several years as the best-selling album of all-time, before being overtaken by Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”?

Only seven teams earned a two-point bonus by forgoing the crossword hint and turning in this correct response:

But even after the crossword-style hint was given, out correct answer rate landed at just 27%.  Our game concluded with another challenging question in the subject of U.S. Geography:

–> There are numerous locations at which the borders of three U.S. states converge at a single point.  Name any two of the three states that converge at the westernmost of these points.

Some of our teams might have forgotten just how skinny California is, opting for the incorrect answer of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.  While one of those three was correct, we were instead looking for this convergence:

The final round produced just two fewest perfect scores: Bertie Botts’ Every Flavour Team (Quincy’s South) and Five Sure (Top Golf – Ashburn).  Here are Tuesday’s top overall scores after the final round:

• Bertie Botts’ Every Flavour Team (Quincy’s South):  160
• Beer Pressure (Senor Tequila’s):  159
• Kellie’s Heroes (Top Golf – Ashburn):  157
• Comfortably Dum (Champion Billiards):  156
• Wiseacres (Champion Billiards):  155
• Probably Worth a Google (Monkey La La):  155

FINAL QUESTION (36.4% success rate):

–> In 2006, Australians were told by local authorities to stop committing retribution killings against which type of animal?

The key to answering this question correctly was to first figure out the reason why Australians would be committing retribution killings at that particular time.  In September of that year, beloved TV personality Steve Irwin was killed by the barb of a stingray, which was our correct answer.  Congratulations to Bad Hombres (Fireflies) as the only team to answer every wagering question correctly to score the Perfect 21 tonight.

CONGRATULATIONS TO NEWTON’S MINION AT CHAMPION BILLIARDS, WHO CAME BACK FROM FIFTH PLACE ON THE FINAL QUESTION TO WIN AS A SOLO PLAYER!

Here are Tuesday’s top overall scores:

• Probably Worth a Google (Monkey La La):  167
• Stink Floyd (Monkey La La):  165
• Beer Pressure (Senor Tequila’s):  162
• Give Us Your Beer Money (Primanti Brothers):  161
• You Just Got Shawshanked (Cugini’s):  161
• Menace 2 Sobriety (Capitol City Brewing):  159
• Bertie Botts’ Every Flavour Team (Quincy’s South):  157
• Uncle Jack (Quincy’s South):  157
• Bad Hombres (Fireflies):  157
• Drunk and Disorderly (Cugini’s):  161

TONIGHT’S WINNERS:

Capitol City Brewing in Arlington, VA:  Menace 2 Sobriety  (Next week’s first category: “Flavor of Love”)

Champion Billiards in Frederick, MD:  Newton’s Minion  (Next week’s first category: “Justice League” – 2017 film)

Cugini’s in Poolesville, MD:  You Just Got Shawshanked  (Next week’s first category: Stephen King Film Adaptations)

Senor Tequila’s in Germantown, MD:  Beer Pressure  (Next week’s first category: Steve Irwin)

Fireflies in Alexandria, VA:  Bad Hombres  (NO GAME NEXT WEEK – First category on October 3: 21st Century Rock – AUDIO)

Shuckin’ Shack in Frederick, MD:  Rural Jurors  (Next week’s first category: “Saturday Night Live”)

Top Golf in Ashburn, VA:  Taco Tuesday  (Next week’s first category: The Bechdel Test)

Primanti Brothers in Hagerstown, MD:  Give Us Your Beer Money  (Next week’s first category: 1970s Rock – AUDIO)

The Block in Annandale, VA:  Kappa Crabs  (Next week’s first category: Frisbee Golf)

Blue Parrott in St. Petersburg, FL:  Clavins  (Next week’s first category: Harry Potter)

Monkey La La in Frederick, MD:  Probably Worth a Google  (Next week’s first category: “Star Trek: The Next Generation”)

Quincy’s South in Rockville, MD:  Bertie Botts’ Every Flavour Team  (Next week’s first category: German Operas)

Casa Tequila in Lovettsville, VA:  True Wit  (Next week’s first category: Vietnam War)

Outta the Way Cafe in Derwood, MD:  GDI  (Next week’s first category:  )