Weekend Trivia Has the Right Title!

Nine weekend venues hosted a total of 83 teams for a heck of a lot of Pour House Trivia, including a 27-team outfit at Doc Waters Cidery in Germantown, MD.

FIRST ROUND:

The weekend had a lot of categories in the opening round, including Birkenstock sandals, MLB’s even-numbered year champs San Francisco Giants, and the 1990s grunge music fad. A difficult question cropped up here, though:

• Which mineral commonly found in baby powder is composed of hydrated magnesium silicate? It is the softest known mineral on Earth, as it is scratchable with just a fingernail.

Talc is that mineral, with just over a third of teams getting bonus points for naming the Mohs scale of hardness. Seven teams got lucky with perfect scores in this round.

SECOND ROUND:

Friday’s audio question proved to be the hardest of the first round, with a trio of songs from bands which took their name from a literary work. About 47% of teams had at least two of those band names (Steely Dan, Steppenwolf, and Veruca Salt) for wagering points. A couple of questions in this round wound up with only three teams earning bonus points. First up, this Three Clues question about a certain word had these two clues:

• CLUE 1: A line segment whose endpoints both lie on the same curve.
• CLUE 2: An emotional response, especially one of sympathy.

Those clues struck a chord with only three teams. Another question about a Canadian province named Victoria saw only three teams name the Seychelles as the Indian Ocean nation with the same capital city name. Perfect scores in this round were a little too far away for the field.

HALFTIME:

Halftime topics included TV title characters, backing band names, and members of Saturday Night Live‘s Five-Timers Club. What proved to be a tough halftime set ended up with an average team score of 13.6 and only one team getting all 20 points. These teams ruled the roost at the halftime break:

• Zero Proof (Mason Social): 87
• Lone Strangers (Mason Social): 87
• Sexual Chocolate (Belles’): 87
• No Eye Deer (Doc Waters): 85
• Quality Guesswork (Pretzel and Pizza): 85

THIRD ROUND:

Topics in the third round over the weekend included three people named Bonnie, Three Clues about actress Joan Cusack, and the delectable Waldorf salad. The hardest question all weekend showed up at the end of Friday’s third round:

• In the 2020 edition of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list, which man born in 1941 had the most albums of any solo artist with eight?

Just under a quarter of the field named Bob Dylan for their points. The only perfect third-round team all weekend was We Need a Sports Person (Flying Ace).

FOURTH ROUND:

The weekend’s 6-4-2 questions dealt with Mountain Dew, Thailand, and the tiger. In the fourth round, we covered subjects like glaucoma, the green flag used in NASCAR, and Affirmed‘s Triple Crown run. The hardest question of the round asked teams to give the sum of these two things:

• A: The number of times a baton is passed in an Olympic relay track race.
• B: The minimum count given to an Olympic boxer EVERY time they are knocked down.

In order, 3 + 8 equals 11, the answer to that question. However, this was another round with no perfect scores. We made it to the final question with these teams on top:

• Lone Strangers (Mason Social): 156
• Murph’s Masters (Belles’): 153
• Sexual Chocolate (Belles’): 152
• Red Team (Doc Waters): 152
• Little Brains, Big Egos (Springfield Manor): 151
• No Eye Deer (Doc Waters): 151
• Ten Thousand Dugongs (Mason Social): 151

FRIDAY’S FINAL QUESTION (29.5% success rate):

• Adapted from an 1826 work of literature, which 1992 film featured the tagline the first American hero?

SATURDAY’S FINAL QUESTION (67.7% success rate):

• The author of which 2005 novel stated that the main character was inspired by what he imagined to be an adult version of the Swedish children’s character Pippi Longstocking?

SUNDAY’S FINAL QUESTION (40.0% success rate):

• Who is the most recent figure from outside of the film industry to announce the winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture?

Those answers, in order, were The Last of the Mohicans, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and Michelle Obama. Unfortunately, there were no teams to make a Perfect 21 by answering all 21 wagering questions correctly. These teams were the best of the weekend best:

• Murph’s Masters (Belles’): 165
• Red Team (Doc Waters): 164
• No Eye Deer (Doc Waters): 163
• Little Brains, Big Egos (Springfield Manor): 163
• Ten Thousand Dugongs (Mason Social): 163
• Forrest Gump and the Dwarves (Springfield Manor): 162
• No MSG (Flying Ace): 162
• Lyrical Gangsters (Flying Ace): 162
• Rufio (Doc Waters): 161
• Sexual Chocolate (Belles’): 160

WEEKEND WINNERS:

Springfield Manor Winery in Thurmont, MD: Little Brains, Big Egos  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Chicago)

P. B. Dye Golf Course in Ijamsville, MD: ON HIATUS  (FIRST CATEGORY AFTER HIATUS: Cryptozoology)

Dragon Distillery in Frederick, MD: Independent Panda  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Succession)

Doc Waters Cidery in Germantown. MD: Red Team  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Formula One Racing)

Flying Ace Farm in Lovettsville, VA: Lyrical Gangsters  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Medieval English Monarchs)

South Mountain Creamery in Frederick, MD: Clean Up on Aisle Four  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Bathroom History)

Belles’ Sports Bar in Frederick, MD: Murph’s Masters  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Breaking Bad)

Pretzel and Pizza Creations in Hagerstown, MD: Quality Guesswork  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Star Trek: Enterprise)

Mason Social in Alexandria, VA: Ten Thousand Dugongs  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Grand Tetons)

Coast Tacobar in Hagerstown, MD: