Commences here:
The half-way measures recap of the Showdown game from last Tuesday..which Tues? The half-assed way to the Travelin’ Trivia Trophy, in which the BUZZHEADS cover only about half the nation. The little-team-who-tried at Coaches only recorded half the game as well.
Worn-up Round
1. Whose remains were just removed to prevent them from continuing to be a shrine: RUDOLF HESS. 2. Used metaphorically, this verb means to render someone powerless: HAMSTRING. 3. Josef Strauss II wrote the popular “pizzicato POLKA”. 4. Prater Vienna contains a large ___ in the Austrian capital: AMUSEMENT PARK. 5. Which animal listed is a large wild cat: JAGUARUNDI. 6. Fela Kuti was a ___ musician and social activist: NIGERIAN. <Wasn’t “fella” the name of one of the girlfriends of George of the Jungle?> 7. Standard Italian is based on the __ dialect: TUSCAN. 8. How many U.S. students are given Rhodes Scholarships annually? 32. 9. Mitosis and cytokinesis are stages of: CELL DIVISION. 10. At the time of its conversion to Christianity, Canute the Great was King of: DENMARK. <And Manute the Bol was King of the courts of Sudan…but I digress.>
I wish I could say that we did a half-assed job on questions 3 and 6, but that would be generous. We did more like a fifth-assed split. Let’s see if we can get a few more half-assed guesses on the
Ground-down Round:
1. A ___ would wear a scapular: ROMAN CATHOLIC. 2. Encaustic painting is also known as __ painting: HOT WAX. <Insert Kardashian joke here.> 3. This term is used for an operating system for mobile devices: ANDROID. 4. “2083, A Declaration of European Independence” was written by a __ terrorist: NORWEGIAN. 5. Cadel Evans just became the first __ to win the Tour de France: AUSTRALIAN. 6. The agouti is a __ that is native to South America and the Caribbean: RODENT. 7. George Enescu’s most famous musical works are his two __ rhapsodies: ROMANIAN. 8. The U.S. congress outlawed the Atlantic slave trade as of this year: 1808. 9. Roughly speaking “Pain Perdu” is the equivalent of what Americans call: FRENCH TOAST. 10. Which term means a sculptor’s small, preliminary model: MAQUETTE. 11. The stepdaughter of Herod, she is not actually named in the new testament: SALOME. 12. The late Robert Ettinger was a pioneer in this unusual practice: CRYONICS. <When they said “unusual practice” I thought the BUZZIES were referring to editing trivia questions for accuracy.>
We had a meltdown on the “hot wax” Q, and were ducking bullets on a little Norwegian island. We also couldn’t make it on maquette. This was actually one of our better performances on countdown. The team is now half-ready for the Scatological Round.
1. new non-fiction v IN MEMORIAM
The late Lucian Freud was one of Britain’s most celebrated: PAINTERS <A half-way split ensued.>
2. TOP ATHLETES v European politics
Pat Gillick, Bert Blyleven, and __ were just inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame: ROBERTO ALOMAR
<We’re still waiting for Chi Chi Esquelez to get the nod.>
3. CORPORATE AMERICA v classical music
Which video distribution company is causing controversy for raising its prices: NETFLIX
<many boycott partisans now call it “Not-flicks”.>
4. EUROPEAN POLITICS v new non-fiction
Lars Hedegaard is a __ author found guilty of hate speech: DANISH
<Yeah, we hate to talk about him, too. So much so that we almost missed this Q.>
5. Jeret “Speedy” Peterson was an Olympic: FREESTYLE SKIER
<He overdosed on Alkaseltzer, fast, fast, fast.>
6. IN MEMORIAM v corporate America
Which song was a hit for the late Amy Winehouse: REHAB <This impending death was so obvious, no one could attribute “irony” to the title.>
The Crotches Crewe ripped through these with ease, although we had half-assed communication on the Hedegaard conundrum.
Unfortunately, this pretty much marks the end of the recorded portion of the recap. Operator error, by BLZBUB, resulted in no video of the rest of the game. His infernal notes provide some of the material to come.
Frightening Round:
We got all of these questions correct except the where we confused Euell Gibbons with (Dr. Benjamin Gayelord Hauser?) for the 1950s health food guru. This set us up nicely for disappointment during the:
Py-Ram-It Round
P1. Something…discovery of Guiana: SIR WALTER RALEIGH <we managed to get this from the date?>
P2. Iduma or Edon…THE NEAR EAST <pretty much a history brain trust anal extraction.>
P3. In astronomy the largest __-was found at a distance of some 12 Billion light years away:
RESEVOIR OF WATER <we tanked this one, badly.>
P4. Founded in 1864, the Hakluyt Society publishes…ACCOUNTS OF VOYAGES <Another history braintrust nest egg of info.>
P5. The ctenosaur is a species of animal found mainly in: CENTRAL AMERICA <Doofus, BLZBUB, confused it with a dinosaur and tried to determine where the most recent archaeological discovery was made. The team suffered.>
We got Py-rammed pretty good on that round, and now we need perfection on the FINAL TRAGEDY to survive in the Top 50.
FINAL TRAGEDY is on the Topic of PSUEDONYMS
Lev Bronshtein was the given name of the man who commonly went by:
LEON TROTSKY
Points drained and the response from the history braintrust was equivocal at best. Still, many of the twenty boxes active got 90% of the full pull and our score wasn’t too bad.
The top six scores were 44917, 44719, 38076, 37888, 37 687, and 37419. The team average was 40117, which, as we feared, was not Top 50 worthy. The 61st place ranking was not a big surprise. What did surprise was the 21st place finish of our cross-town rival, the Smegtasters at Spectators Sports Bar.
We don’t know whether 2nd ranked Niles City in Fort Worth is Borg or non-Borg. The first non-Borg name that we recognized was Concert Pub of Houston at 4th. Congrats to them. The difficulty of the game is evidenced by the 12th place finish of The Fellowship at Stringz and Wingz, Streets OH, and the 14th place showing of IN THE ZONE of Tampa, FL.
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