Unaccustomed as I am to posting to Scaratings, I still felt that I should say a few words about the recent passing of a fellow trivia player, and friend, Johann Joseph Mierendorf (YOYO). The nickname being an obvious corruption of the German pronunciation of the first and middle names, and the surname, as Yoyo so eloquently put it, being German for “village of beautiful flowers”.
During a trivia career in which he amassed over 25,000,000 player plus points, Yoyo had seen most of the questions in ntn’s massive trivia data base at least once, and some of them multiple times. I remember laughing when the “This was the subject of a 1913 show at the New York City Armory” question would come up, and Yoyo would groan, “Oh no. Not the modern art question again.” I recalled how he would bellow out “Here we go!” at the beginning of each round, in a voice worthy of a marine drill sergeant, urging on the trivia team to steel itself for the task ahead.
We once had a Countdown game that was a repeat of one that had aired two weeks earlier. Yoyo correctly called out the numbers corresponding to the answers, for all 15 questions, before the multiple choices were displayed. His memory was that good. Unfortunately, he was afflicted with a condition not uncommon to those of us whose chosen means of entertainment incorporates the word “bar” along with the word “trivia”.
Yoyo was a born salesman, and a master storyteller. As long as you realized that his stories were 50 % fact and 50% fiction (percentages are approximate), I guess there was no harm in that. Maybe we should have been appreciative that he would go through so much trouble to make our lives that much more interesting.
Over the past several years, Yoyo had ceased coming into Diamond Lil’s, and we lost touch with him. This week I received an email from one of our trivia players, BOTANST. She had been doing some random web surfing, and discovered from Johann’s Facebook page that he died a couple of weeks ago from kidney failure.
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Bye Yo.
Still holding out hope that this is just another one of your stories.
REB