SHUT UPPP

I have a monster-sized test on Monday, for those of you who don't know. It will essentially determine how much work I have to do this summer and also my eligibility for a possible bilingual certification. I'm quite the wreck this week! So since I've been holed up in my living room reviewing verb tenses and vocabulary and the Dreaded Eevil Subjunctive, I have very little to report that would make for good blog reading. Not that that's unusual, y'all have to be used to that by now! Ha, I kid. Well, kinda. Anyway: instead y'all are getting the Trivia Team Stand-Up Comedy Show.

Apparently last Wednesday (my only real venture outside from Sun-Thurs) was Bad Joke Night at our table, and I will now share the bad jokes with you. Look for the return of more interesting, more entertaining blogstuff next week! Well, hopefully. If I don't do well on this test then you might not hear much from me until August. Motivation!

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MERE: I think I need to see Titanic again, I forgot how it ended.
MARY: Ohh, that is a bad joke
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DUFFY: Oh crap, I forgot to read question #3. Ok, just take this next one and insert it wherever you want it.
MERE: That's what she said.
DUFFY: Drops microphone on the floor in disgust and drops his head down on the bar.
DUFFY: Into microphone: Sorry, I just heard one bad joke too many.
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DUFFY: Question #6: What is the hardest substance in the human body?
CAM: MY DICK!
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BEN: What is in your mouth?
MERE: Spitting food into a napkin: There was a piece of bone in my food!
MARK: Wait, did you just say you had a bone in your mouth? I'm gonna have to call "That's what she said."
MERE: No! It was a choking hazard, there was a bone in my mouth and I almost choked!
MARK: Stares at me for a second.
MARK: THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID!
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Oh, trivia team. Y'all are awesome.

We weren't feeling our usual Tavern trip for trivia this week so Cam, Mary, Dale, and I braved the cold (WTF?!) wet weather and wandered over to Pluckers, which is much more conveniently located for us "North Austinites". Freakin biggest mistake any of us have made in a loooong time! But that's a different story. This is the story of Mary's Amazing and Semi-Hilarious Brain. During Matt's (UGH!) grab-bag round, he asked us to name the four railroads in Monopoly. I hate Monopoly so much, but Mary instantly wrote down "B&O" and "Reading". Then I said "Isn't there a Pennsylvania?" so we had three. A while later, the round was almost over and the four of us started to think on the fourth one. Then something awesome happened. Mary was trying to talk herself through it, here's her thought process as the rest of us heard it at the table:

Mary: Sun? Sunny. Sunshine. Shoeshine? Shoreline? Shoreline!
Me: Short Line!

How we got Short Line from a list that included "Sunny" and "Shoeshine" I'm not really sure, but it has something to do with us being A) awesome, B) brilliant, and Secret Option C) trivia masters.

Also, attending the paralyzingly lame and horribly irritating trivia at Pluckers made us appreciate how awesome Duffy and the Tavern are. Going back to Pluckers was like revisiting that horrible relationship that ended two years ago. You know the one, where all you remember is the fun parts but when you get back into it you start to remember that the relationship pretty much sucked because even though your waiter was bad ass, the rest of it was annoying and obnoxious and the rest of the people there sucked. Ok so the analogy kind of falls apart if you get too specific. Whatever.

Anyway - we're officially back to regularly dominating at the Tavern on Wednesday nights. If you're awesome, fun, and think yourself a worthy adversary then you too should come "prove your brain is as big as your liver" and maybe take home a giant tricked-out trophy. Tavern. Duffy says 7:30 but really it's 8:00. Or like 8:10. Be there!

Ok so I didn't almost kill somebody, but I did come very close to a potential bar fight tonight at trivia. All my "I almost did something horrible" stories start with "I was at trivia last night...."

Anyway, I was at trivia last night, and it was weird. Usually trivia is on Wednesday but tonight it was Thursday because apparently the Tavern had other plans on Wednesday. Half the regulars didn't get the memo so apparently Wednesday night a bunch of people had shown up and I guess nobody told them to come back on Thursday because the bar was barely half full. Maybe six teams, tops. Plus Duffy's grader didn't show so Mark graciously filled in (when I say "graciously" I actually mean "was bribed with free beer"). Also apparently Mark sometimes reads my blog (he called me a "real blogger", ha ha awesome) HI MARK! Uhm, anyway. Dale wasn't feeling well, Mary has a life outside of trivia (WHO KNEW?!), and Ben was doing whatever so at the table it was just me, Eng, and Camden, making his triumphant return to trivia after battling the Eevil Mono.

So I went and turned in an answer sheet and it happened. It was almost like a dance, the motions lined up so perfectly. I was about five feet from our table and the guy sitting caddy-cornered to us was walking back to his chair also. Apparently he was talking to his buddy and paying even less attention than I was because he pulled out his chair while in mid-sentence and went to sit in it, but he'd pushed it just a few inches too far and right into my path. I kind of saw all of this happening but was a little too slow to fix any of it. The chair entered my path and I accidentally (it was an accident, I SWEAR!!) kicked it a little, and when he went to sit in it...yeah. He didn't crash all the way to the floor, he kind of did this Superman style laid-out flop into the chair as he realized he was way too far away to sit in it normally. You know those moments when you kind of want to die? That was me. Of course I instantly apologized profusely and repeatedly and the guy was completely nice about it. I mean, I might talk a lot of crap at trivia but unless you're this guy I would never purposely inflict bodily harm on anybody! Thursday trivia throws off my whole groove.

Before you read this, I'd like to formally apologize to my mother who is a wonderful parent and an awesome lady and raised me much better than to get in a fight with a total idiot stranger in public. I swear that this almost never happens and I won't do it again. For a while. :o) Ok moving on...

Last night was trivia - YAY! And a bunch of people who I haven't seen in a while were there, double YAY! Annnnd some jackass decided to start screaming the second Duffy started talking on the mic. Not so much yay. There was a basketball game on that this d-bag wanted to watch and apparently he couldn't figure out what was going on on the screen without the play-by-play so when they turned the sound off for trivia he started screaming like a two-year-old who didn't get his way. No words, nothing specific, just a loud, sustained, Tarzan-like yell. Really, guy? What I don't get, and I never got the answer because he wouldn't actually talk reasonably to anybody, was why he needed the sound on to watch basketball. I mean, you get that if you're actually AT the game there's no commentators or anyone telling you exactly what is going on, right? They invented that job for the old washed up players and coaches who nobody actually in the sport wanted to work with, but d-bags like you still relate to because they've spent their entire careers being not good enough and not liked by their peers, and you both live by the delusion that if the coach/owner/boss would have given you one more chance then you would have been awesome. (With the exception of Lou Holtz, who is extremely awesome but is currently paying his debt to society for coaching the Eevil Notre Dame.) I don't even really know that much about basketball but I am perfectly capable of watching a game with the sound off because...well, there's zero things that I actually need to hear.

So anyway, this d-bag is screaming his head off and at first nobody can tell if he's just drunk or if he's "serious", and somehow we almost ended up (ok when I say "we" I'm really just talking about me and Ben) in a fight! Except I don't really know if it can be considered a fight if the best the other guys can do besides a Tarzan yell is to say "SHUT THE FUCK UP!" repeatedly to the trivia host and to yell "WHATEVER!" and ask if I'm retarded. I mean, I suppose it's a valid question, I was pretty much ready to cut a bitch with a butter knife right there in the middle of the bar. I have been looking for a fight for a while now, apparently. Oh, and did I mention that Fireman's #4 was on special last night and apparently I was reaaalllly thirsty and achieved Pluckers-like levels of drunkenness? Anyway, it was all about to get REALLY awesome and then...yeah, they just kind of left. As the guy's idiot friend left he smiled really big at Ben which Ben quite rightly pointed out he wouldn't have done if there hadn't been a massive oak table between the two of them and the friend commented to Duffy that he has some "real nice" trivia fans, like maybe he'd just achieved the burn of the century.

So that was trivia, or the start of it anyway. GTYO took the damn trophy back which is halfway fine with me because really we didn't want it again and I swear if she takes any of the screws out of the gnome's face I'm gonna paint its face like a pirate. Beeyotch. And we're pretty sure they cheated but they did win best team name for the 2nd time in a row even though their name was pretty lame both weeks. So we're gonna have to have a super strong showing next week because this week was kind of a bummer, what with the screaming Tarzan idiot and GTYO. Apparently I'll be spending the next week brushing up on my grab-bag trivia (so...reading the encyclopedia, I guess?) because that was the only round that we didn't get a near-perfect score in, like always. If anybody wants to throw random trivia facts my way I'm all for it!

So as is the custom when a team completely destroys all competition at trivia, we brought home the trophy last week and got to add stuff to it. Turns out we're good at trivia but pretty crappy at organizing time to do creative stuff to a trophy ("I have markers." - Camden) so Dale and I wandered in to Hobby Lobby, spent four minutes(!) in the kids' crafts section, grabbed random stuff, and wandered out. Fantastic. Here are the highlights:



A shout out to Duffy and his weekly speech about "Just a reminder, there is no use of iPhones, Blackberries, schnozberries, we do have free wifi here at the Tavern but if you're Googling something, it'd better be porn!"
TToA "Googling Porn Since 2007".



Our team name won us an extra 5 points this week, so we had to commemorate it somewhere on the trophy. We're gonna be a little more hard up (TWSS) for trivia team names after January 20. It's been a good run, ol' George.



We didn't want to be too holiday-y but we had to add some jingle bells. Hopefully they'll go on to annoy other winning teams for years to come.



Mary putting the finishing touches on. Note the feathers. I thought that was a classy touch.



Annnnd the finished product! Shoes, paint pen, feathers, googly eyes, jingle bells, a button that plays "Happy Birthday" when you press it, and a Hannah Montana guitar with a pic of Cam and Duffy snuggling. It's seriously the best trophy ever. Plus it has all of our names on it, because we ARE the TToA.

Do you think we're taking this too far?
I don't think we're taking this far enough.
I just got goosebumps.

We're defending our title on Tuesday night, all suggestions for team names should be directed to the Facebook group. Aww we're nerdy but I love us.

Oh giant ten year old, where is thy sting? We totally redeemed ourselves at trivia this week, and it was awesome. Katie was in town, nobody quit, we had a dreidel, we won best team name ("If you can dodge the draft, you can dodge a shoe!") and we absolutely ruined the other teams, it wasn't even close. Trivia Team of Awesome, FTW! God bless us, every one!

Dear Blog,

I went to trivia with the biggest assholes tonight. We had one of the most WRONG team names ever and when Duffy announced it as a co-winner we all just kind of sat there, unwilling or unable to admit in public that it was us that came up with it. Then all hell kind of broke loose and everyone started fighting. Camden was pretty sure he knew the answer to a question so I wrote it down and suddenly everyone was screaming. They berated Camden about his answer until his only defense was to sit calmly and whimper "Please don't change it." I've never seen a man so defeated by his friends. For the record, he was right, so suck it. And Mary had a horrible day with the crazies and lost her voice. And the Tavern changed their menu and got rid of corn nuggets and also half the stuff they used to serve, including their 35-cent-wings, what the fuck? Also I quit the team. And then some smart ass had the balls to say "Don't worry, she can't quit anything!" Fuckers. Then we came in third (with 62.5 points, that's pathetic!) for the second week in a row because we're in a brain-rut and the really annoying girl who looks like a giant ten year old goes "I think we've had (the trophy) more than anyone else!" Yeah, bitch, three's a real record. And eventually I was lured back onto the team when they needed to know the name of the Grinch's dog. Those people can be so sneaky. I love them.

Love,
Meredith

So I went to trivia tonight, wouldn't shut up about my blog (it is an awesome resource for entertainment and interesting bits of random information), and then was told by everyone there that I would go home and write about trivia. Unfortunately, every time I try to write about trivia I end up with this crazy writer's block. It's not that there's not tons of blog fodder flying around at trivia (it's rampant), it's just really hard to explain WHY some of that stuff is funny. And so tonight, you have a guest-blogger. This is my night at trivia, according to Camden. Enjoy!

ME: I was gonna write a blog about trivia but I can't come up with anything good. Sorry to disappoint!

CAMDEN: Dear blog,
I went to trivia with the biggest assholes tonight. One of them kept saying he knew Simpsons trivia, but I really knew all of them. Also, for some reason, we sat at the pool table. And didn't win the best team name. I may never go again. Or maybe next week. Next week sounds good.
-Meredith

And for the record, the a-hole who is supposed to be our resident Simpsons expert? Mr. Camden Gilman. A.K.A. Armin Tamzarian. And I did totally kick his ass at Simpsons trivia tonight. Sucka.