It all started out so innocently. We met this other young, childless couple -- the ones who introduced me to Settlers of Catan -- and they invited us to play trivia sometime. Scott is the host/announcer, so Amanda was often left to sit alone listening to him read off the questions. We said we'd stop by sometime to play . . .
. . . and we won a gift card -- they give $30 bar credit to the first place winners, $20 to the second place winners, and $10 to the third place winners . . .
. . . so then we had to go back another night to spend our winnings . . .
. . . and when Scott started hosting at a different bar, we invited a whole bunch of people so he'd have a big crowd on his first night there . . .
. . . and Amanda, Kevin, and I sat next to and started playing with A.J. and Nick . . .
. . . and then we won, so we had to come back and play again the next week and spend our winnings . . .
. . . and lo and behold if we didn't win again the next time . . .
. . . and pretty soon we were winning pretty much every week and everyone else in the bar was hating on the Roaring Cheetahs. Geesh. We can't help it that we're awesome.
So anyway, long story short, these trivia scores got added up every week and the top fifteen teams in La Crosse got invited to play in the state championship game. Madison and Milwaukee each got thirty teams. La Crosse and Eau Claire's top fifteen teams got to play. There are some other cities who had teams, too, but because I'm not from around here, I can't name them. (Obviously Wisconsin geography questions don't come up much or we'd be out of luck.)
All in all, 120 were playing at the bar on Saturday. Scott had told us in advance that the questions were really hard and someone from Madison or Milwaukee always won. In other words, come on out, have some fun, but don't have too high of expectations.
I should mention that Amanda had to bow out at this point. First place wins $2000, so people take it seriously. Scott was afraid if by some wild chance we did win, people might not find it fair that his wife was on the team. He said we should recruit a couple more players since every team can have six players, so we invited Jon and Christina, another couple that plays most Monday nights, to join us.
So there we were, sitting in our booth, expecting awful, unanswerable questions, when the first question was asked. It was something along the lines of, "On Seinfeld, what Latvian word is used to describe Kramer's "lure of the animal," meaning women can't stay away from him?"
A.J., Jon, Christina, Kevin, and I stared blankly at each other. Nick grabbed the answer pad and wrote down "kavorka." I have no idea how on earth he knew that, but whatever. We were off.
(Nick turned out to be the master of strange knowledge. He also came through in the clutch with "Trixie" when asked the name of Speed Racer's girlfriend. Who knows this stuff?)
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| The Roaring Cheetahs doing our super-intimidating roar!! |
Unfortunately it was all downhill from there. We stunk it up, answering question after question with wrong answers. Presidents, dogs, clothing, religions, geography . . . we were equal opportunity stinker-uppers. Our score in the second half was less than half our score in the first half. It was sad.
But here's the thing: everyone else in the state seemed to stink it up in the second round, too! We still had a shot at this! You could risk 0 to 20 points on the final question, and if we went up 20 while the top team went down 20, we could still win. We bet it all on the final question, eying the $2000, $500, and $100 prizes for first, second, and third.
We lost. Dang that Carly Rae Jepson and Call Me, Maybe. We thought for sure she had to be one of the top five downloaded ringtones in 2012, but she wasn't. Sigh.
So anyway, we ended up twenty-something-eth in the state of Wisconsin. Scott said if we would have bet 0, we would have been fifth in the whole state. Alas. We wanted the money, baby.
We still got a $50 gift card for getting third place in all of La Crosse, so that was nice. Also, we declared ourselves the third smartest people in all of La Crosse, Wisconsin, which is pretty much awesome and may or may not be true.
And then we resumed our regular Monday night game at our regular bar two days later . . .
. . . and won . . .
. . . so guess where we'll be, spending our winnings, this Monday?
ROAR!!
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