Tuesday, April 9, 2019

One Hundred Percent Joker Confident!

Tonight was bar trivia night... my team pulled off a first place victory, but we just didn’t feel that we did as well as we did. We didn’t have any 10/10 rounds in the basic game, but pulled off a perfect bonus round after the typical seven rounds. One round out of the first six can be doubled for points if you check off the ‘joker’s wild’ box on the scoresheet. We got 9/10 in the history and geography round, muffing the newly elected president of Slovakia.

Last week, we also pulled off a first place showing. The ‘picture recognition’ round involved naming animals... the easiest ones were alpaca, narwhal, and the bartender (labeled Sexius Beasticus) by the smartass MC. Then came more outer beasts: jerboa, aye aye, axolotl, Patagonian cavy. I told my teammates, “Hand me the sheet, this one’s mine”. When they asked if we should double the round, I stated emphatically, “I am 100% joker confident!” The term has since passed into the lexicon, this week we were ‘joker resigned’ and pulled off 9/10. For the record, most of last week’s teams did poorly with the weird animals- the second place team, who are very friendly rivals, got 3/10. I guess that my years as a huge fan of the late, lamented World of Darkness at the Bronx Zoo were useful.

On a happy note, tonight’s MC, a sub for the usual ringleader, told me that he got a job as an overnight DJ at a local radio station. He’s a good guy, lives a couple of blocks from me, and has done the bar DJ, trivia MC thing for a while now. He’ll be at a top 40 station, but I told him that I’d call up requesting songs like ‘Firecracker’ by YMO or the extended dance instrumental for the Clash’s ‘Magnificent Seven’. At four in the morning, would management lean on him for going off-script? In all seriousness, though, he’s a great guy, and though the pay isn’t great he’ll be doing what he loves, and he’ll still have time for his MCing duties.


I like it when the good guy wins.

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