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CCH, trivia

Trivia Contest

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This weekend is the Community Caring Hands Trivia Bowl. It is one of the more fun charity events to support the local CCH group. For those who aren’t familiar with CCH, they are a non-profit which does services for the elderly and poor in the community such as window repair and handicapped ramps and … Basically home improvements and repair for those who can’t do them without help.

The Trivia Bowl was started by a faculty group from the local community college many moons ago. It grew from a game they played over the lunch hour that is much akin to a team version of Trivial Pursuit. The way the local version works is that you get together a 4-6 person team, enter, and have fun.  Each team is assigned a table in the Elks Ballroom. A local retired faculty member and author of many trivia books is the Moderator. The normal flow is:

  • Moderator asks a question
  • Moderator starts the 60 second clock
  • Your team writes its answer on a slip of paper
  • Clock expires and the slips of paper are collected by the runners
  • Runners give the slips to the panel of judges
  • Your team is awarded a point for each correct answer

The winner is the team with the most points after all 6-8 categories of human knowledge have been exhausted.
What makes the event fun is that every one is heckling everyone else between questions and there is food and drink for all teams. Not to mention the audience in the galleries is hooting and hollering, especially when the judges announce a particularly inane answer to the crowd. You score crowd points but no game points by making up a Rube Goldberg style answer to any question you have no clue about.

Needless to say, it is a couple of hours of fun. Teams spend a lot of time visiting and talking between rounds, so it is a social event as well as a trivia contest. Teams seem to persist for years as a team. The team I am on has been competing for some years now with changes in personnel when schedules prevent some of us from participating. Our leader is an old high school classmate and former CPA. He is a bit obsessive, to the point of analyzing any question we missed in the previous year, etc. Another of our team is local lawyer who was also a high school classmate. Finally, to round out the core of our team, we have a youngster (he might be 27 by now) so that we can cover the youth trend questions. Some years we add a local surgeon or doctor or teacher or movie writer or … It all depends on who we can recruit.

We usually get a rousing round of boos at the start of the contest as the teams are announced – both because I am the mayor and because we have been the champions 3 out of the last 4 years. (We were sub-par one year and lost to the local community college faculty team. *gasp*) Most years there are 120 questions divided into 6 categories. We usually end up getting 110-115 correct. Second place is usually around 105-110 correct and then there always seems to be a gap before a cluster of other teams. But the real fun is the ones where you have no clue and so can go for the crowd points.

So think of me tomorrow night as I trivialize my way down the road … I’ll try to remember a few good questions and put them up here after the contest.

election, pundit, trivia, widows

Monday’ish Wednesdays

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Why did today feel like a Monday all day? It just had that feel. Started off cool and damp from the melt of yesterdays snow flurry. Then warmed up and turned a bit windy. For some reason it just felt like a Monday all day long.

The walk down to the radio station for the weekly show was uneventful and the report of yesterdays council meeting was short and to the point. Only a few items on the agenda. The trivia question was surprisingly hard for people to guess in spite of the numerous hints we gave. The question was: “10% of men have never done this, what is it?” The answer is in the first comment.

This afternoon was a disaster of sorts. I had an abrasion on my leg start bleeding again and it wouldn’t stop so I could put on long pants to go to a meeting. Nothing like a little squishy blood in your sock to make the day complete! It was just a little nick, but it had that annoying drip … drip … drip persistence at a time when I was already in a hurry.

In other news, I finally got my wife’s old laptop at least partially resurrected from the dead. Even as I write this, the poor beast is doing a backup of all it’s contents to one of my servers. That way if it heads to the land of the dead again, we’ll at least have all the information from it in an accessible form. I suspect that it is more than just one problem with this machine, so the current revival may not be one for the long run. I had forgotten just how painful Windows 98 was to work with and network. Guess I have just gotten to used to XP, Linux, and Solaris. It did remind of the old days of Windows 95 and even {*gasp*} Windows 3.x. I may actually be one of the few people willing to admit that saw and even attempted to use a copy of Windows 1.x back in the 80’s. Now that really lets you know you’re getting old.

Off to prepare for my chance to be a pundit tomorrow. What *will be* the implications of the elections results. It will be interesting because this area is one of the few in Colorado that voted overwhelmingly for McCain and Schaeffer. Almost everywhere else went for the Democratic candidates of Obama and Udall. (It is amusing that blogger’s spell checker thinks Obama is wrong, but has no suggestions of a better word. Is blogger a closet Republican?) Ta-ta.