Bismuth

The Brain snapped the fingers of her left hand across the hardtop table and took a bite of her messy sundae. She was either pissed off or concentrating intensely on that particular bite. Given the circumstances of the night, it was safe to say the former was most likely by far. And if she was angry, I couldn't blame her one bit. 

Listen, on this team we're all competitive people. There's a reason why one of our favorite social outlets is matching wits with perfect strangers. We all like to show off, and we all love to win. And the Brain may hate losing more than any of us. 

The category, "Medicine" seemed intimidating, but  question was straightforward enough: "What chemical element is the active ingredient in Pepto Bismol?" I thought I knew the answer and when another of my teammates said "Magnesium!" I thought we had it. It was rare for two of us to come to the same incorrect answer independently. When another teammate agreed, the answer seemed clear. 

"It's bismuth." the Brain seemed so sure. 

We all turned toward her, agape. For a moment no one said a word. We looked at each other through eyes slit in concentration. "Are you sure?" I asked, "I've never heard of that. Is it even an element." 

"Why do you think it's called Pepto-Bismol?" she asked, brushing her bangs away from her eyes. There was an absolute certainty in her voice. And a hint of disdain. 

"Okay" I hesitated, "Can you tell me where it is on the periodic table?" I was hoping to settle the dispute quickly. 

"I dunno... Somewhere on the right?" This was a tough situation. The Brain was our best player, but there was a flicker of doubt in her eyes.  Or there seemed to be. 

Let me explain my role on the team. I am not, by any stretch, the most intelligent nor do I specialize in any particular subject. Indeed the area I should be best at, literature, is one of the teams worst. No, my most important job is to resolve disputes. 

Inevitably in the course of any trivia contest, the team will put forth more than one reasonable answer. Deciding on one can be a delicate process. Obviously our number one objective is to find the best answer. Consensus is the best solution of course, but sometimes it's impossible to achieve amongst 4-7 team members in one minute. 

This was one of those times. Three of us were pretty sure the answer was magnesium. Moreover we were all pretty sure this thing called bismuth was not an element.  Still our best player thought the answer was bismuth. 

After thinking as long as we could think, we answered magnesium. I certainly had my reservations, but I thought it was the one that had the best chance to be correct. I knew without any doubt there would be consequences if the answer was bismuth. 

Sometimes The Host gives the answer right away. He needs to keep the game moving at a decent pace. Once in a while, however, he does his best impression of Regis from "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire". This was one of those times. 

It seems silly to say, but I could hardly breathe as he took a long pause then read the answer. Bismuth. In an earlier post I said one of the greatest joys in trivia is being right as the odd one out. The Brain, I could tell, did not find any joy in her victory. 

Despite our setback, we kept fighting. We knew the answer to "What does the symbol AR stand for on the periodic table" (Argon) and "Which cartoon dog was born and raised at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm" (Snoopy). And even though we didn't know who Mork's boss was on Mork and Mindy (Orson) or which NFL coach with two Super Bowl wins won the fewest regular season games (Jimmy Johnson), we were in third heading into the final question. 

Sometimes you know a question without having to think at all, and sometimes you can figure it out through deductive reasoning. This question fit neither definition: "Arrange these hit songs by when they came out from first to last: 

1. The Wallflowers, 6th Ave. Heartache 

2. Sting, Fortress around Your Heart

3. Paula Abdul, Cold Hearted

4. Genesis, Hold on My Heart"

I've lost our answer sheet so I cannot tell you what our answer was. I can tell you that we were not close to correct. The right answer was Sting, Paula Abdul, Genesis, Wallflowers. We started gathering out stuff and paying our check, another frustrating week down the drain. 

As The Host read the answers, I was only half listening. There were seven teams at the bar and The Host hadn't read our name, "Obama Care Bear Stare yet. This was a rare week. Every team got the question wrong and we had all bet the max. 

As things turned out we finished third. The same place in which we started the final round. Sometimes in trivia, you can play as badly as possible and things turn out okay. For third place we received a ten dollar gift card, and so we slunk into the night, ashamed but not empty handed. 

Halftime Question: 

"During the Cold War what did STAR between the US and the Soviet Union stand for."

1. 

2. 

3. 

4. 

Our Lizard Brain

The Brain told me hours before there was no way she could make it. Yet at 8:45 she rounded the corner, telling a joke to a friend. Surprised, we shouted a greeting into the glow that surrounded the bar after dark. 

If our relief was almost palpable, there was a reason. The Brain was our trivia all-star. Her specialty was science, but with a seemingly eidetic memory very few questions were out of her realm. 

This week, question after question would have stumped the rest of the team, but the Brain had the answer to them all. She knew the organ TB effects (the lungs). She knew which card game ranks the cards ATKQJ (pinochle). And despite a small hiccup in the hockey category--Gordie Howe not Bobby Orr won three straight MVPs in the 50s --she knew that Gary Larson is the author of The Far Side. 

When I asked her once how she remembered one fact after another, she told me they came from her lizard brain. 

The term is an interesting one. As far as I know, the human brain shares little in common with the lizard's. But when we want to refer to the deepest parts of our subconscious, the places where our memories are lodged most stubbornly,  that is the term we choose. 

When I write there are moments when I get to access my own lizard brain. Others may call it their muse or their inspiration, but whatever they name it the idea is the same: we find something in the depths of our mind that even we didn't know was there. 

Perhaps it's appropriate that we consider this part of ourselves somehow distinct from the rest of our consciousness. The nature of the lizard brain dictates this and, in turn, contributes to its inherent mystery. When you pull up something you didn't know you knew, it feels an awful lot like it comes from an undiscovered place. 

For most of us, these moments of clarity and discovery happen only once in a great while. The Brain, however, seemed to live most of her life in that country. There was rarely a question that she flat couldn't answer. Even if she wasn't always correct, always she seemed to come up with a reasonable answer. 

If anything, the team relied on her too much. Although brilliant, she certainly was failable. She convinced us that "Off the Wall" not "Bad" or "Thriller" had the most #1 hits. And neither her guess (an eagle) nor mine (the flag) was the correct answer to "What image was on the first forever stamp" (liberty bell). 

Still she is the best player in our little bar and her answers had us in the game for the final question: "The following three actors won the academy awards in the same year for best actor, best supporting actress, and best supporting actor, respectively: Al Pacino, Marisa  Tomei, Gene Hackman. Which movie won best picture that year? Hint: one of the actors mentioned was in the movie" 

A complicated one, but once we figured out what the question was asking, we tried to figure it out. We knew at once that Tomei won for "My Cousin Vinny", which we knew didn't win best picture and which we thought was made in 1992. Now the question was what movie won the 1992 academy award for best picture. 

Unfortunately, movies are one of the weakest categories for our team. We couldn't come up with a whisper of answer. Our lizard brains would not work. 

In the end we had to hazard a guess. We narrowed it down to "A Few Good Men" (none of those actors were in it) and "Scarface" (made a decade before). We didn't even consider the correct answer (Unforgiven). And so we scratched our heads and wondered at the silence we found there. 

Halftime Question:

Match each item to its color. There is one extra color: purple, red, blue, green, orange. 

1. Arnold Schwarzenegger 80s film titles. 

2. Fred's Ascot in Scooby Doo

3. The Gs in Google

4. The horseshoes in lucky charmsg

The Host

He had the face of everyone you've ever known who never wanted to work a cubical but ended up working a cubical anyway. I imagine him searching each morning for a clean shirt and tie, picking through his closet, past the second hand guitar he played at coffee houses in a small college town, past the boxes of notebooks filled with song lyrics and the first lines of great short stories, past a leather jacket, vintage tee shirts, a box of keepsakes from an old girlfriend. 

He brushed the vestiges of what once must have been a long careless hairstyle from his eyes and handed me an answer sheet and a pen. I said hello and he responded in kind. He thinks of me, if indeed he thinks of me at all, as a part of the furniture, nearly indiscriminate from the other beer toting psedo-hipster yuppies who frequent this bar. 

I was the first of our group to arrive. The night was cold enough for the bar to put up their heat lamps. I pulled two tables together close to one, ordered an 8th street ale and waited for reinforcements. 

A fourth of the way through my rather large beer, my teammates began to come in ones and twos. They ordered diet cokes or waters and squinted over menus they'd squinted over dozens of times before. We had a large team that night. Seven of us got comfortable and exchanged small talk as we waited for the game to begin. 

This may have been our strongest team in recent memory. And after winning two weeks in a row, I was feeling confident. 

My confidence proved to be well founded. We flew through the first half missing only two points. At halftime we held a comfortable lead. The Host was cracking jokes. Any time he asked a baseball question he quoted "Something about Mary." He pretended the question he was about to ask was impossibly obscure, "Put the following 37 French Painters in order..." They were the lines he uses every week. We laughed along, so happy we didn't even have to fake it. 

In the background ESPN was broadcasting the final table of the World Series of Poker. There were two players left. One, a tall floppy haired 23 year old in a hoody and blue jeans, had almost all the chips. He sat tall, confident enough to make the cards bend to his will, or seem to. His opponent, pudgy with amazing arm tattoos, hurled his cards. They tumbled over the side of the table. It was a study in contrasts and the difference confidence can make. 

Our own swagger continued into the second round. We answered the first three questions of the second half correctly. With only six questions remaining, we were almost home. And then it hit us. 

"The Wall" is a phenomenon that exists in endurance athletics. I've hit it on a few occasions myself. One moment you're running along an empty highway, enjoying the morning air and thinking about what you're going to eat when you get home, the next you can't breathe, every fiber in your legs is on fire, you struggle to put one foot in front of another. Every athlete fears the wall, and we had just run into it headlong. 

Our "Wall" was a series of questions we could not answer. Some we thought we knew, "what is the governmental name for a group of owls" (a parliament). Some we could only hazard a guess at, "What still living diminutive actor was born Joseph Yule, Jr. in 1922 (Mickey Rooney) or "Which nursery rhyme character asks 'what a good boy am I?'"(Jack Horner). When the dust had settled, we sat in 5th place, 13 points behind the leaders. 

Hope remained, however, and we still had the final question to consider. It was, "Put the following 4 people in order from tallest to shortest: Prince, Danny Devito, Peter Dinklage, and Michael J Fox". We thought a while, knowing that we had to bet the maximum. Finally we answered Fox, Prince, Devitto, Dinklage. We felt good about our answer, but would the teams ahead of us miss it? 

As it happened, our answer was correct. We weren't surprised. The question hinged on knowing who Peter Dinklage is (he plays Tyrion Lanister on game of thrones) and guessing that Prince is shorter than Fox. It was an easy answer to come across. And so we were disappointed but not surprised when we passed only one team in the final standings. 

The Host smiled at me as we filed past him. I wish I could ascribe some meaning to that look. Perhaps that he felt our pain, that he too knew what it was to suffer at the hands of "The Wall", that he was rooting for us and we'd do better next week. But in my heart I knew he was being congenial. There was no deeper meaning. 

As I left, I glanced back through the glass double doors. On the big tv over the back wall, the floppy haired kid celebrated his inevitable victory. His opponent stood next to him, watching, almost shrinking from the picture. As I drove off, I watched the bar lights melt into my rear view. 

Halftime Question: 

For each of these 4 quarterbacks name the NFC team they won the Super Bowl with:

1. Jeff Hostetler 

2. Bart Star

3. Doug Williams

4. Brad Johnson