Nope!
A word with Slavic origins?
Wrong again!
The letters for all of the elements which have a single letter as their chemical symbol?
Bing, bing, bing!!! Correct-o-mundo!
And so I ended yesterday on a high note, playing trivia with the Liquor Posse at a local watering hole. What a nice way to finish a day which had begun so poorly! Even better, this particular answer was the final question, worth forty-two points if all fourteen parts were correct. And I nailed it, with some assistance from the team for U, V, and Y. Woohoo!
That final question was not the only one I nailed, either. The game had started with a question about SNL's Jeopardy skits: who played Trebek? Why, that was Will Ferrell!!! And I knew it! Oddly, I seemed to be the only one who did, too. Still, we wagered our maximum bid on it and we were off and running!
I know, I know. It's just a trivia game, right?
True, but I am usually not good at those games. I may know one question, or think I know it, but usually not so much.
Tonight, I was the team leader on that first question. Amazing!
Then, I knew the one about the sports figure on the most Wheaties boxes.
Michael Jordan, of course!
Then, the game-changing final question came along. You get 3 points per correct answer, but lose 3 points for every wrong answer. For a 14-parter, you stood to gain as many as 42 points... but you could also lose that many if you blew all of it.
We weren't in the lead, for a change. We weren't even close enough to the lead to be in second place.
We were third out from the win, behind by 19 points.
Ouch.
Then the final question came and the answer slip flew in front of me! They all know what I do for a living and this was definitely in my field of expertise! I wrote nine of the 14 immediately, seeing the Periodic Table with my mind's eye. Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Sulfur, Phosphorus: the backbones of the molecules of biochemistry and organic chemistry, the mainstays of our lives. Fluorine, Iodine: halogens, in the same family of chemicals. Potassium: that's a K, y'all, not a P or a Po, and we can thank the Romans for that confusion. Then came, Tungsten, aka "Wolfram", a favorite W-word for me and another team player. Thanks to him, and his methodical perusal of the alphabet, together with my knowledge of the names of the elements, we finished up with Uranium, Vanadium, and Yttrium.
Woohoo!
That didn't give us enough gain to win (the winning team also had a science teacher in their ranks), but we did take 2nd! Yeah! $20 gift card for the team's next visit!
This visit, my dinner was free. That's right, free! Along with four other members of our team, we split the 1st-place and 2nd-place gift cards from previous weeks.
Ah, such sweet victory!
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