We are #3! We are #3! We are #3!

And damned proud of it 'cuz we didn't cheat.  Last night was pub quiz night at our local.  With a paltry team of four (some teams are 6+) and many beers, we pulled off a third place finish with the only slightly-inspired name of "My Sarah Palin name is Cracker".  We didn't win the team name contest because ours wasn't nearly offensive enough.  Seriously.  The more obnoxious and rude the name, the better the chance of winning.

Anyway, thank goodness J knew that I, Claudius was written by Robert Graves 'cuz I sure didn't.  Nor did anyone else.  J was our Michael Phelps anchorleg coming up with several clutch calls.  We did fairly well on the general knowledge questions, until the golf round.  Could they have chosen a worse sport for trivia?  Um, not for us.  We had to name the nationalities of various golfers.  After Shigeki Maruyama, J. Choi and Chi Chi Rodriguez, we were just plain guessing.  Fortunately, we guessed three more right, but that round took us down hard. And so did the "fill in the connecting word" round.

E.g.,
paper ____ bone (what word connects those two?)
seconds _____ cast
penny _____ stop

And then there was the bonus, double-point round where we kicked butt.  We got 9 of ten right, leading us to a tie-breaker for third place.  Kudos to SM for knowing the seven continents in order of size¹ 'cuz in this case, size definitely mattered.  And C knew that Charmin's advertising campaign was all about being soft enough for a bear's bottom (whereas all I remember is Mr. Whipple).  SM knew that Ryan Howard was the quickest player in the National League to reach 100 homeruns in... something.  I forgot the rest of the question because as soon as I knew it was about baseball, my brain skipped to the next one.  And our brilliance on this round led us to the tie-breaker to take third place.  The question was something like "What was the median price of a home in the US in May 2007?"  The winner was determined by who came closer without going over.  We guessed a paltry $125K, and the answer was something like $212K.  But the other team in the tie-breaker guessed too high (ya' know, like "The Price is Right"?  Sometimes $1 is the right bid!), so we won the $10 gift certificate and a Smithwick's baseball cap (which SM took and wore proudly -- despite being offered $20 for it -- because it signified the victory and it goes with his Smithwick's t-shirt).

So now we've got a $10 (woo-hoo!) certificate to blow on our next pub quiz night.  Hopefully we'll be able to get our acts together to get there again sometime before it expires next year.

¹_{Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, Australia.}