Bean Trivia

It was a veritable bloodbath.

Turnout was about average; no alums or passers-by, but the usual suspects in spades. Getting off to my usual good start, I forgot to bring the beans with me, but we’ve overcome this beginner’s error in the past and we did it again by keeping track on the board. I did this to begin with; in apparent disgust with my efforts, Meh took over the bean counting halfway through. You can’t please everybody.

I had hoped for an answer like the classic one about Muppets, “Hermit the Crab,” but only came close once. For reasons obvious to anyone who has ever seen Spons at a computer, I put her in charge of the computer, and when attempting to google which president went on to become chief justice, she somehow managed to come up with the answer “Chris Palmer.” I don’t know if I was more surprised that CP was a chief justice or a former president, but I had to mark the answer as incorrect. If there is evidence to the contrary, I’m willing to reconsider.

The lifelines of daughter and O’C proved lively and productive, although I did occasionally steer people away from asking questions about things I knew they would know nothing about. Between the two of them, this is a small area, but it does exist. Then again, it was not a competition between the two of them, even if O’C did keep texting that he was getting asked more questions than she was. I mean, really. She gave four answers to who was the princess of Oz; he never gave more than one answer to anything. What a piker.

When we tried to eliminate down to the lightning round, we ended up eliminating no one, but that was okay. Eliminations went fast, since every now and then someone knew an answer, which is unusual. Crappy prizes flew by, including Portuguese Reader’s Digests and a fine selection of DVD made-for-French-TV movies. Then we got into the big prizes. Third was a box with a piece of Styrofoam promoting some dumb TV show on Fox (is that redundant?). Second was a giant orange Styrofoam thumbs-up; there was obviously a Styrofoam theme to the night. And then there was the first prize: an unclaimed overnight bag from Bump, with no i.d. of course, but with clean underwear. This is the sort of treasure that any Sailor will hold close to heart for a lifetime. It also provides an answer to the question of what to do with unclaimed Lost & Found items from Bump. Our experience is that no one ever finds anything that gets lost, and no one ever lost anything that gets found: these concepts do not seem to travel the same tracks, and make Schrodinger’s cat look positively decisive.

And so another season ended (except for Panivore Junior’s CatNat entry at the end of the month). Excelsior!