Debate: Think you're so smart, eh?

We ended up Beaning at the chez, as I said, because of those gas leaks. No one ate any of the beans, so there were no similar gas problems chez moi. It was a good turnout, with people squeezed in everywhere. We created balanced teams rather than sorting by vintage, and it worked pretty well.

For those of you who wish to play our game at home, I offer a sample challenge. Are you smarter than the average Sailor? Let’s try a few samples. Keep in mind that for some of these, it was only the group on the hot seat, not the entire bunch.

They were able to answer these questions:

• Which first lady was a former actress?
  
• What is Wonderland Center (category Lindsay Lohan)?
  
• Fill in the Stones blank: Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m ___
  
• Name the three Pixar features with no people in them.
  
• Who is Mr. Dithers (comic strips)?
  

Presumably you can answer all of them too. On the other hand,

• They were unable to name a Sondheim show (unless you count Fiddler on the Roof, which I was not prone to do).
  
• The best they could come up with for the year 313 AD was that was the year Rome fell. Much like 2012 is the year the world ends, I guess.
  
• They could not identify the composer, the name of the song, or any other lyrics from the the song in the Great American Songbook with the line: “The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, They’re only made of clay.” They spent a lot of time analyzing the fact that a lot of rocks were mentioned, presumably on the assumption that this represented the geological vein of the Songbook.
  
• No one could figure out which one doesn’t belong and why in the group Cosmo, George, Archie and Jerry.
  
• Nor did anyone know which Muppet plays the piano. (Actually, there’s more than one answer to that one.)
  

As for the lifelines, O’C had Gwyneth Paltrow starring in a movie that was never made, my daughter flunked miserably at comic strips and claimed it was because the particular strip sucks, and Spons, while knowing that birds gotta swim and fish gotta fry, thought that Showboat was written by Lerner and Loewe. No one ever went broke betting against the lifelines.

Two of the little Dec girls made it all the way to the finals, so as CP suggests, in the future I’ll keep my opinion of Dec to myself. It took a Yale student to actually win, but as usual, Meh was in there up to the finish.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a goodnight.