February Means Fifty-Hour Trivia

It’s proving tough to get over the hump in basketball. You see, our meteo grad IM team, Wyld Stallyns, hasn’t won a game since 2005. Though, to be fair, we didn’t even field a team in 2006. But still, it’s been three years since we’ve won a game. In our game last Thursday, we played tough in the first half (I even scored our team’s first points, which is maybe a bad sign, haha), trailing 18-17. But then couldn’t buy a basket in the second half (we all got really tired too) and lost 35-22. My line:
12 Min, 2 Pts, 1-3 FG, 5 Reb, 0 Ast, 1 Stl, 0 TO, 0 PF
And then in tonight’s game, the other team only had five players, but they were all athletic and in better shape than we were, and kept running out on fast breaks to get easy points. That, and we had trouble with a bunch of easy shots inside. We still played them tough the whole game, trailing 18-13 at half, and losing 38-32 for a final score. My kinda pathetic line:
9 Min, 0 Pts, 0-2 FG, 1 Reb, 1 Ast, 0 Stl, 0 TO, 3 PF
We have one more shot at redemption next week, otherwise the streak will stretch into 2009. Ugh.
At least winter made a comeback around here in the last week or so, in tune with Phil’s prediction. Back on Friday night and Saturday we got a nice 3 inches of heavy wet snow, which stuck to all the branches and everything, making the whole campus really pretty. It definitely made for a pleasant scene for our PSCG Leadership “Advance” (we didn’t wanna call it a “retreat,” haha) on Saturday for a few hours. It was pretty productive too, we got a fair amount of long-term planning done, and we’re pretty excited about where we think God’s leading the ministry in the coming months and years!
And then on Tuesday we got another pretty decent snowstorm, and it kept snowing and snowing all day. I really miss having days like that, where it just does nothing but snow all day long. We got 5 inches by Tuesday evening, followed by a tenth of an inch of ice on top of it by Wednesday morning (freezing rain when it’s only 25 degrees at the surface? are you serious?), and then another couple tenths of an inch of snow around midday on Wednesday (when it was “snowing like a banshee” when I made my last post). It made for some pretty pictures on Tuesday night anyway!
Also on Tuesday night, a bunch of us went down to Zeno’s to celebrate both Nat & Ethan’s birthdays! It was really nice, the bar wasn’t crowded at all, probably largely due to the snowy weather making it hard to get around. But hey, I’ll take it! Robyn & Dan arranged to send Ethan on a big long scavenger hunt all around town and campus too, from Walker to The Diner to Webster’s Cafe to Berkey Creamery to Pattee Library before he finally found a clue that led him to Zeno’s where we all were. All while wearing a really zany hat/crown thing. It was pretty cool. 🙂
And periodically through the weekend I was helping out Carl’s team (“Carl Sagan Could Kick Chuck Norris’ Butt”) in the annual 50-hour KVSC Trivia Contest (KVSC is a campus radio station at Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota). I’ve participated in this rather insane trivia contest before, but for those of you who don’t know what it is, 9 questions are read over the air per hour, and teams can use any resource they can find to try to locate the answers. The questions vary in difficulty, and correspondingly in point values (ranging from 10-125 points, typically) and the length of time that the questions are left open (5-40 minutes, typically). Each team then has to call in answers to the hotline for the various questions, and in theory each team could get a given question right before it’s closed. So anyway, Carl had a group of people with him up at Cornell University, and I rounded up Walter, Jacob & Mario to help here at Penn State, and Chris to help out from down in Raleigh too (our multi-state team communicated answers and who was calling in via an AIM chatroom). Some of these questions are google-able, and some are not. For a sampling of the sorts of questions we got, here are a couple:
Q: (for 75 points) In the 2008 New Hampshire Democrat Vice Presidential Primary, there were two candidates on the ballot. Name both of them, and the town that was listed in parentheses below their names on the ballot.
A: Raymond Stebbins (Weymouth, Massachusetts), and William Bryk (Manhattan, New York).
I got that one for our team! Thank you Wikipedia (and then Google for the second guy’s town)! And now for a second question (this one we didn’t get):
Q: (for 40 points) “At the end of the February 27, 2007 show of Wheel of Fortune, Vanna White revealed that when she was young, she rolled what into her hair to straighten it?”
A: Orange juice cans.
Seriously, some of the trivia questions are absolutely insane. But you can use any resource, including company hotlines. Yes, I even called White Castle customer service at midnight on Friday night to ask what their 100-burger pack was called. 🙂 I helped out from 11pm-2am Friday night, and then 5pm-2am on Saturday, and when Carl and the Cornell guys called it quits at 4am Sunday morning, we were in about 42nd place or so, but we fell all the way to 56th place by the end (out of 78 teams). Jacob, Walter & Mario really liked it, and I think they’re looking forward to doing it again next year, though with a bit more coordination with the Carl and his buddies up at Cornell. And maybe trying to organize it so that there’s always at least a couple people awake and answering questions. That’s really the key to doing well in a fifty hour marathon like this!
And speaking of Carl, I’ll be heading up to Ithaca, New York, tomorrow afternoon to go visit him for the weekend! Should be a fine way to celebrate being a PhD Candidate at long last!