Week 6 of the 2013-14 “Catch the Mania” Trivia Tournament

This is not what I expected.

Six weeks into this 16-week tournament, and even after my Ruck-specific team of “We Are Your Nemesis … Fear Us!” had a strong showing in Week 5, our team has only clawed its way up from 16th to 14th place among all trivia teams in all “Catch The Mania” bars.

And while we were able to put the Troyale Family in our rear-view mirror, we’re still stuck in fourth place.  Why?

Well, Unwed Fathers (1st place Ruck, 2nd place overall) and More Cowbell (2nd place Ruck, 7th place overall) are still ahead of us… for now…

But another team statistically leap-frogged over us.  A team with the name of “2 Fast, 2 Funeral, 2 Soon?”  They played last week only and scored 69 points… but that actually averaged out to two percentage points ahead of us.  Third at the Ruck, 13th overall for the Paul Walker tribute trivia team.  Yawn.

Now it’s time to cowboy up.  And now that Jeremy McNamara has completed his Monday commitments and can join Donna, Dylan, Matt and me for Monday night trivia at the Ruck…

Let’s do this.

First round, Miscellaneous questions… did okay.  8 out of 10.

We did well on the third round – the music round – and then we started tearing things apart.

There was a category in which the answer was the combination of two different questions.  Something like “A Bow Wow Wow song while you’re playing a Facebook game” would be “I Want Candy Crush Saga.”  In that category, we were able to talk through what we knew – if we could get one part of the question, we could use some deductive reasoning to snag the second part of the question.  Guess what?  Ten for ten.

We also were perfect through a TV Themes category, where the lyrics to the TV them were posted and we had to name the show.  As for a category on literature, we claimed nine out of ten – and were also perfect in identifying photos of baseball pitchers.

And with every perfect-scored category, with every correct answer…

My team and I started having fun.  We were joking.  We were smiling.  We were having a great time.  And in the end, when Donna handed each of us some holiday cheer – packages of cocoa and marshmallows, all in decorative reindeer packaging – we were totally in the holiday trivia spirit.

We finished second on the night, just three points behind the Cowbells.  Unwed Fathers had a bad round on the TV themes category – which, by the way, was a 20-point round – so they slipped badly.  And as for the “2 Fast, 2 Funeral, 2 soon?” team…. I guess they got caught in a Tokyo Drift and didn’t show up.  Aww…

A great game and a great time with my teammates.  This round should put us back in the Top 10 in overall scoring.  And since this tournament has an attendance requirement (teams must play ten out of 16 weeks to be considered for qualification for the final round), we’re in good shape and peaking at just the right moment.

Yeah.  This feels good.