Dan's Papers Trivia Team Starts Season with Victory

After a long summer hiatus, Townline BBQ Quiz Night returned this past Thursday and the Dan’s Papers trivia team, Thursday Night AA, came out swinging, winning handily.

During the 2013-14 quiz season, it took TNAA until December to have a first-place finish at the weekly event. This season, TNAA is going for the gold–or, in this case, a trophy with a golden hog on it. To explain: The first-, second- and third-place teams each week win cash, and they also win points toward the Townline Trophy for Trivia Excellence.

Last time around, TNAA finished in third for the season. It was a great end for a novice team, but fell short of our ultimate goal: To have ‘Thursday Night AA” engraved on the pig trophy for future generations to admire.

Out of a possible 62 points over six rounds, we posted 52.5 points. The runners up fell 3.5 points behind, making it one of the most comfortable margins of victory we have had. We wanted to argue for one more point–over whether McDonald’s was founded in the 1940s or the 1950s–but with a comfortable lead in the fifth round we let it go. Also factoring into the decision to leave it be was a new rule introduced this season: If you challenge the Quizmaster’s answer to a question, and you are proven wrong, you lose a point. It used to be that false challenges were consequence free.

TNAA were happy to learn of this new rule, because it helps the game move along expediently, but it does stink to put a point on the line to petition for a reevaluation of an answer.

Thursday’s first round concerned current events. I was kicking myself for not learning the proper spelling of George Clooney’s wife’s name. I expected it to come up–and it did. One point for identifying her. And one bonus point for spelling it right. Because of this failure to prepare, we got 10 out of 11 for the round and were tied for first.

The second round was on booze, which was especially challenging. But at least now we know what’s in a Negroni. We got 6 out of a possible 10, and fortunately for us most of the other teams found this round equally challenging. We followed that with 8 out of 10. Then for the activity round we were given a sheet of 10 movie stills with the actors’ edited out. Most of these movies came to us with ease. Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski took some brain racking. We got a lousy 8 out of 10 points in round 5–when McDonald’s came up–but were well in the lead. The final round–the audio round–was song mashups this week. After hearing 11 mashups played, we could identify 21 out of 22 artists, and maintained our lead. (We missed Phoenix.)

We hope this strong start is an indicator of things to come. Come root for us, or compete with us, Thursdays at 7 p.m. at Townline BBQ in Sagaponack.