A Day In The Life

This past weekend I attended a Trivia Night in our local synagogue. A friend of mine was putting together a team and asked my husband and me to be part of it. I usually am not a game player, and am not one of those people who has a broad range of knowledge on a lot of topics, but we figured it would be fun and would get us out of the house on a Saturday night. Our team leader’s name is June so we called our team June Bugs.

The trivia was divided into categories, with about 8 questions in each.  We had 1 minute to discuss between ourselves what we thought an answer was after it was read out loud and appeared on a  screen. The categories included Jewish topics, Sports, Geography, Science, History, Entertainment, Music and Food.

There were 8 of us on our team and it was a good mix of those who knew about some topics and those who hadn’t a clue. It started with the Jewish topics, Which 4 rivers are mentioned in the Book of Genesis that flowed from the Garden of Eden? That was a tricky one and putting our collective heads together we only remembered 2. No worries, the next question was Gematria- for every Hebrew letter there is a numerical equivalent, and the question was to add together the numerical equivalent of the first 4 letters of the alphabet, then divide them and subtract….they lost me at adding them, but my husband got it no problem. Next was identifying these 2 people. (All answers are listed at the bottom of this post.)

When the Sports section came up my husband and the team leader’s husband left it to everyone else at the table as they know absolutely zero about sports. Fortunately there were 2 real sports buffs and they managed to get us through that section. One question was, Which baseball team has won the SECOND most world series championships. Even I correctly figured The Yankees were the first, but the 2nd? One of the guys on our team got it right for us!

Here are some photos of mustachioed baseball players- who all looked like Tom Selleck to me, but apparently were not. They were once again correctly identified between 2 of the men on our team.

The Science section was challenging- we had no Doctors on our team. What is the heaviest organ in the human body? What are the symbols on the Periodic Table for Gold, Oxygen, Iron, Tin. Oxygen was the only one I remembered from having to memorize the Periodic Table in 9th grade.

For the Entertainment section we were shown clips from movies that we had to identify- all were easy- Fatal Attraction, Moonstruck, Tootsie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Beverly Hills Cop. The music section consisted of hearing a few bars from different songs that were played that we had to identify. It went fast but we got just about all of them. Most songs were easily recognizable but remembering their titles was challenging.

For the food section they showed photos of some different fruits

Then they brought out samples of syrups we had to taste and identify. I correctly identified all but one, they were honey, agave, maple syrup, molasses, and we incorrectly identified what turned out to be corn syrup. Then we were given some vegetables to taste- they were cut up into pieces so they were not easily identifiable. Okra, Parsnip, Yellow Beet, Watermelon Radish.

After each section was completed they announced the scores. Our team’s name was called first so we let out a whoop in unison only to find out a second later that we were the lowest scoring in that section. We improved as the evening went on, but not by much. We finished in last place when it was all over. It didn’t matter- we had a good time and had learned some new things too. Who knew that the largest desert on Earth is the Antarctic Desert, not the Sahara as we had thought?

Answers:

The 4 rivers are: Pishon, Gichon,Chidekel,Perat

Photo of woman in uniform is Hannah Senesh, Man is Benjamin Netanyahu

Second most World Series Championships: St. Louis Cardinals

Photos l to r: Dennis Eckersley, Rollie Fingers, Mike Schmidt

Heaviest Organ: The Liver

Gold: AU, Oxygen: O, Iron: Fe, Tin: Sn

Left: Dragon fruit Right: Ugli Fruit