Steely Dan – "Do It Again" (1972)

You go back, Jack, do it again

Wheel turnin’ around and around

You go back, Jack, do it again

In the second 1980 presidential debate, Ronald Reagan famously prefaced his rebuttal of a critical comment by his opponent, Jimmy Carter, with these words: “There you go again!”

The post-debate news coverage focused more on how Reagan had effectively defused Carter’s attack than on the merits of the issue the candidates were debating at the time.  

Final Electoral College tally: 489 to 49

Reagan’s iconic line has been quoted or paraphrased by a number of copycat politicians – e.g., Sarah Palin and Bill Clinton.

I have no doubt that “The Great Communicator” was thinking “There you go again!” last night as he looked down from heaven and watched me once again mishandle one of the questions at the weekly trivia contest at Smoketown Creekside. 

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I hope all you regular readers of 2 or 3 lines will excuse me for repeating a portion of my December 14 post – if I didn’t, the story that I’m about to tell wouldn’t make a lot of sense to those readers who are new to my wildly popular little blog.

As I explained in that earlier post, the trivia format used by Pourhouse Trivia – which runs the games at Smoketown – features rounds of five questions.  You may bet 1, 3, 5, 7, or 9 on those questions – but you can only use each bet once.

The optimal strategy is to use your largest available bet when you’re sure of an answer, and use your smallest available bet when you have no clue what the answer is.

Here’s the third question from one of the rounds in last week’s trivia competition:

Name the play by Thornton Wilder that is set in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners and features a character known as “Stage Manager” who speaks directly to the audience.

As I had explained in my December 14 post, my trivia team had already used our 3 bet and 5 bet when that third question was asked, so we were left with our 1 bet, our 7 bet, and our 9 bet.

The answer to that question – Our Town – should have been easy peasy for me.  I’ve seen that very famous play performed more than once, and I recently read a biography of its author.

But my mind went blank when the question was asked – I simply could not think of the play’s name at that critical moment.  (“Choked” is an ugly word, but go ahead and use it to describe I did if you must.) 

As the time permitted to get an answer to the host ticked down to zero, I reluctantly wrote the number down “1” for our bet.  I stood up and started to take the otherwise blank answer slip to the host when one of my bartender teammates came rushing over and whispered “Our Town!” in my ear.  

As soon as I heard that answer, I KNEW it was correct and that my prayers had been answered – and just in the nick of time!  As the host harangued us loudly for our tardiness, I scribbled the answer down and rushed up to hand it to him.

But I was too discombobulated to think to change our wager from a 1 – a smart wager when you don’t know the answer, but now we did know the answer! – to a 9.

That came back to bite us on the ass when the next question turned out to be a tough one that we couldn’t answer.  If I had thought to change our Our Town bet from 1 to 9, we could have bet 1 on the succeeding question.  But since we had already used our 1 bet, we had to bet 7 (which was the smallest bet we had left at that point).

That’s a six-point mistake, and most of our trivia wins and losses have been by fewer than six points.

The only comfort I took from this snafu was I would learn from it, and never make the same mistake again!

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Now that we’ve finally gotten to the end of that long historical detour,  let’s get right to the point.

Last night, we had a “Three Clues, One Word” question, which is a regular feature of the Pourhouse Trivia game.

The host reads three clues, all of which have the same answer.  In this case, the items described in all three clues had the same one-word name.

Here are the three clues:

1.  This television show was created by Chris Carter, who also created The X-Files.

2.  This album by the Backstreet Boys was released in 1999.

3.  This name was given to a series of crime novels written by Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson.

I had no idea what clues #1 and #2 were referring to.

As for #3, I knew that Stieg Larsson was the author of the hugely popular book, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and its two sequels – all of which featured a fictional badass named Lisbeth Salander. 

I not only have read the books, but I’ve also seen the movie adaptations of the books.  (There were Swedish and American movies made from the books, by the way – I saw ‘em all.)

But I had no idea what one-word name was used to describe the Salander trilogy.

As the time allowed for us to noodle over this question ticked away, I was prepared to write down “1” for our bet, leave the space for the answer blank, and take our medicine.

But at the last moment, one of my bartender teammates came rushing over.  She was sure the name of that Backstreet Boys album was Millennium, and she whispered that word in my ear.  I hurriedly scribbled it down and ran the answer slip up to the host just in the nick of time.

By the way . . . does any of this sound familiar?

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You see what’s coming next, right?  (As my dear old grandmother used to say, “It’s as plain as the nose on your face!”)

If you guessed that I once again neglected to change our 1 bet– which I had written down while we were feeling like we were in John Bunyan’s infamous “Slough of Despond” over not having an answer – to a 9 bet . . . you are correct, sir!

To make matters even worse, the “Three Clues, One Word” query was our bonus question – meaning there was an additional five points riding on it – and it was the first question of the five in that round.  (Talk about your perfect sh*tstorm.)  

There was a good chance that at least one of the remaining four questions would turn out to be a stumper – and that happened, we would have been without what I like to call the “In Case of Emergency, Break Glass” wager.

In fact, there was a later question in that round we missed: “What does the Hannukah-related term shammash refer to?”  (Only Gentiles on our team, I’m afraid – so we had no clue that a shammash is the candle used to light each of the other candles of the Hanukkah menorah.)

Just like last week, we bet 7 on that question because our 1 wager had been used already – so we lost six points due to my repeating the past because I didn’t remember it.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

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As it turned out, we nonetheless finished in first place both nights – so my crumbling under pressure had no ill effects on our team.  Maybe that’s why I didn’t learn my lesson after the first time it happened.

If neglecting to adjust the bet had resulted in the loss of the “50% off your beer tab” coupon that the proprietors of Smoketown Brewing so graciously present to the winning team each week, you best believe I wouldn’t have made the same mistake twice – consequences that serious would have made me sit up and take notice.

But because we dodged the bullet and won despite my misfeasance, I wouldn’t be too surprised if I commit the same blunder again in the future.

Which makes this post sort of anticlimactic.

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“Do It Again” was the first single released from Steely Dan’s 1972 debut album, Can’t Buy a Thrill, which was one of the albums you heard playing all the time if you lived in one of the residence halls at my college.  (“Can’t buy a thrill” is a line from Bob Dylan’s song, “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.”)

Click here to listen to “Do It Again.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: