Beatles – "I'm a Loser" (1964)

And so it’s true, pride comes before a fall

I’m telling you so that you won’t lose all

To answer Tennessee, or not to answer Tennessee – that was the question.

To be precise, that was the final question at trivia this week – the question that caused my team to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune yet again:

Which two states that border each other are tied for the highest number of borders shared with other states – with eight each?

In other words, we were asked to name the two states that are bordered by the most  states – each of which touches eight other states (including one another). 

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I wrote a few days ago that my Tuesday night trivia team had gone from being a trivia juggernaut (winning seven of nine weekly contests in December and January) to being a trivia cowflop, going oh-for-four in the most recent competitions.

That oh-for-four streak is now – horrible dictu – an OH-FOR-FIVE streak!

All because I didn’t know whether it was Kentucky or Tennessee that bordered eight states.

I knew that Missouri was one of correct answers to the final questions.  I spent my first 18 years in the  “Show Me State,” and I know many obscure facts about it – including the fact that no state is bordered by more states than Missouri.  

In case you didn’t know, the eight states that border Missouri are Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska:

Do you know which two-letter state abbreviation
 has the highest value in Roman numerals? (I do!)

But it wasn’t enough to name only one of the most-bordered states – to get credit for your answer, you had to name both of them.

I knew absotively, posilutely that either Kentucky or Tennessee – both of which border Missouri – was the other state that touched eight of its fellow commonwealths.  

I knew with 100% certainty that Kentucky bordered at least seven states (Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, and Missouri).

I was equally sure that Tennessee also bordered at least seven states (Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri). 

What I didn’t know was whether Kentucky also bordered Arkansas (which would have made the Bluegrass State the correct answer) or whether Tennessee also bordered Georgia (which would have made the Volunteer State the right choice).  

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After the host reads the final question each week, teams have exactly two minutes to turn in their answers.

I spent most of that two minutes drawing this map:

(Rand-McNally has nothing to fear from me)

If you look very closely, you’ll see that my crude cartographical effort did not show Kentucky bordering Arkansas.  It also did not show Tennessee bordering Georgia.

One of those two had to be right, and one had to be wrong.  But I was as clueless as most of you would have been when it came to figuring out which one was which.  

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Some of you would had answered the question with something nonsensical like “New York and Connecticut.”  Connecticut borders only three other states, while New York borders six – of course, that’s counting Rhode Island, which doesn’t really border New York.  

Here’s a map showing Montauk, Long Island (which is part of New York) and Block Island (which belongs to Rhode Island).  Those two locales are separated by 21 miles of open water:

 

Officially, New York and Rhode Island share something called a “water border.”  But how you can you say that two states that are separated by 21 miles of open water border each other?  You might as well say that Florida borders Massachusetts.

I can hear you smartasses out there.  “Missouri is separated from Illinois by the Mississippi River,” you’re thinking to yourselves, “which is pretty damn wide and just as wet as Block Island Sound.”

But there are bridges over the Mississippi that connect Missouri and Illinois – the two states are physically connected.  You can stand on one of those bridges with one foot in Missouri and one foot in Illinois.  That’s a far cry from having to go 21 miles in a boat or airplane to get to from one state to one of its “bordering” states.

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Anyway, I guessed Kentucky instead of Tennessee, and I was wrong, which made Dynamite! – that’s the name of our trivia team – a BIG FAT LOSER for the fifth consecutive week.

I could blame my teammates for our failure – I got a deer-in-the-headlights look from each of them when I asked them whether I should go with Kentucky or Tennessee – but that’s not the kind of trivia teammate I am!

Going with Kentucky instead of Tennessee was 100% on me.  God help me, but that’s my part of the world.  I’ve driven through each and every one of those states backwards and forwards, and I used actual maps to navigate instead of blindly relying on an app to get me to my destination like you young whippersnappers do.  

At one point in time I knew the answer to the question with certainly.  But that night I only remembered that it was one of two states – and close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.  (Curling and cornhole as well.)

Mea culpa . . . mea culpa . . . mea maxima culpa.

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When our team hit oh-for-four, one of our team members said we were suffering through “a bit of a dry spell.”

That turn of phrase reminds me of an incident years ago when my family was vacationing on Cape Cod and my oldest child – he was a teenager then – drove to a local beach late one night with a friend.

When I say he drove to the beach, I mean he actually drove on to the beach, where he got stuck in the soft sand.  As luck would have it, the tide was coming in.

He called AAA, hoping to get towed to higher ground before the family car became a submarine.  But there had been a multi-car collision on the main Cape Cod highway that night, and every tow truck in Barnstable County was en route to the scene of those shenanigans.

“I’m in a bit of a bind,” he said when he called home seeking help.

“Yes, you are,” I told him.

“A bit of a bind” was a bit of understatement when it came to describing my son’s predicament.

And “a bit of a dry spell” is a bit of an understatement when it comes to describing an oh-for-four trivia losing streak.

As for an OH-FOR-FIVE streak, fuhgeddaboudit.  That’s not a bit of a dry spell, that’s f*cking Armegeddon.

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STOP THE PRESSES!

I held this post back until I could report on what happened at trivia the week after the Kentucky-Tennessee fiasco.

What happened is that oh-for-five is now OH-FOR-F*CKING-SIX.

That night, Dynamite! was sitting somewhat uncomfortably in first place when it was time for the final question: we were ahead of the runners-up by a mere three points.

You can bet a maximum of 12 points on the final question, so we bet ten – if we answered the final question correctly, we couldn't lose.

The problem is that we rarely get the final question right.  I ran the numbers, and it looks like Dynamite! answers the final question correctly about one-third of the time.

That’s pretty typical of the teams that play Pourhouse Trivia on Tuesdays – over the past four months, roughly one-third of them have gotten the final question right.

Given that the odds against us coming up with correct answer were two to one, you might wonder why we bet anything at all.  Why not sit tight and hope that the teams within striking distance would step on their d*cks and get the final answer wrong instead of taking a risk and beating ourselves?

That is a VERY good question.  It turned out that if we had bet zero, we would have finished in first place.

What’s ironic about this result is that it was the mirror-image of my experience the previous Thursday, when I played with a different group of teammates at a different brewery.  That night, we had been in second place, three points out of the top spot, when the final question rolled around.  

If one team got the final answer wrong and the other team got it right, the team that got it right was almost certain to beat the team that got it wrong regardless of the amounts that were wagered.  But if both of us got it wrong or both of us got it right, the amounts that we bet would determine the outcome.

We bet six, hoping that the top team would bet ten.

If they did bet ten and got the answer right, they would win – no matter what we bet.  They had the lead, which put them in the driver’s seat.

But what if both teams were wrong?  If they bet ten and we bet six and we were both wrong, we would win by one point.  

AND THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED!  Our strategy turned out to be perfect!

“So why didn’t you learn from that experience Tuesday night, when the tables were turned and you were in first place by three points?” you may be asking.  “Why did you make the same final-question bet when you were leading by three on Tuesday that the other team made the previous Thursday when they were leading by three – a bet that blew up in your face just as it had blown up in the other team’s face?”

I guess that’s why they call us Dynamite!

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I almost forgot to share the final question from Tuesday night – that question that knocked us out of first place when we were unable to answer it correctly:

Winner of eight Oscars including Best Picture, which 1980’s film holds a Guinness world record by filming a scene with an estimated 300,000 extras?

(You want the answer?  Look it up your own damn self.)

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“I’m A Loser” is a bit of a hot mess.  The song (written by John Lennon)  is emblematic of Lennon and McCartney’s two major weaknesses as songwriters.

First, many of their songs were created by stitching together song fragments that didn’t mesh with one another very smoothly – sort of like Dr. Frankenstein created his monster by stitching together parts from different bodies that didn’t look quite right together.  (Listen to the instrumental break before the third verse.  The first half is a Dylanesque harmonica solo, while the other half is a twangy C&W-style guitar solo that sounds nothing like the first half.)

Second, the slapdash lyrics sound like Lennon spent all of five minutes coming up with them.  

The first line quoted above illustrates my point.  It’s bad enough that Lennon falls back on a cliché like “pride comes before a fall.”  It’s worse that his particular formulation of that cliché was so carelessly written that the first syllable of “before” is stressed when it’s the second syllable that should be.  (The third verse that includes that line sounds like it  was written by someone for whom English is a second language.)

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Here’s what Lennon said about “I’m a Loser” in a 1980 interview:

That’s me in my Dylan period.  Part of me suspects I’m a loser and part of me thinks I’m God Almighty.

2 or 3 lines knows just how you felt, John.

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Click here to listen to “I’m A Loser,” which was released in the U.S. on the Beatles ’65 album in 1964.  (And no – that’s not a typo.)

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.