Republica – "Ready to Go" (1996)

I’m standing on the rooftops shouting out

“Baby, I’m ready to go!”

I’ve never had a cool nickname, and I’m envious of anyone who does.  (I know a guy who goes by “Ace,” and I would love it if people suddenly started to call me that – hint, hint!)

The next best thing to having a cool nickname would be to be a member of a trivia team with a cool team name.  I didn’t get to choose the somewhat boring names of my trivia teams – those teams got their starts before I joined them, so they already had names.

A lot of trivia teams have tried to come up with cool names.  But most of them failed – there are a lot of very lame trivia team names out there.

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For example, the team that’s won the last three Pourhouse Trivia championships is called “What Would Snake Do?”  That’s a takeoff on “What Would Jesus Do?” but substitutes the “Snake” character from the The Simpsons (who’s a career criminal) for Jesus.  (Obviously it would not be wise to make one’s life choices based on what Snake would do if he were in your situation rather than what Jesus would do.)  

Snake from The Simpsons

Another very successful local team called itself “Dave Martinez School of Management” during Dave Martinez’s seven-year-plus tenure as the manager of the Washington Nationals.  When Martinez was fired last summer, that team changed its name to “Miguel Cairo School of Management” in honor of the man who replaced Martinez as the Nationals’ interim skipper.  (Blake Butera was hired as the Nats’ permanent manager last fall, but those guys haven’t changed their name to reflect that development yet – they seem to be sticking with Miguel Cairo, who’s now a coach with the Baltimore Orioles.)

One of my favorite team names – “Equatorial Guinea Pigs” – requires a bit of explaining.  Most nights, we have a “last word/first word” question.  The correct answer to such a question is a combination of two names or phrases that have a word in common – the last word of one is the first word of the other.  For example, if you were asked to combine the name of the star of the City Slickers movie with the name of an object often used by fortune tellers, the correct answer would be “Billy Crystal Ball.”

The “Equatorial Guinea Pigs” took their name from a last word/first word question that asked you to combine the name of the only African country to have Spanish as an official language (Equatorial Guinea) with the name of the herbivorous rodent belonging to the Cavia family that is a popular household pet (guinea pig).

Finally, here’s a team name that I do not approve of: “Does This Handkerchief Smell Like Chloroform To You?”

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My trivia team calls itself the “Einsteins” – which probably strikes you as kind of dull.

Technically, our team wasn’t named in honor of Albert Einstein.  Rather, it was named for a fictional trivia team that was named in honor of the inventor of the theory of relativity.

Here’s the Wikipedia summary of the eleventh episode of the eighth season of The Office – which was titled “Trivia”:

Andy Bernard, worried that he will not be able to meet the 8% quarterly sales growth figures that [his boss] asked for by about $800, proposes that everyone in the office buy paper to alleviate some of the burden, but no one is willing.  He then asks Oscar Martinez to make a rounding mistake in the books. Oscar tells Andy that he does not have time to make the mistake because he is leaving for a trivia contest with a $1,000 prize in a bar in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Andy, encouraged by Darryl Philbin and Jim Halpert, decides to take the entire office to Philadelphia in an attempt to win the money and make up the sales growth difference. 

At the bar, which turns out to be a gay bar called the Liberty Well, Andy divides the office into three teams: the “A-Team” consisting of Jim, Darryl, Andy, and Ryan Howard, the “B-Team” consisting of Stanley Hudson, Phyllis Vance, Creed Bratton, and Cathy Simms, and the “Just For Fun” team consisting of Kevin Malone, Kelly Kapoor, Erin Hannon, and Meredith Palmer. . . .

Initially, the Dunder Mifflin “A-Team” does well but soon falters.  However, the "Just For Fun" team does much better than expected . . . . [They] and eventually win thanks to Kevin's correct answers. 

If you watched The Office, you’ll immediately get that Andy assigned the four people that he thought were the dumbest of his co-workers to the “Just for Fun” team.  Once that group surprised their co-workers by winning the competition, they changed their name to the “Einsteins” – hence, my team’s name.

The Einsteins from The Office did pretty well until they got a question about who was responsible for the famous E=mc² formula.  All the other teams knew that the answer was “Einstein” – but despite being named after him, the Einsteins answered “Thomas Edison.”

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They say that life imitates art.  And whoever “they” are, they are right.

Several years ago, our trivia host asked the teams who were playing that night to identify Time’s “Person of the 20th Century.”  

We wondered if the correct answer might be a World War II-era leader like FDR or Churchill (or even Hitler).  But Time’s choice was Albert Einstein, of course – whose name had never entered our mind.     

Since then, we’ve had two other questions for which Einstein was the correct answer.  We missed them both.

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The last 2 or 3 lines featured Elastica’s “Connection.”  Today, we’re featuring Republica’s “Ready to Go,” which was released in 1996 on Republica’s eponymous debut album. 

I’m not sure I realized until recently that Republica and Elastica were different bands.  They were both active in the mid-1990s, both had female singers, and both broke up after a couple of albums – so it was an easy mistake to make, especially for someone who is very busy on a number of important projects!)

Click here to listen to “Ready to Go.”  It’s bangin’!

Click here to buy “Ready to Go” from Amazon.