How low can you go?
How low can you go?
I’m sure you’ve heard the old joke about the man who was seen hitting his head over and over with a hammer:
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When a passerby asked him why he was doing it, he said, “Because it feels so good when I stop.”
I’m that man – except I haven’t stopped hitting myself yet.
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A few weeks ago, I wrote about playing trivia by myself at a neighborhood pizza joint. (It was the Thursday before Christmas and the number of new covid cases in our area was climbing, so the brewery where I and some neighbors usually play on Thursdays decided to cancel trivia that night.)
It’s almost impossible to win at trivia playing solo unless your opponents are dunces, or drunk, or both. Finishing in the middle of the pack is about the best you can hope for.
That night I got off to a horrible start, missing five of the first seven questions. I could barely look the host in the eye when I took my answers up – I was so embarrassed. I would have sneaked out the side door and gone home with my tail between my legs if there had been a side door.
I eventually righted the ship, and answered the next 13 questions correctly. That enabled me to finish with a respectable score, although well behind the first-place team – which had five or six players.
“That was a b-i-g mistake,” I said to myself as I was walking out of the restaurant. “A mistake I certainly won’t be making again!”
Famous last words . . .
* * * * *
Two weeks later, all of my Thursday night teammates opted out of playing at our regular venue, so I went back to the pizza place for another one-man effort.
It isn’t far away from my house, and the pizza there is quite good – plus they discount the prices of the local craft beers significantly during trivia. (I do love me a bargain!)
But the real reason I went back is that relatively few teams show up for trivia there – in fact, I was one of only four teams competing that night – which meant I had a better chance of finishing at or near the top of the standings.
I should know better than to think I can win even under such relatively favorable circumstances . . . but it seems that I still haven’t learned my lesson.
When an acquaintance of his whose first marriage had been miserable decided to marry for a second time, the English writer Samuel Johnson said the friend’s decision represented “the triumph of hope over experience.” That epigram applies equally to me for playing trivia solo for a second time.
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The philosopher George Santayana’s famous line – “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – was also applicable to me.
Except my second experience playing as a one-man team wasn’t a repeat of my first experience – it was even worse.
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I did pretty well in the first two rounds that night. Naturally, my score wasn’t as high as it usually is when I’m playing with my bartender pals – but it wasn’t bad.
The wheels started to come off the bus during the picture round, which asked players to look at still photos from ten 2021 movies, and name those movies. (I haven’t been in a movie theatre in two years – and even if I had, it wouldn’t have been to see Spider-Man: No Way Home, or Fast and Furious 9, or Cruella.)
It helped my score that I was able to successfully name eight of the ten largest countries in the world by population. (I doubt that any of my opponents did better.)
The first question of the third round was a real softball for me: “Name the longest-serving Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.” It came with a bonus question – “Name his successor, who was the second-longest-serving Chief Justice ever” – that I knocked out of the park as well.
At that point, I was in second place, and within shouting distance of the six-member first-place team.
I did miss the next question, but I had bet the minimum amount on it – which prevented any real damage to my score – and then followed up with another high-wager winner and bonus combination.
As for what happened after that, the less said the better.
* * * * *
I missed the next six questions in a row. (Horribile dictu!)
Several of those questions were relatively easy. For example, do you know what color always comes first in rainbows? I didn’t. (It’s red.)
I couldn’t name even two of the last three American males to win grand-slam tennis tournaments. (I correctly identified Andre Agassi, but missed the other two. I might be forgiven for not thinking of Andy Roddick, who won one and only one grand-slam title. But how I overlooked Pete Sampras – who won a record fourteen grand-slam events, and was the #1-ranked player in the world for almost six years – is beyond me.)
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| A sudarshana chakra |
The next question concerned something called a sudarshana chakra, which is a discus-like weapon with 108 serrated edges. It’s associated with one of the major gods of a particular religion, and we were asked to identify what that religion was. I figured it had to be Hinduism or Buddhism, given its name and the fact that the religion in question seemed to have more than one god (which eliminated Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). I mentally flipped a coin and guessed Buddhism, but the correct answer was Hinduism.
Quel désastre! I had scored 31 of a possible 36 points in the first round, 30 out of 36 in the second round, and 25 out of 36 in the third round – but I only tallied seven of the possible 36 points in the fourth and final round.
That’s bad enough. But things were about the get worse.
* * * * *
The last question is the only one where your wager is subtracted from your score if you don’t know the correct answer. (If you miss any other question, you simply get zero points added to your total.)
After the fourth round, I was in 4th and last place – ten points out of 3rd and so far out of 1st there was no point in even thinking about it.
You can bet up to 12 points on the final question, and there was no reason for me not to go for broke – when you’re 4th out of four teams, you really can’t go any lower.
The category for the final question was “Fictional characters,” which gave me reason to be optimistic – I was an English major, after all, and I’ve always read a lot.
Here’s the final question:
When this character is first introduced in a 20th-century novel, she is only sixteen years old. However, by the time the novel is finished, she has been married three times, had three children, lost one of those children to a horse-riding accident, and runs a successful sawmill. Who was that character?
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The six-player team that finished first that night knew the answer. They wagered 12 points and ended up with the very highest score of the 102 teams who played at a Pourhouse Trivia venue that night.
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I obviously never had a chance of beating them single-handedly. But I certainly had a chance to finish in 2nd or 3rd place.
However, by whiffing on the final question, I finished with a final score that was actually lower than my score after the third round. In other words, I would have done better if I had gone home after the third round, and just punted on the last seven questions.
It doesn’t get any worse than that.
Surely the shameful memory of my performance that night will cure me of any desire to ever play trivia by myself again.
On the other hand, it doesn’t get any worse than that – so I have no place to go but up! Right?
* * * * *
In case you’re wondering, the two longest-serving Chief Justices of the Supreme Court? John Marshall and Roger Taney, of course.
The ten largest countries in the world by population? China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, and Mexico.
Finally, the answer to the final question is none other than Scarlett O’Hara of Gone With the Wind fame. I’ve read the book and seen the movie – it was a l-o-n-g time ago, to be sure – and all I remember for sure about her is that after the South’s defeat in the Civil War resulted in her financial ruin, she made a fancy dress out of her family mansion’s curtains in hopes of impressing the man she wanted to marry:
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None of that stuff about husbands and children and a sawmill stuck with me, and my final score suffered accordingly.
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Ludacris’s “How Low” was a big hit for the Atlanta rapper (who is a distant cousin of the late comedian Richard Pryor) in 2009-2010.
The track samples Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” – that’s where the “How low can you go?” line quoted above comes from.
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Click here to watch the official music video for “How Low.”
Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:
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