Trivial matters.

Often on Tuesday nights, the Resident Shrink and I (and the Rocket Scientist when he can join us), collectively known as Team Echidna, go to a bar called The Loft  in San Jose to play Brainstormer Trivia.  We're pretty good:  of the five times we've played there, we've won three, and one game we lost by tanking the final tiebreaker.  We view it as a form of gambling: if we win, the $50 gift certificate covers our dinner for the evening.

This is not the first place we've played trivia: when Gordon Biersch in Palo Alto ran Brainstormer games, we often won the "small team" prize, which was usually glassware.  At one point we had twelve pilsner glasses and five mugs -- all but one of the pilsner glasses have subsequently bit the dust, unfortunately.

There is another company which does bar trivia, called BuzzTime.  What it loses in the human touch it gains in being able to play against people all over the country at the same time.  Tonight we went to an Applebee's to play BuzzTime.

My standings in the national rankings in the four games I played were 42, 19, 6, and 27.  I won all the games at the bar level.

Then they held a "hosted" game -- same company, slightly different format, with a real live person reading the questions -- and I, with some help from the Rocket Scientist and the Resident Shrink, torched the competition.  We won a $10 gift certificate.

I know it sounds like I'm bragging....

Oh, hell.  Of course I'm bragging.  But it's not like I'm cocky or anything: as my dearly departed Dad used to say:

"You ain't cocky if you can do it."

And I can do it.*

I just wish there were some way to make a living doing it.

[Edited to add, Tuesday night:  I went to The Loft for Trivia: five teams of four and me, playing as "The Lonely Echidna" -- I came in second by one point, after changing at least three answers.  I  need to keep reminding myself to go with my gut.  I lost to the Gringos, who have won something like 15 times in the past few months -- and they have not even been there every week.] 

*The one time I did very poorly at pub trivia, I was highly distracted by other things going on in my life that evening.  Not to mention that that game had an entire round of "identify which Sex and the City character said this."  WTF?  I and my teammate that night (not the Resident Shrink nor the Rocket Scientist) did, however, run the "Princesses" round.