During the recent Holiday season I had the annual opportunity to mingle with a bunch of strangers that are in some form or fashion, sort of related to me. Family, for lack of a better word, has never been my strong suit. Trivia Games, on the other hand, are something I am pretty good at. More than once I have watched Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and yelled at the screen as the poor sap couldn’t figure out the answer to some dumb question that I knew.
But family and friends are not offering up a Million Dollars and it is just for grins. In fact, we don’t even play the game. Trivial Pursuit, like Monopoly, works on the general theory that you have nothing planned for the rest of your life. So we take the cards out of the game set, and just ask the questions. This is still a bit of fun and still a chance to showoff my otherwise totally useless knowledge.
But really, it is a chance for us all to realize, that well, we really don’t know each other. One of the questions had to do with claymation and a pair of British characters, one of which is very fond of cheese. That would be Wallace & Gromit, of The Wrong Trousers fame. The Wife and I knew this, and everyone else looked at us as we had beamed down from outer space only moments before. When asked about a bestselling Irish author of nonfiction books and Dublin, the answer was on the tip of my tongue, but the Wife beat me to it-Frank McCourt. This so baffled the person asking the question that he stared at her blank amazement and asked how she knew that. Well, how many bestselling Irish nonfiction writers have you ever heard of?
On the other side of the coin, there was a question about a star player who retired his jersey, #99, on 9/9/99. This question was met with blank stares, and a few wild guesses of football players and maybe a racehorse or two. While even in Texas we had heard of the Great One, Wayne Gretzky, none of us knew that his jersey number was 99. Hockey, that’s played on a lawn, right?
These games are fun, as it just goes to show that we are all different and even people we think we know, we really don’t. We all follow our own paths in life. Therefore we all know different answers to different trivial questions. Sadly I got all the ones about Micheal Jackson right and missed all the ones about NASA. I’m not sure what that says about me-and not sure I want to know.
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