We did remarkably well on the first round, which is always the Grab Bag and usually pretty tough. The second round kicked our asses, though: Astrology. Why not just call the round Superstitions People Made Up That You Can Have No Way of Guessing? How the heck am I supposed to know which day of the week is best for Cancers? It's a guessing game with a one-in-seven chance. (The correct answer is Monday, by the way. I said Thursday. Whatever.)
Round three, the visual round, held us down and did cruel things to our bottoms, which sent us further behind in the scores. We had to name airlines based on their logos. Much harder than you might think, unless you travel a hell of a lot. There were at least half a dozen on the page with some form of identical bird involved. Also, the hosts were sticklers for exact answers. If you said Air Alaska instead of Alaska Airlines, you didn't get the points. Personally, I think I should have gotten extra points for spelling Lufthansa right, but no such luck.
We slammed our way back to a respectable standing with the final two rounds, though. Round four was The Oscars, which we nearly aced. (Funny story: One question asked us to name all five women nominated for Best Actress this year. They were probably expecting us to blank on Melissa Leo's name, but the name we actually blanked on, at least for a little while, was Angelina Jolie! Ouch!) Round five, the audio round, was a killer. Twenty songs, each involving samples of other songs. We had to name the artist of the song we heard a snippet of, the artist of the song being sampled, and the name of the song being sampled. Luckily, my teammates know a lot more about music than I do -- though I take pride in being able to spot riffs from Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" in Third Bass' "Pop Goes the Weasel" -- and we scored high again.
Just not high enough to place, unfortunately. But we'll be back Monday, March 9 to see if our four-time winning team can once again snatch the trophy from the hands of the usurpers!
