hitting rock bottom at the druid

December 22nd, 2005 by Lawrence David

so wednesday night, my first evening free from finals and school, christina and i headed out to the druid’s (a local irish pub) weekly pub quiz. this has become something of a weekly tradition for the two of us and our good canadian friends, jesse and hillary.

these pub quizes are usually quite hard; the quizmaster is big on pop culture and the four of us aren’t too keyed into that stuff. to make matters worse, he’s big on pop culture from his adolescence – and he’s a good 10 years older than us. so, we often find ourselves scratching our heads, trying to recall names of lead singers from big-hair rock bands that we’ve never heard of.

prizes are usually awarded to the first place, second place, and of course, the last place teams. we’ve come close to placing in the first two positions before; most recently, i screwed our moose by misnaming the most valuable green property in monopoly (for some reason, i thought it was pacific ave).

so this week’s performance was especially noteworthy because not only did we come in dead last amongst 14 teams, but i think we got the lowest score in recent pub quiz memory. and since this isn’t scored like golf, that’s a bad thing. (note: that 10 pictured above does not denote perfection, since the winning quiz score was 268.)

in our defense, we did this on purpose; the last place team gets a free round of shots from the pub: “the only thing that’ll make us smarter.” so, given that about 1/3rd of the way into the quiz we realized we couldn’t win, we decided to tank. unfortunately, another team was racing us to the bottom and we were forced to tank really hard.

honestly, i viewed this whole episode as something of a victory. we set a goal and we achieved. who cares that the announcement of our abysmal score drew stunned silence from the rest of the bar? at least we weren’t those losers with a score of 12.

and, our free shots were magnificent! it’s amazing how much better high class tequila tastes than the stuff you find in liquor store bargain bins. i got another pub-goer to provide photographic evidence of our victory (below). our other two teammates there, by the way, are rachel and tim. tim (the fellow flashing the backwards loser sign), it turns out went to regis with me. turns out he’s in hillary’s phd program at hahvahd. that’s smaller than smallworld – it’s microworld.

the rest of the photos from the night are here.