Wrinkly Bits
A Blog by Gail Cushman
One of the highlights on a cruise for many travelers is the daily 4:00 game of Trivia. About a hundred people gather in one of the lounges, drinking wine and trying to answer questions we should have learned in fourth grade, or maybe eighth if we were slow learners. The trivia guru asks about 15 questions and teams of about 6 people put their heads together to answer the questions. The team with the most correct answers at the end of the contest wins. The prize: a glass tulip, after all this is the Oosterdam, of Holland America, one of the “dam ships.”
Cowboy and I have played trivia every night on every cruise, meaning that we have played in the range of 200 games. Cowboy is an avid reader and has traveled as much as I, he knows a lot of important and unimportant stuff. I’ve read a lot and taught a wide variety of subjects, so it seems to me, that we should be able to answer most questions correctly. We usually can put together about 8-10 correct answers, but the others elude us, especially a question like What is the only fruit that has seeds on the outside? I knew that one, but then, four more: Which sea critter has three hearts? What is the real name of Cookie Monster from Sesame Street? What was the first vegetable to be grown in space? Who is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta? Good question, I asked, who the hell is she? I knew the seed question correctly, but as for the others…I have no idea.
Some of last night’s answers: Marie Curie (Nobel prize); Italy (World Heritage sites), Palindrome (words backwards and forwards), and a bunch more questions, some of which I knew, and other, well, you know, they slipped out of my brain’s range. With six people on a team, from all walks of life, the answers that emerge are varied and interesting, all with some sort of reasoning behind them. There are always questions about gods and goddesses and I know none of them. I would do well with questions about sentence structure or synonyms and antonyms, but they are absent. Cowboy hopes for questions about cows, branding, castrating, or pulling cows. So far, none of those has appeared.
But, last night, we won! First time in over 5 years! Our “dam” team got 15 out of 15 correct, plus one of the extra credits…The tulips bloomed for our team. Woo Hoo!
