Geek Bowl

So for the last several years my wife Mary and I have been playing bar trivia. We have been since we moved out to the suburbs we have been making a weekly event out of it. Our team name is "Cat Party". Mary's brother Ryan is to thank for that gem, he was going on and on about his friend that was throwing her cat a birthday party and then we needed a name. As they say the rest is history.

So along the way one of our good friends sister and her husband joined in on the fun (Hi Annie and David). David has been hosting a podcast for a long time about the occult and cryptozoology, its really interesting if you want to check it out its called Blurry Photos. Last year David and Annie started up a trivia podcast called Quiz Quiz Bang Bang. Mary and I have had the pleasure of being on it a few times I don't know if that's a selling point or not.

Mary and I got invited out to Geek Bowl by Annie and David. We were able to welcome a new daughter to our family in November so we both couldn't attend. I went and represented the family on this occasion. The event was at Navy Pier, not a destination I go to often. I think its more or less a tourist trap. There is a beautiful ball room at the end of the pier and thats where the Geek Bowl went down. The event is put on by Geeks Who Drink who are a national bar trivia company. Mary and I have played their trivia before when we were in Denver on vacation and had a good time.

This event was epic. First of all it was great being the guest of Annie and David they are very connected to the podcast and trivia crowd it gave it all the air of being VIP. After we grabbed some cocktails at the bar we sat down and the host came out and did a musical number celebrating herself. Her stick was putting down Chicago and pumping herself up wasn't my bag. There were eight rounds of clues divided up into three sections. Each section had a special round. First up there was a musical round with They Might Be Giants doing parodies of songs and we had to guess the city that the original musician was from. Then in between every section was a performance by TMBG. It was like having my childhood sprinkled in with my adult life.

The second special round was a scrabble round. This was very cleaver, under one persons

seat at each table there was a bag of scrabble pieces. Each clues answer was spelled out of these tiles and you had to use them all by the end of the round and not use any twice. I enjoyed this round a lot, I thought it was so creative and boom there is a souvenir to take home also. The third round had Improv Olympic actors up on stage acting out questions that they were fed on the spot. I felt bad for these guys because they put the clues up on the screens and everyone was just watching the screens rather than the actors.

At the end of the night we got 144th place out of 231 teams had a great time and saw one of my favorite bands.

Links to everything

---

Geeks Who Drink

Blurry Photos - Shadows in the Desert (Kickstarter)

Quiz Quiz Bang Bang