June 3 Warmup Quiz Hilarity

On the June 3 Warmup Quiz, I challenged players to draw a firkin, a bodkin, a yurt, a thurible, a byre, and a narwhal. (Roughly speaking, these are a keg, a knife, a hut, an incense burner, a cowshed, and a whale with a horn).

I got a lot of narwhals, and a good number of yurts.

Some people decided to draw something, anything -- just in case it turned out that a thurible was, for instance, a clown on a bicycle. Here are some of my favorite entries:

June 3 Vocabulary Bee

Winner: Ted Phillips


Winner Ted Phillips with runners-up Marcia and Travis

Click here for more photos.

A Little Behind In Our Updates

Wow, how did I fall so far behind in these updates?  Perhaps I can argue that Mind Games has been going fantastically, thus resulting in a wealth of content, thus resulting in the deceleration of my blogging.

More soon!

May 27 Team Trivia

Winners: Caublasians



Click here for more photos.

May 20 Math Bee

Winner: Scott Matthews

Winner Scott (center) with hosts Andrew and Jen and runners-up Idan and Andy

Click here for more photos.

Next week (May 27) is Team Trivia!

May 20 Warmup Quiz Answers

Nobel and Pulitzer Winners

Who won 2008’s Nobel Peace Prize? MARTTI AHTISAARI (no one knew this!)

What New York Times writer won 2008’s Nobel Prize in Economics? PAUL KRUGMAN (some people knew this)

The 2008 Nobel Prizes in “Physiology or Medicine” went to the discoverers of what two viruses? HIV & HPV

Who won the 2009 Pulitzer in music? STEVE REICH

In fiction? ELIZABETH STROUT

In poetry? W.S. MERWIN


Please list all the UK Prime Minsters serving after Churchill:

(The list of all UK Prime Ministers may be found here. One note: Churchill served three terms, with one Clement Attlee between the second and third terms; Attlee counts. Also, incidentally, as one point was awarded per prime minister listed, the winner of the quiz was pretty much the person who knew the most prime ministers -- good work, Norm!)

May 13 Warmup Quiz Answers

(JACK CONNER, TOM MORGAN, AL SMITH, BILL WELLS)

(ACQUIT, BAZAAR, CRUNCH, FRILLY, GAZEBO, HYPHEN, JARGON, KNIGHT, LAGOON, MELODY, ORPHAN, PSYCHE, ROTUND, SOUGHT, UNKIND, WREATH. Unfortunately, many people came up with the lovely word "fright," which works, but then leaves the contestant with "soully," which is a sad attempt at an adverb. The correct match, as above, is "frilly" and "sought.")

Famous People Anagrams - Unscramble to Spell the Name of a Person Matching the Clue (1 point each):

LOUD MAD SAGAS (an author at the end of the universe):

MERRY WARDROBE (she’s just not that into you):

DEMON JABS (a suave fictional character):

ONLY I CAN THRILL (never made it out of the primaries):

GERMANY (really liked to eat pie in the ‘80s):

PURITANS (pulled strings in Russia while the czar was away):

(DOUGLAS ADAMS, DREW BARRYMORE, JAMES BOND, HILLARY CLINTON, MEG RYAN, RASPUTIN)

May 13 Geography Bee Results

Winner: Frank Chang


Winner Frank Chang (center) with runners-up Johnny and Bev and hosts Abbi and Jen

Frank Chang won in a knockout geography battle including a new round called "Country (and Territory) Truths and Lies." Contestants were each given five statements about a country and asked to separate the truths from the lies. Example (answers below):

The Philippines is named after King Philip II of Spain
The Philippines declared independence from the U.S. after WWI
The Philippines consists of 18 islands
The Philippines currently has a female commander in chief of the armed forces
The Philippines exports more oil than coconuts, measured monetarily

Click here for more photos.

Answers: TRUTH, LIE (after WWII), LIE (it's over 7,000!), TRUTH, LIE

Answers to May 6 Warmup Quiz

Name the 2 largest nations by land mass: RUSSIA and CANADA

Name the 2 smallest nations by land mass: VATICAN CITY AND MONACO

List the top 10 websites in the U.S. in any order (our source is today's Alexa rankings). Hint: includes 3 search engines, one video site, 2 social networking websites, and one online encyclopedia.

(Note: the list is also here, although it may have changed since the date of the quiz).

Google
Yahoo!
Facebook
YouTube
Myspace
Microsoft Network (MSN)
Windows Live
Wikipedia
Craigslist.org
eBay

May 6 Vocabulary Tournament Results

Winner: M.G. Duke

Winner M.G. Duke with host Jen and runner-up Johnny Lu

A full complement of 20 competitors vied for the vocabulary championship this month. In round one, as always, contestants were given three difficult words and asked to make up a sentence including all three. In round two, we played "Synonym Antonym True False" -- for example, trying answering Synonym Antonym True, or False to each of the following questions, as fast as possible (answers below):

realistically contains two a’s
a jodhpur is a weapon
erroneous infallible
the plural of synopsis is synopsis
perfidious staunch
an emollient is a salve
a quindecasyllabic word has 14 syllables

Finally, in round three, we tried a crossword-style challenge, one example of which came out looking like this:



M.G. Duke was far and away the winner, but many grandiloquent individuals had copious fun perambulating the Market, cerebrally jousting, and engaging in affable badinage.

Click here for more photos.

Answers: TRUE, FALSE (they're pants), ANTONYMS, FALSE, ANTONYMS, TRUE, FALSE (it has 15)

April 29 Warmup Quiz Answers

5 points: Take the first letter of the Spanish word for “today” (also the name of a popular Spanish language newspaper).  Follow it by the first name of the current president of Liberia.  Follow it by the initials of the term used to describe the boundary that separated the Warsaw Pact countries from the NATO countries from about 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991.  These letters together will form an adjective describing the study or spread of a particular ancient culture after that culture’s decline.  Answer:  HELLENIC

Name the first 5 U.S. states by population:
CALIFORNIA
TEXAS
NEW YORK
FLORIDA
ILLINOIS

Name the last 5 U.S. states by population:
South Dakota
Alaska
North Dakota
Vermont
Wyoming

April 29 Team Trivia

Winners: O'Trivia Newton John and The Date Rappers

Here are some sample categories and questions from last week's trivia game:

American Cities and States

• The “Old North State” is actually in the South. What is it?
  
• If you are visiting a downtown area called The Loop, what metropolis are you in?
  
• What southern state was known as Land of the 4 C’s, after the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, and Choctaw tribes?

Recession Round

• What is the name of the insurance-like contracts that promise to cover losses on certain securities in the event of a default and in which the buyer makes periodic payments to the seller, in return receiving a payoff if an underlying financial instrument defaults?
  
• Name the economist whose views, espoused in General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, encouraged deficit spending as a cure for the Depression of the 1930s.
  
• Name the 1977 Broadway musical containing the song "We'd like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover"

Mathematical Formulas

• In Eintein’s e=mc², what does c stand for?
  
• What does the m stand for?
  
• The equation a² + b² = c² was named after what Greek mathematician and mystic? 

Those questions aren't so hard, but here's where things get confusing.

The Date Rappers were awarded first place, and we took their picture and we think they're swell. But then, after many people had left, O'Trivia Newton John (best team name EVER!) approached us, suspicious that they hadn't even been named in the top 5 teams when we announced Honorable Mentions. Turns out the team grading their answer sheet CAN'T ADD. We added. O'Trivia Newton John won by half a point. O'Trivia Newton John was offered a cash prize, but these guys didn't even want it -- they just wanted the recognition. Classy! The Date Rappers and O'Trivia Newton John are both seriously smart.  Check 'em out here:


O'Trivia Newton John


The Date Rappers

My co-host Michael and I will check everyone's math more rigorously in the future.

Click here for more photos.

(Answers: North Carolina; Chicago; Alabama; credit default swap; Keynes; Annie; the speed of light; mass; Pythagoras).

April 22 Warmup Quiz Answers

      

Identify the Organs of the Digestive System (1 point each):

esophagus liver gallbladder colon appendix small intestine stomach pancreas colon

April 22 Math Bee

Winner: Scott Matthews

Winner Scott Matthews (2nd from right) with hosts Andrew and Jen and runners-up Viveca and Alex

This month's math bee began, as usual, with "Fifteen Seconds in Math Heaven."  For instance, imagine I start the clock and then ask you:

12 times 11! (132)

Fifteen quarters and five dimes! ($4.25)

80 minutes after 9:32! (10:52)

Etc....  Contestants picked up anywhere from zero to four points in this endeavor.  

In round two, contestants answered longer, more involved questions, and could use the whiteboard.  Here is one question from this past week (written by Andrew Singer):

You're on a distant planet when you run into a hot babe. When you first see her, she has 12 arms, 18 legs and 5 heads. Each leg weighs 30 pounds, each arm is 20 pounds, and each head is 40 pounds. All of a sudden, she morphs so that she has 8 heads and 12 legs. Assuming her weight remains the same, how many arms does she end up with?

Jen commented that this problem illustrated "the law of conservation of hot babe."  (The answer is 15).

In the third and final round, in which all questions are posed to all contestants and speed is of the essence, Scott pulled ahead by calculating with lightning speed.

See you next week for Team Trivia!

April 15 Warmup Quiz Answers

Name all 4 of the Monkees (first names only):

Micky

Davy

Michael

Peter

All 3 of the Jonas Brothers (first names only):

Nick

Joe

Kevin

All 3 authors of The Federalist Papers:

Alexander Hamilton

James Madison

John Jay

All 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council:

US

UK

China

France

Russia

9 Reflexive Pronouns:

myself

himself

herself

yourself

itself

oneself

ourselves

yourselves

themselves

thyself 

(That's 10 -- any 9 would do.  "Theirselves" is a regionalism on par with "y'all" and is listed in dictionaries only as "Vulgar English."  Incidentally, the "Vulgar English" lexicon also includes "hisself," at which point you really ought to just start playing the washboard as an instrument.)

A final challenge asked participants to guess the blacked-out words on these covers:

Hilarity ensued.  Here are the complete covers:

    

In other words: muscle, fat, sex, abs, pains, rich, health, fantasy, confidence, boxers, sex, gay, and rape.  Many people suggested that perhaps the boyfriend had not changed his sheets; one person suggested that there might be a new kind of date "rap" we should know about.