Quiz Night

Hey all,

If you recall, we left off my adventures at work yesterday as I was readying myself to leave for "Quiz Night" at a nearby bar called Opus. The party going to quiz night just ended up being Nels, Rob, and myself. Getting there was almost an adventure in and of itself as Nels "kind of" knew where we were going and had been told the bar is "impossible to miss." It turns out that it is only impossible to miss if you are looking at it from the correct direction, which we almost didn't do. It also looks quite sketchy and rundown from the outside, which was getting me pretty worried.

However, once we walked into the bar it was not longer sketchy or rundown at all. It was a very nice, stylish place with colored mood lights and excellent (if a little loud) music. Since Opus is also a restaurant we ordered ourselves dinner and some beer (Kingfisher, which is one of the two or three beers available here. A light and somewhat flavorless lager, it is still pretty good). Quiz night started at 9:30, and it was basically a Master of Ceremonies announcing questions that we quickly wrote on small pieces of paper an turned in. The guy was a bit of a character, especially when he was announcing answers. He would often go through the cards, announcing the things that people submitted that were *not* answers. It certainly jerked our chains a bit, but it when we didn't fall for his trick it was fun to watch the rest of the (very energetic) crowd fall for it.

There was a range of difficulty on the questions. There was a whole lot of American trivia so we did well on that, but we lost pretty badly on the "listen" section, which was a series of 5 questions where they would play a sound clip and ask something like "what TV show is this from" or "what is the name of the lead singer of the band that did this song". The hardest one of those was a song by Bono, where we were asked to give his original given name! We were allowed to "call a friend" with our cell phones, but we didn't end up having time to :-(. Some of the questions required some British type knowledge (like the traditional british meal that goes with a given traditional british drink). All in all, we did OK but not great and would really have needed a little more diversity in world perspective to do fantastic. However, this happens every Thursday and there are plans to go back (if not next week).

There was one other even that happened while we were at Opus. Rob was happily eating away at his meal, then suddenly he pulled back, his math started opening and closing like a goldfish, and he started clutching his chest! He also got all pale! I thought that he was going to die! He certainly looked like it! It turned out that he had eaten a *really* hot pepper in his food, and after suffering through the pain for a while (even the rice we had was temperature hot and he wasn't able to eat it :-( ) he recovered just fine to the point we were able to tease him about it ^_^.

Not all that much happened today. Basically just working, though I got to talk to Satya for a while about some fun stuff, met a vegan who has set up illegal radio stations (i.e. he has set up radio stations) in multiple major US cities, and did the boxing class again. I also made some progress on a problem that I've been avoiding because it didn't sound fun, but now that I have an idea I want to see if it works!

Thats all for now folks! I think we are going to go out to dinner, and hopefully I'll do something cool this weekend. I hope you all do too :-).

Cheers,
Jason