Gotta get me some of that soup…

Out of the dark void, formless entities swirled through the faceless morass.  The spark of sentience falls like divine rain upon the raw forms, shattering into a brilliant flash of color.  Thought, primitive and unrestrained, flows forth like a cooling river over the hot desert sand.  Jarring at first, unconnected, primal, instinctive.  Slowly coming into focus, shaping into consciousness.  The beings begin to evaluate their situation, nay, their own existence.  Words come into the sphere of the temporal, small and unintelligible at first, but growing in sophistication.  Suddenly, like the bright flash of a star exploding into cosmic essence, the newly formed creatures can quantify the very meaning of life.  They fall to the ground and train their heads to the heavens and, in unison, cry out with urgent force:  “HALF PRICE TACOS?!  I’D BE CRAZY NOT TO BUY A DOZEN!!!”

This doesn’t have anything to do with anything.  Forgive me for indulging my own whimsy.  So.  Trivia?  Did we do that tonight?  You bet your sweet Aspercreme we did.  And, like the founding fathers before us, we destroyed all comers with our giant electrical death cannon!  Except the two teams that beat us.  They had, like, anti-electrical-death-cannon suits or something.  How should I know?  But don’t you worry, the damage was still catastrophic and delicious.  And, we still came in third despite booting some easier questions in the first two rounds. 

The name tonight was The Bourne Redundancy.  It was on the list, but it wasn’t very topical.  I suppose that if we had put more thought into it we could probably have come up with something Olympics-related, but we were le tired (Maybe the Gold Medals?  That’s funny, right?  Or Javelin?  Maybe?).  So we went with the tired out-of-date 2007 film reference.  Deal with it!  But we did ok, overall.  We missed one question each in the first two rounds (#s 3 and 8), aced round 3, and missed 2 in round 4 (13 and 15).  And we demolished the bonus like a German demolishes the all-you-can-eat pancake extravabreakfast at IHOP.  They loves them some boysenberry.  Or, as they call it, der boysenberry.  Or Eine Deelishus.  I think.  I don’t really speak German, so I’m mostly just gleaning what I can from TV shows that have lampooned Hogan’s Heroes.

HERE BE QUESTIONS!!  I promise not to mention the Electric Slide once in the question section.

1.  What does TVA stand for?  (Terrible Violent Apples.  Wait, I can do better than that.  Two Voluminous Apricots?  Twin Vienna Arf-arf?  I got nothing.  I think my funny’s broken.  I might have broken it doing the electric slide…anyway, it’s Tennessee Valley Authority.  Started by president Taft to provide opium to the natives, the TVA has since morphed into a secret organization bent on controlling the world’s supply of precious diamonds and being constantly thwarted by those meddlesome GoBots.  Choke on it Taft!)

2.  “CSI: Miami” and “The Price is Right” air on which network?  (CBS.  Best known as the channel that launched the great Electric Slide craze of 1909, CBS originally operated a chain of juice and smoothie bars catering largely to Portuguese immigrants along the eastern seaboard.  Later, they outfitted allied warships with giant electrical death cannons to fight against the TVA.)

3.  Which country’s Ministry of Health claims that it’s women are the longest-lived in the world?  (Man, that one is tough to phrase coherently.  I need a smoothie, so I guess I’ll have to fake a Portuguese accent again.  The country is Japan, but we said Sweden.  After we turned the answer in, it came to Dad that he had read about Japan’s boasting on teh internets today, but alas.  Fun fact!  In Japan, you can legally pay for any meal tab under 20000 Yen by doing the electric slide!  What a country!)

4.  What beer was endorsed by Spuds MacKenzie?  (If you said Caybrew, you’ve got another think coming.  You’ve also got your mind set to flavor and your phasers set to delicious, but that’s neither here nor there.  Spuds in fact endorsed Bud Light, which you might remember as the Bud Bowl runner-up from 1989 to 1997.  In 1996, in the penultimate Bud Bowl, Bud Light came close to upsetting Budweiser, but, with 12 seconds remaining in the final quarter, they were unable to electric slide their way into the end zone for the winning score. )

5.  What football team plays their home games in Bryant-Denny Stadium?  (If you said Bud Light, you’ve got your mind set to great taste and your phasers set to less filling.  But, you’re still close, as the real inhabitants of the stadium are a bunch of beer-filled losers: the University of Alabama!  Yee-haw!  The stadium is named after Paul “Bear” Bryant, the inventor of the electric slide, and a Denny’s that is, like, right down the road.  Germans stay away from Denny’s, preferring to get their boysenberry fix from the flavor country that is IHOP.)

6.  Which decade saw bellbottoms, miniskirts, and beehive hairdos become fashionable?  (If you said the 1960s, you were…um…right, i guess.  It was the 60s.  Dad did note that beehives were popular as early as the 1950s since it kept one’s hair out of one’s eyes when doing the electric slide.  There’s not a lot of funny in the 1960s, unlike the hilarious 1940s, so I can’t make a joke.  Oh well.)

7.  What color is associated with the Soviet army?  (If you said purple, then you’ve got you’re mind set to donuts and your phasers set to “is a fruit.”  And you’re wrong!  It’s red!  The Red Army!!  Remember?  You probably saw them in your history textbooks, doing the Electric Slide on the Berlin Wall before heading off to the nearest Denny’s for a Two Eggs Over My Hammy breakfastaganza.  It was the best of times, it was the delicious of times.)

8.  Which was inducted into the Toy Hall of Fame first: the Frisbee or the red wagon?  (This question is terrible.  There’s absolutely no way to divine the answer except to guess.  We guessed red wagon, and it was actually the Frisbee.  Seriously though, this is NOT the first time he’s thrown out a Toy Hall of Fame question, which begs the question: does Andy keep up with the Toy Hall of Fame the same way that non-German people might keep up with the Baseball Hall of Fame, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or Electric Slide Hall of Fame?  I mean, honestly… )

9.  The Tennessee Smokies are a minor league affiliate of what Major League Baseball club?  (If you said the Sault Ste. Marie Electric Sliders, then you’ve just stumbled upon perhaps the greatest baseball team name ever!!  You’ve also got your mind set to Wrong and your phasers set to [muted trumpet].  It is, of course, those lovable rascals the Chicago Cubs.  Incidentally, the Cubbies last won a World Series in 1993, led by a rotation that included young fireballer Henry “the high stinky Limburger” Rowengartner and crafty veteran Chet “Deal From the Have-to” Steadman.)

10.  What movie has a ferris wheel, drag racing, and Stockard Channing?  (It’s Grease.  Blah blah Electric Slide blah.  Next!)

11.  On this day in 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his gubernatorial intentions on whose show?  (It was Jay Leno, three-time Nebraska State Fair Electric Slide champion!  Fun fact: while doing a tour of IHOPs in Germany, Leno made a Bob Evans joke and was nearly drowned in a giant vat full of boysenberry syrup.  Fun Fact, the deuce: the TVA frequently employs a giant vat full of blueberry syrup as an execution device, as it is more cost-effective than decadently delicious boysenberry.)

12.  What do you call a shockwave produced by an object moving through the air faster than the speed of sound?  (If you said Sonic Boom, referring to the shot of espresso that can be added to any blended coffee drink at Sonic, then you’ve got a serious case of delicious on your hands.  But you’re also technically not correct.  Like doing the electric boogie instead of the electric slide.  The real answer is a Sonic Boom, but in the less delicious supersonic speed version.)

13.  Who is the author of Where the Red Fern Grows?  ( If you said the TVA, then you just electric slid you’re way out of correctitude.  Now that that’s out of the way.  The answer is apparently Wilson Rawls, whom I’ve never heard of.  I’ve heard of Wilson Phillips and Lou Rawls, so I assume that it’s some kind of joint venture from the two.  Anywho, we said Frances Hodgson Burnett, which is in no way in the land of correctitude.)

14.  Who has played the following characters:  Doralee Rhodes, Mona Stangley, and Truvy Jones?  (If you said Dolly Parton, then, congratulations!  You answered correctly, which you should have since you’ve spent some time with at least one of those characters.  But, you didn’t answer hilariously.  For Hilarity, we would have accepted any of the following: boysenberry syrup, Germany, the TVA, giant electrical death cannons, IHOP, or Bob Evans.  But definitely NOT the electric slide.  That’s more serious than funny.)

15.  What country borders the Pacific, contains the large city of Villa Nueva, and has as its currency the quetzal?  (If you said Peru, you’ve got your mind set to our answer but, unfortunately, your phasers set to Incorrect.  As Peruvian as the question might sound, the CORRECT answer is Guatemala.  Fun fact: the electric slide is neat!  [That worked out better than I could have hoped.])

16.  Name the song and performer behind the following lyric: “Everybody sing, everybody dance.  Lose yourself in a wild romance.”  (As you are no doubt singing the lyrics to the ghosts and dust mites doing the electric slide invisibly in your bedroom right now, I’ll just affirm for you that the answer is, in fact, “All Night Long [All Night]” by Lionel “Chet Steadman” Richie.)

BONUS!  Category: Steel Production.  Hold onto your electric slidin’ bonnet, Nelly, things are about to get cuh-razy!
Q.  According to the International Iron and Steel Institute (not as awesome as it sounds), name 4 of the 5 top steel-producing countries of this our world.  ( The correct answers, in order from awesomest to least awesome, are Japan, the US of A, Russia, China, and India.  In case you’re wondering, Japan edges out the U of SA just slightly due to their overall lead in electric slide dancin’ robots with giant electrical death cannons embedded in their chests.  Anyway, we got the first for but missed India, saying Germany instead.  I think we figured that all of those IHOP forks and boysenberry syrup latches would require vast steel reserves, but we still got it right enough.  Hooray!)

So, that’s the way that it went down.  Notice that I didn’t mention the electric slide once, but many gloriously hilarious times.  It’s like my oeuvre.  And, now the post is oeuvre.  Which is to say over.