Pub Quiz at Ri-Ra

Tuesdays have been historically...blah. The agony of the work week is in full force and that trusty savior Hump Day is still hours and hours away. Happy hour might be a good way to break up the monotony but it just seems wrong on a Tuesday (so some people say).

If only there were some nighttime occupation you could participate in that would both stimulate your noggin and enable you to unashamedly support your local watering hole on a Tuesday.

Trivia junkies around Portland have already discovered Tuesday night pub trivia at Ri-Ra. That became obvious at about 7:50 p.m. last Tuesday when the half-empty bar suddenly flooded with people.

I had arrived early with a few friends and managed to stake out some stools and a bit of counter top - which turned out to be very lucky when space soon thereafter became a commodity.

The chitchat in the room was heavy while a bartender hoisted the pub quiz boards onto the wall in preparation. I grabbed a quiz notepad and pencils (two, just in case) and my cohorts and I brainstormed a team name: Squeaky Silent Ks.

It's pub trivia, I thought. How hard can it be? I'm an avid reader. I watch Discovery Channel (when I have access to a cable TV) and MPBN (when I don't). My recall of useless information is, in my humble opinion, up there with the best of them. Yeah, I was confident we'd do OK.

Soon after 8:00 p.m., the first 10-question round began. The aforementioned bartender read the first question aloud. I'm wishing now that I had written it down so I could include it here. Let it suffice to say that, at the time, the question sounded something like this: "Name the triplolectic of the flubberstaff who was the first grabnagit to slipnit."

Uh... [insert sound of confidence being crushed here]

We had a team of five - all literate, educated folks - and we could do nothing but stare questionioningly at each other. "Do you know it?" "No, do you?" "I have no idea." "Wait. What was the question again?"

Nine more questions came - most we wrote down answers for, most of those we knew were wrong.

At the end of the round we brought our answer sheet up to be checked (and laughed at) and tallied up by the pub quiz operators.

Team names were written on the board with first-round scores. We looked on with baited breath. Please, please, please don't let us be profoundly dumber than all the other teams.

And there was our team name - next to one of the lowest scores on the board: 3 out of 10 points. Yikes. On a brighter note, there was one team that scored even lower. Three cheers for not being the absolute worst.

Round two went a little better. Shockingly the round we really scored with was the picture round, during which we needed to identify 10 car logos. My gear head brother would have been proud: 9 out 10.

If teams were tied for points at the end of a round, a tie-breaker question was read.

Lucky for us, we never had to deal with that pressure.

And despite being trivia deficient, the lively atmosphere kept spirits up. A friendly team nearby even took pity and helped us with a couple of answers. So we weren't trivia champs. Big deal. Word on the street is, "that Celtics team always wins" anyway.

Way to go Celtics. For the rest of us, it's still a great excuse to have a drink, enjoy good company and do something a little different on a Tuesday.