Well, it happened! Our good friends and regular winners of the Rockslide quiz made the trip over the mountain in late January to take part in the Geek Bowl. I will post the scores and the pics from last night, but the real story comes from Levi, an amazing mind and writer. Enjoy the awesomeness and we will see you next week! SPRING IS COMING AND THE PATIO CALLS TO US ALL!

THE SCORES

Carrie's Entourage-               66
Don't Poop in the Pope's Oatmeal- 59
The Lazy Ninjas-                  55
Papa Bear and The Shin-dig King-  54
PANTHERNAUT-                      46
Strippers Actually Like Me-       35
Down n' Out-                      27
Those Guys-                       13

....AND Here... We.... Go!

By Levi Starbird:

Balthazar and the Geeks
By the time I was there, it was already too late. I was meeting the team at a place called “Moe’s”, right by the club we were waiting to enter. The night before had not been a great warm up, as it mostly consisted of my futile attempts to drive a Ford Focus eastbound on I-70 at speeds that in other cars allow for time travel to happen, drinking absinthe and apparently finding the western hideout of the cast of Jersey shore, who apparently really like gyro’s. As I walked up while the girlfriend found parking (we were apparently in a tow happy Starbucks lot), I came upon an open patio and promptly bought a beer by the lawyer (for legal reasons, I’m not using his name). I was curious as to why the team had asked me to meet them two hours early in the place that smelled the most like death in Denver (I’m the teams lone vegetarian, which is a constant base for jokes. The dicks). So, while I got to bask in the award wining “Best bbq in Denver”, I realized two things; first, it looks like the other five people on my team have been drinking since noon, and second, hey! this place has a bowling alley on the side, and was happily distracted until it was time to enter the Gothic, take our seats and drink eight dollar beer.

The reason we were in Denver, and the reason behind at least 80% of this essay, was a thing called the Geekbowl. It is the grand finale of Geeks Who Drink, a weekly pub quiz held all the hell over the southwest. My team is from Grand Junction, Colorado. Before you ask, no, we are not the only team from Grand Junction, just the one who wins the most. Geeks Who Drink is very simple. You may assemble a team of up to six people, and you are asked eight rounds with eight questions per round. There are two audio rounds and one visual. The topics are varied and many. It could be over the producers of major pharmaceuticals. It could be over the career of Swedish murder machine Dolph Lunndgren. It will most likely involve dick at some point. If I were to estimate the sheer number of questions on just animal sex organs asked of me in a week, it would fall somewhere between eight and why the hell are you still asking me about koala balls. What I’m getting at here is, it pays to have a well-rounded team. Or a guy with an almanac on badger cock and fun facts related to it.

But back to us. We are a consistent six person team, consisting of the aforementioned lawyer, two clove cigarette obsessed salesmen of varying goods, depending on the month, a very nice lady who works for the hospital and somehow deals with our obsession of, in detail, discussing who would win in a fight between two made up animals (a gorilla with chainsaws for hands vs. a shark with a laser mounted to his fin? First question? “Is it a silverback gorilla?”), a fella in the oil industry who has a soft spot for shots with Tabasco, and me. I’m basically a retired punk rocker who works in a bar at night and studies political science in the day. But we’re a team. We don’t have a fixed name, but the other teams know us, and we show up every Tuesday to play at our local brew pup, the Rockslide.

We have one of the smaller bars that host Geeks weekly, holding 11 tables and the bartop, which might as well be a weekly hearing test if you’re trying to play from there. Our Quizmaster, The Ninja, is a loud, football obsessed dj who beats me in poker on a regular basis. He has run Geeks in Junction since it started. He sets up shop directly next to our brewery windows, as if you’d somehow forgotten that you were in a bar. In the summer, we pile onto the patio, in the kind of bottle-necking situation that would take Fire Marshal Bill to clear our, and smoke heavily. Since we pulled our team from the ashes of several others, we’ve been there every Tuesday for longer then I can remember, so we’ve got to be pretty close with him and the other players.

I’m gonna backtrack a bit to the idea of trivia these days. When I say we could be asked anything, I mean anything. Full rounds on the Lord of the Rings? Easy. Historical and international politics? We got that. But when it comes time to name But none of us have memorized the periodic table of elements, or know exactly how old Nelson Mandela is. Which leads to the real question; in a culture so based on the idea of celebrity and constant headlines as opposed to a real understanding of a topic, what’s worth knowing? Sure, one of our clove driven salesmen can name the height and college of every starting basketball player for the last twenty years (I’m serious), but outside of an event like Geeks Who Drink, this knowledge is useless. I can name you probably thirty Mountain Goats albums and name half the songs, off the top of my head. This has awarded me not even a point in the game, only a free drink in a bonus round. This is not a gripe at the game, by the way. I don’t want it to ask me practical questions. That sounds enough like real life that I might have to put my beer down and go more then twenty minutes without smoking. See, I want to understand everything, but have no interest in applying it practically. What’s shocking isn’t that there are dozens of people like this in my region, but thousands. There must have been 600 people at the GeekBowl, and that was only the best teams from the best locations.

Alan Moore, in-between worshipping his snake god and scaring the life out of little English farm children by running around with those rings of his, made a very good point in a documentary about him (it’s called “the Mindscape of Alan Moore”. If you’re a fan of very generic goth mood music and pictures of candles with a crazy person talking over it, it’s a must buy.) His theory is that a hundred years ago, there were maybe fifty people around the world that could go to any country in the world and have someone know who he or she were. The Queen of England, Charles Limburg, Teddy Roosevelt. Information traveled slowly, and was harder to collect without a great library or freakish fascination about the world around you. Collecting knowledge of that sort was only for those in the highest brackets of education. As time went on, things like tv’s and radios popping up made it possible to take a consistent devotion to the life of another person, who is neither a deity or head of state. Something much more fleeting. Sure, there have been stories and books, but it was always known that those people weren’t real. Then look a few decades later, where people care more about what Ashton Kutcher thinks then what CNN is reporting, and you get to a place where people like me (and probably you, if you’re reading this) can digest information in amounts that would paralyze our grandparents.

So imagine walking into a room with over 80 teams of people who can all do this. Know so much about so many things they’ve basically become Boolean thinkers (enough information is compiled and the person filters using the words “and” or “or.). The event is strict. We sign in, have to check our names off the list, as we were required to register in advance, and find our table. We walk past a Jewish Viking and having to explain why we were all wearing suits (we couldn’t afford geeks who do heroin, so we’re here) to the camera, and we were in the zone. After some time and several smoke breaks, we were warned that the game would be starting shortly. We were shown a video explaining the simple rules of the game. No cheating, don’t shout out the answers, and don’t fuck with anyone while they’re grading the sheets. What was different this time was the intensity and the speed of the game. The kind of person who would run trivia in a bar for a living is, to be as delicate as possible, “drug inclined”, by nature. The people who read these questions must have found a secret stash of speed, because they read these questions off like there was a vintage Plymouth Duster on line to the highest bidder. After the ten questions were read, the proctor would, with all the loving tenderness of a TSA employee, remove the sheet in preparation for the next round. We were less then confident. When the first rounds were graded, after being serenaded by “The Limbs” (I won’t even talk about it. Let’s just say I have personal issues with cover bands, and it’s a good thing the Gothic has lots of security), the points rolled out. In a moment of glory, we were actually in this thing! Beer cans were clinked, we shouted some old Phil Jackson when the Bulls didn’t suck mantra, and life was good. Then the bastard next to me in the fedora the size of a hubcap let us know the drill.

“Dude, that’s not points, that’s rank. We’re 35th.”
About an hour past that, two things became clear. First, the lone lady on our team was not feeling great, and our lawyer was shit-housed. Looks like a few hours of pre-gaming and a Fosters oil cans can get you drunk enough to like vegemite and think “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” wasn’t that bad (I bet you were waiting for a Yahoo Serious joke, weren’t you? Well, I like him, and I’m the one with the parentheticals.) After two video rounds involving either cross dressers or possibly closeted film stars, and the single hardest round about animal dick I’ve ever played (I told you!), it was done. There was stand up comedy, mostly involving a very nice sounding young man from Philadelphia and his internet forum issues, our fate was to be revealed. This was not before watching the lawyer shout “Balthazar the Horncock” for about twenty minutes. The points rolled out, and we left.

Soaking in all the glory that a team that’s about 29 places lower then it can accept finishing, we went for middle eastern food, then tried to find somewhere that sold beer and served it quickly. I was instantly vetoed on my votes for the bars (Denver locals will be familiar with Sputnik and Hi-Dive), as “they made me feel dirty just driving by”. We found a bar, drank without speaking much, then went our separate ways. While navigating the way back to my brothers, I sent us south as opposed to north, leading to emergency evasive actions whilst attempting to find a bathroom somewhere half way to Colorado Springs, and it was a night.

The trip home and the next night, out with two of my teammates, was business as usual. I talked to much, our friend from the oil company bought us shots as readily as he had bought us GeekBowl tickets and supplied the Scarface mansion we partied in the night before, and our resident sports freak tried (successfully) to piss me off about politics. It wasn’t until I was at home later, watching “Lost” because I watch the entire series before a new season starts, and experiencing the combination of being drunk and having a sugar crash that came from my Slurpee on the ride home, that it crossed me how odd, and bizarrely lucky the whole thing is. I had just competed, and would again in two days, for free stuff and cash prizes, and all I had to do was spend the better part of my life just being a nerd. Now, with Joe Espisito songs stuck in my head, I could drift off to sleep to dreams of chess opens or “Doctor Who”, and shortly compete again.
And if Balthazar The Horncock looses again, I’mma have to choke someone.