Before I get into the nitty gritty blog where I filled in for Jon "Gifto" Gabso, I would like to thank you guys for your One Fund Boston donations. 55 dollar bills! On with the babel. 

Haa yoo guyz. Wii hud a gud quids twonite! Roond oon wasson resently n stoof. Roooond 2 whaz on parahdice. Rund free ws un Dee Endy. Loss of sporz quessions and numbs hahd to prununce. Whadd Us cull a blind dinosaur? 

Our Foooking Cithy wunnn za fizz! 

Pannzzz off dans off. Baz Lurhman fool of tahos wun 3rd in danzz! 

Spanx Jun Gasso.

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Ffop- Fissherald 

Sometimes the quizzees at the Dubliner can be a bit of a mindfuck. On days where it’s absolutely packed, it seems that somewhat often a team is able to pull ahead and whomp everybody else. However, this week we had the first relatively slow week in a while, with only 12 teams competing for the top three prizes. However, we ended up also having the absolute closest quiz in a long time also, with so many teams tied after each scoring break and the top 11 teams separated by only 14 points. We’ve had teams win by 14 points on busy nights, yet somehow tonight the entire room performs within that span. With apologies to OMD, how bizarre!

Perhaps tonight’s perpetual closeness could be chalked up to the fact that everyone in tonight’s crowd was extremely joker-shy. Not a single team jokered any round until Round 5, when eventual 7^th placers Meme Weavers somewhat foolishly jokered their visual round 5 without knowing that almost everyone else scored a perfect 8 on that round too. Later on in Round 7, which was a 16-pointer on Star Wars quotes, Meme Weavers scored a rad 14 points, but had already expired their joker. Had they saved it for Round 7, they would have finished 5^th instead of 7^th, which is a bit more impressive. Theirs was certainly the hugest botched joker of the night.

Aside from those folks, every single team jokered either the 7^th or 8^th round, which were both worth 16 possible pre-joker points this week. The 7^th round was a boon for the Star Wars dweebs in our crew, the bulk of which must have been within Homebrew’s ranks. Their six-piece scored tonight’s best round in Round 7 with a 15-point jokering, proving that they were pretty damn close to identifying the verbatim quotes and specific episodes within the Star Wars saga that they needed to excel here. Homebrew spent much of the quiz prior to round 7 a couple points behind fellow frontronners The Tooth Fairies and My Mom Says I’m The Coolest Kid In School,  but their advanced Star Wars dweebery put them completely in the top 3 picture.

Homebrew, in fact, were pretty damn close to winning this thing outright, but with The Tooth Fairies notching the best pre-joker Round 8 of the field with 13 points and holding a one-point advantage over Homebrew at that point, they evened up the deal and those two squads ended up in a tie for the win at the very end. I gave Chris from Homebrew and Justin from The Tooth Fairies the opportunity to settle their tie with a best of 5 sudden death round, out of which they tied 2-2. It then came down to which of the two could more closely pinpoint the year in which Carnegie Hall opened, and Homebrew took it by being a mere 20 or so years closer. I don’t think you could make a battle for the lead much closer than that.

Tonight’s meager sized crowd elicited plenty of honorable mention, as the aforementioned Justin also won tonight’s e-mail prize, a pair of GEEK-emblazoned knee-high socks, and one particular individual from 11^th place We Thought Our Neighbors Had A Meth Lab But It Was Just Their Cat, although their team was bringing up the rear, garnered an astounding three $5 bonus prizes, effectively outearning the 3^rd place team. The weirdness applies across the board on slow nights like this.

So next week, the honorable F-Stop Fitzgerald of Wednesday night TITS Allston fame will be subbing for me while I get sloshed on vacation for a week in NYC. He’ll be providing some wisdom, and I’ll be back the week after. Seeya then!

AAAAAHAHAHAHHA title’s a haiku! D’you see what I did right there?!?!? Syllables and shit!

FUCK! THAT’S TWO! BAM!!!! Ahah ok I’ll stop.

This evening’s quiz at the Dubliner began with a round of haiku movie reviews, so thus I had an excuse to get corny as fuck  and frontload my blogpost this week with uncharacteristically awful writing for my own personal yuks. Frontloaded is by no means how I would describe tonight’s quiz performance, as we started off with tonight’s top teams a bit separated, and ended with a pretty friggin’ close quiz. A total of 17 teams showed to rad-ify the Dubliner with their expertise in the arcane, and in the end we saw the resurgence of a new first-time champ finally making it to the top in their 3^rd visit, with some new faces grabbing 2^nd and 3^rd. And, in my own classic fashion, I shafted several teams out of points in Round 2 because I’m an asshole about adding extra propositions to song titles.

In said Round 2, we saw the emergence of what seemed like a surefire Top 2 rivalry early on. Anyone whose played the GWD quiz at Dubliner knows that if you’re going to do well in Round 2, you better get the song titles right to the fucking letter. Third Eye Blind never wrote a song with an awful title like “Semi-Charmed Kind Of Life” because that would be stupid. Nor was Ace of Base ever tacky enough to name their mid-90’s resurgence hit something as clunky as “It’s a Beautiful Life”. As anyone knows, Ace of Base are pioneers of brevity in pop-centric thought, and would never clutter song titles like that. So if you screw up the intentions of these brilliant visionaries, yer damn right you’re not getting a point for it. Most teams messed up these titles, but the clever folks in La Cage Aux Follicles and Tin Roof, Rusted pulled off some verbatim perfection, with the former jokering a 14-point performance and the latter jokering a sweet 13 points. They were two of an unusually low three teams to joker Round 2 (along with our beloved regulars Sheeeeeit) and would set the tone for the bulk of the quiz.

Mainly, La Cage Aux Follicles remained ahead by a good few points most of the time. However, there were a couple key factors that made this quiz closer than it seemed. First, the Dubliner crowd came the closest it had ever been to a cross-bar perfect round in tonight’s Round 5. Our quizzees know their brodents, as every single team in the room who gave me a Round 5 scored a perfect 8, and I got so excited to announce Real Dubliner Pub History. But the final Round 5 I got to scoring belonged to Sheeeeeit, who scored a goddamn 6 and ruined the whole moment. Sheeeeeeeeeeit, indeed. No worries, the fact they play like beasts every week more than makes up for that. Secondly, the top two were nearly invaded at the very last second as tonight’s official dark horse, Scott Norwood Has A Posse (so much of a dark horse, in fact, they asked me twice not to take a picture of them for this blog), snuck into 3^rd in the last second, just 2 points out of 1^st and 1 point out of 2^nd. They saved their joker for the final round, which made them easy to ignore for most of the quiz. Consider the fact, though, that Scott Norwood had notched 12 points each in rounds 2, 3 and 8 and literally could have jokered almost half the quiz to the same effect, and you see some pretty impressive consistency from that team. It was a great underdog performance very worth of the $10 3^rd prize.

At the end, La Cage made off with the $30 top prize, and Tin Roof, Rusted left with the $20 runner-up loveliness. Anyone who references “Love Shack” is off to a good start anyways. What’s more is that for the very first time this week, our top 3 teams got their prizes in the form of fancy plastic gift cards emblazoned with the Dubliner’s snazzy new logo instead of just regular printouts! Oh you fancy huh?

Come on by next week to the Dubliner, I’ll show you fancy. Slice me nice! (search for that on youtube, seriously)

• The Royal Hilltop - Aurora 8:00 PM
• Darcy's Bistro & Pub - Denver 8:30 PM
• Prickly Pete's - Denver 8:00 PM
• The Whiskey Bar - Denver 7:00 PM
• The Cheeky Monk - Westminster 9:00 PM
• The Ram (Meridian) - Meridian 9:00 PM
• Lisa's Restaurant & Lounge - Augusta 7:30 PM
• Opal Divine's (Marina) - Austin 10:00 PM
• Opal Divine's (Penn Field) - Austin 10:00 PM