Bus heckler

The bus ride from home to work usually takes 30 – 45 minutes, 35 minutes on average. Gotta love efficient public transportation. Plus, saving the Earth on a daily basis. This morning on the bus I was fiddling around with my iPod playing a few rounds of iQuizzes that I got online instead of actually listening to the music. You can download these random trivia questions from the Net, which test your knowledge on a variety of random things.

About ten minutes into the ride, as I was furiously attempting to keep my score above the 60% percentage mark, I heard the girl beside me suddenly say, “Arctic ocean.” I turned and looked at the Indian girl sitting next to me. She was looking at me with a bemused expression, an eyebrow raised, Phil Keoghan-style. The first thing I noticed about her was the outfit. She had on this light yellow blouse with frilly edges sticking out. She looked like a bloated cauliflower vegetable to me.

“Excuse me?” I asked, surprised.

“The answer’s the Arctic ocean,” she said, pointing to my iPod, “And you have 5 seconds left.”

“Oh.” was all I could muster. The question was “What is located underneath the North Pole at 90 degrees north?” with the choices: “a) Arctic Ocean b) Antarctica c) Santa’s plumbing.” Option c) was dismissed immediately, but I guess she saw that I was frowning while contemplating over the other two options and decided to butt in with her own answer.

Of course, when I pressed the click wheel for the right answer, the timer had already ran out. My score immediately receded to 58%. Damn. Flushed, I paused the game for a moment and turned to her.

“Er, thanks,” I said, “But I would have gotten it right in the end.”

“The questions are too easy.” she said.

“You were peeking?”

“I can take all those questions.”

“Really?”

“You wanna bet?”

Three words I love to hear. Them fightin’ words! We were on.

Seeing that I had approximately twenty minutes left in the ride before my stop, we went for a round of forty questions, split into 4 sets of 10 questions with each set concentrating on a predetermined theme. Topics could range from world history, human science, continental geography, to trivia about random TV shows. Whoever lost had to demonstrate the Heimlich maneuver on the nearest standing passenger. Kidding. There was no prize at the end for the winner, except for bragging rights I guess, if it’ll ever mean anything. Winning this whole thing will hardly cement anyone’s reputation as possessing a mind with a large repository of extremely useless information.

She won the first set of ten questions 8:5, which was on pop culture. Girl totally knew when Neil Patrick Harris was born, which was somewhat a sharp blow to my ego since I grew up watching Doogie Howser. I won the next with 7:4, which had a significant number of questions on world geography. Many people always assume Philadelphia is the state capital of Pennsylvania, and New York City for New York, which are both incorrect, heheh. Harrisburg and Albany respectively for the win. That wiped off that smug smile on Bus Girl’s face, who got only four questions right.

Third set was on cultural history, which we did badly and ended up with 3:3. I am embarrassed to confess that I had no idea who was the genius who wrote The Wizard of Oz, despite having spawned one of the world’s most famous films. In my defense however, Bus Girl apparently thought van Gogh was an Olympic swimmer.

The fourth batch, typically the most challenging set of questions, was a little tricky. The theme was world history. Ergo, gulp. One of the final questions wanted to know the name of the event that caused Christopher Columbus to set sail to find a new trade route to India that eventually led to the discovery of the Americas. Dead giveaway: the Spanish Inquisition of Granada. Overall, we both had a 50% success rate with the fourth set.

It ended up as a tie, unsurprisingly. The whole spectacle was a little embarrassing though, since we must have looked weird in the eyes of the other passengers, especially when we spoke out the answers. All they saw was an Indian girl and some guy staring at a tiny device and blurting random stuff out to one another, like, “the Suez Canal!”, “Ronald Reagan” and “Jakarta!”

See ya soon

“Trivia is a game played by those who realize they have misspent their youth but do not want to let go of it.” – Edwin Goodgold

Currently addicted to: More bluegrass. After Alison Krauss, this woman is my next favorite go-to solo artist for bluegrass music. Her voice reminds me a little of Trisha Yearwood. Of course, her duet with Ms Parton only makes the song better.

Heartbreaker’s Alibi – Rhonda Vincent & Dolly Parton

Michael Jackson: 1958 – 2009
Rest in Peace