In an effort to stop obsessing about the pink toilet scarcity, I pootled along to a pub trivia competition last night. If you heard, from the tippy-top of your turret in Ontario, the heart-rending strains of a bespectacled baron wailing in the wilderness, it was me, at the most heinous excuse for a pub trivia competition of all time. The questions went something like this:
1. How much does Wayne Carey weigh?
2. Who manages the North Melbourne Fooball Team?
3. What is Wayne Carey's wife's name?
4. Which is better, Essendon Fooball Team or Collingwood Fooball Team?
5. [Insert question about the Antipodean Fooball League.]
6. [Insert question about Wayne Carey.]
7. [Et cetera. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseam.]
I s'pose the 'Bourne can't be all trams and skittles, but really, is it necessary to invoke the term "trivia" so very literally? Whatever happened to the sort of trivia a Victorianist bagpiper with entomological interests could excel in? Y'know, questions like "What is the Latin name for the cat flea?", "How many syllables in 'Charles Dickens'?", "Were there any pink toilets listed on ebay today?".*
* Have just realised I don't know how to punctuate this sentence. Corrections and suggestions will be respectfully filed for future acts of pedantry.
12 comments:
I think that it's High Time we started our own trivia competition. A few tentative suggestions for questions:
1) How are you going?
2) Would you like a pink toilet?
3) Do you prefer Highland Bagpipes or Ulilean Bagpipes?
4) What is the best hanging to go with that wall colour over there?
(etc, etc)
Contestants answers would be judged on tastefullness and response to the pink toilet question. Deal pending with the toilet manufacturers of course.
Now, are there any handy opium dens to put our trivia quiz up?
I could turn the space under my new kitchen sink into an opium den. I think it'd be really trippy.
If it wasn't trippy, it would at least be really drippy. That's some compensation.
Ah well, knowing Wayne Carey's weight is probably of equal use to knowing the Latin name for cat flea (unless one studies cat fleas or Wayne Careys professionally, of course). Perhaps the key is to focus not on the questions, but on the very interesting epistemological standpoint those questions imply; in this case, that knowledge is all about context.
At my last trivial experience (a few years ago), I had an argument with the other members of my team because they wanted to say that Byron wrote Tarzan. Eventually I gave up, as I realised it probably would have been rather fun if he had.
Oh dear, now Tim will feel obliged to rewrite Tarzan in a Byronic manner...
I feel more inclined to rewrite Byron in a Tarzanic manner.
She'm walk in - hoo! hoo! - beauty!
Like the - hoo! hoo! - night!
She'm very nice indeed *scratches fleas*
*Offers Jane a banana*
Me Tarzan! You poetic object!
It kinda works. Tarzan's a character of supernatural machismo, just like Manfred.
He swings in beauty, like the beast,
Of hairy arms, prehensile tail,
And all that's best of chimp and priest,
Meets in his yodel and his wail.
Dammit. Upstaged (predictably) by the Tim himself.
Thank you both. Now I will never read that poem the same way again.
I was thinking of a Don Juan Tarzan, but one would need a lot of time on one's hands for that.
Tarzan Greystoke continued to forge new versifaction techniques in the jungle baboon language for decades, but in his later years, his babboon audiences scorned him, even pelting him with the odd rotten banana/coconut/durian/boulder that was lying around.
Tarzan later turned to blogging, claiming that 'it was all a bit like the babboon community of his youth, really. Once you learn where and when to flash your arse, and how to beat your chest most effectively, you've got it beat.'
Not a matter of upstaging, just taking whatever vine's available, just like Tarzan.
It's a Monty Python skit waiting to happen, Tim.
My friend Mark (with whom one suspects you would get along rather well, Tim) has a great love for this film, but mostly for the sequence where the apes kill Tarzan's father, trash his parents' home and take the baby. He has made me watch it repeatedly and, afterwards, with absolute sincerity, he confides that his dream is to be allowed to one day live in the chimpanzee enclosure at the zoo.
Tarzan studied versification for decades and could only come up with:
Me Tarzane
You Jane!
Post a Comment