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Trivia at Green Mill in Lakeville runs from 9:00-11:00pm on Thursday nights. I have class on Thursday nights which can potentially run from 6:00-10:00pm. Given that my classmates and I tend to burn out before reaching the four hour mark, professors are generally gracious enough to cut things a little short, so with a 30-minute drive down to the restaurant (about two miles from home), I can usually be there by 10:00 or so. Plenty of time for food, drink and trivia.

Today was no exception: buffalo wings, root beer and trivia. There are four rounds of five questions and I got there in the middle of Round 3, which was all about nuts. I don’t remember what #1 was, #2 asked for another name for peanuts (legumes), and I sat down at the table in time to hear #3, which was the nut that’s used to make pesto (pine nuts).

Normally, the host uses a microphone to ask questions through the speaker system—I don’t know why it wasn’t working, but tonight, he had to walk around the restaurant supplying each table with the questions. Thus, before we heard #4, the guy sitting across from me said it’d be funny if one of us went to another table, listened to the question and came up with the answer before the host got to us.

So I did. Not the “listening to the question” part. I came up with the answer.

For no particular reason, when he said it’d be funny, I blurted out, “Macadamia!” Then the host got to our table and he posed a question along the lines of “the nut that was named after John Macadam, an Australian chemist, in 1957.” And I raised my hands in victory.

We did pretty well and came in second place, earning ourselves a $10 gift card to Green Mill, which I graciously accepted on behalf of our team. Getting “macadamia” right, getting the gift card and hearing a tie-breaker question made tonight awesome.

The tie-breaker question? “How many self-titled albums has Seal produced?”
The answer? Three.
The answer one team gave? Twenty three.

Like I said, that helped make tonight awesome, too.