Christmas Time With Cap'n Claude, Trivia Geek

While working on these "catching up with the Singles" posts it dawned on me that I desperately need to update the Singles cast list; the group is way too fluid for me to rest on my laurels too long. But, that shall wait until after I get everyone up to speed on the Singles goings-ons; first up is my account of the night of the All-Singles Christmas Party.

This year we held our All-Singles party at El Guapos, which provided us with a fajita buffet, which wasn’t bad, but would have been better if (a) they had kept the meat separate so that I wasn’t forced to dig through all of the onions, peppers, etc. in search of beef, and (b) they had provided some queso. Mmmmm, queso.

While these All-Singles events are supposed to help people from the different classes mix and mingle, as usually happens the different classes tended to clump together, with Trouble being the exception the rule: "I refuse to be segregated!" she exclaimed before seating herself with the Senior Adult women. I, of course, wound up at the conversational dead zone of the table; I have a knack for that. Basically, there are separate conversations happening on either side of me, and I’m situated just far enough away from the epicenter of both to effectively take part in either.

As so often happens at these things, the All-Singles portion drew to a close before the members of my class were ready to go home, so a few of us headed over to Starbucks to hang out. When I ordered a hot chocolate, the cashier misheard my name, so my order came out labeled "Claude." Not the first time that's happened; while I was working at OSU, I was the office contact person for UPS, who had me down in their database as "Claude Anoch." Still, that's better than the library worker who seems convinced that my name is really "Ted." And then there's the co-worker who keeps calling me "Scott" for no logical reason . . . but I digress.

We sat around visiting for quite a while; it was early on in Magic Pants' time with the Singles, so she was subjected to Cap'ns Cluck and Disaster’s fervent proselytizing for CoIM; she's been one of their few successful converts. The Popular Song was mentioned, and so I was coaxed into performing it for Magic Pants and another Single who hadn't had the pleasure of hearing me perform. After Magic Pants and Cap’n Cluck finished their game of sweetener-packet-checkers, we decided to head to Cap'n Disaster's house to play cards. We played a few hands of Spoons (at which I stunk), and were trying to figure out what to play next when The Cable Guy (so named both because of his job and because he watches about as much TV as I do), who had just gotten off work, arrived with Pop Culture Trivial Pursuit. Magic Pants agreed to play, although she cautioned us that it wasn’t her forte; she’s on practically the other end of the pop culture continuum from me.

I think my favorite moment of the Trivial Pursuit game came when The Cable Guy’s team tried for a TV pie-piece; for those of you unfamiliar with the latest versions of Trivial Pursuit, you get the standard cards for regular questions, but if you try for a pie-piece you have to answer a question supplied by the accompanying DVD, which usually features some sort of film clip to go with the question. In addition, the DVD questions have a built-in time limit; after a certain time has elapsed a message pops up letting you know that anyone can answer the question and steal the pie-piece. So, The Cable Guy’s team was trying to answer a TV question for a pie-piece; as soon as a clip from an animated series started up, he said "Oh, I know what this is, they just made a movie based on it; it wasn't very good." The question popped up asking what the name of the TV series was, and he confidently answered "Thunderbirds." I sat there quietly until the "All Play" message popped up, then turned to the group and said "Actually, it's Battle of the Planets," a decree which was almost instantly confirmed by the answer popping up on the screen. This prompted Cap'n Disaster to mock me, repeating my words back to me in a stereotypical nasal nerdy tone; refusing to be cowed, I embraced my geekiness and explained that Thunderbirds was marionettes, not animation, while Battle of the Planets was an Americanized version of the old anime series Gatchman, and that it had also been released as G-Force, but that it was the presences of 7-Zark-7, who was unique to the BotP iteration of the series, that clued me in to which version was being shown. They all sat in silent horror at the unveiling of my full geekdom. Little did they know that BotP had been on of my favorite cartoons as a kid, and that I had had a BotP poster above my dresser from the time I was 5 up until, well, my parents’ house burned down; unfortunately, this is the best picture of it I could find.

Darn glare; you can't even see 1-Rover-1.

Anyway, after the game was over the others grumbled that the next time we played it should be everyone else on one team and me by myself. It was not the first time such a sentiment had been voiced (a night of trivia games with the Cap’ns and the Cable Guy right before Thanksgiving had resulted in similar comments), nor would it be the last; but don’t worry, if I ever start to get a swelled head, all I have to do is play against Zinger and my ego will be curbed.

By the time we finished up the game, it was really late, so we bid each other a good evening and headed off in our separate directions; our next big function would happen in a couple of weeks at the "Young Singles" Christmas party.