Pride Be Not Proud
8/29 '25
We finished third again thanks to another final-question botch, but did qualify for the semifinals. I was most proud of an answer from my Geography wheelhouse, but also proud of an answer in the Taylor Swift category that strangely enough no one else on my team knew.
What upcoming Taylor Swift album was promoted on the New Heights podcast hosted by the Kelce brothers?
Who was the first TV screenwriter with a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, most well-known for his series that aired for three seasons starting in 1966?
Mexico and what two other countries have agreed to form a multinational nature preserve to protect their rainforests?
Forest Hill Cemetery was "a sea of flowers" after the death of what celebrity, setting a record for the most memorial flower donations?
Best one we ever got: a tie breaker question of the “here’s a numerical question no one will ever get exactly right - let’s see who gets closest” type.
Question was “how many days were there between the start of the Chicago Fire and the date of Taylor Swift’s birth?”
We knew the exact dates of both - the first because it had come up in a previous question, the second because T is famously a Sagittarius, and somewhat less famously (except to her fans) a triskaidekaphile, and because her “1989” album was titled thus because it was the year of her birth.
Ok. So we have December 13 1989 minus October 8, 1871. Count the years between. Multiply by 365. Account for leap years. Account for 1900 NOT being a leap year. Count the days between 10/8 and 12/13. Total the day counts all up. Argue amongst ourselves over whether the start and end dates are included in the count or not. Take a vote. Turn it in.
Got it exactly.
I don’t think that venue has asked a Swift question since.
Becca happened to know the exact square mileage of Delaware and a very close guess at how much smaller RI is. Bill had driven east to west, north to south across central Texas and across the panhandle, and diagonally - and he remembered the total drive time of each along with a close approximation of average mph. I had a good mental picture of the outline of Texas and broke it down into a geometry problem. Elizabeth talked us into rounding down from a likely overestimate. The calculations took up the entire back and front of a napkin. We ended up off by 1 and almost got beaten up on our way to the parking lot.
(These two stories suggest a greater degree of genius than we usually exhibit. We got a round one time of “name the emo band shown in each of these 10 photos” and put System of a Down for all of them figuring we’d get at least one right, except System of a Down isn’t actually an emo band at all so we got exactly zero. The usual level is somewhere in between.)
What’s your usual venue?