We are the champions, my friends

Quizmaster Chris, Christy, Kelly, Billy, Gary, and Dean. Weapons of Mass Instruction Win TriviaBowl V. Photo by Todd Freund.

It started as a lark on a "Veterans' Eve" Thursday. A group of teachers entered the weekly trivia contest at Sacramento Brewing Company. Six of us huddled around an answer sheet as the Quizmaster bellowed questions from the bar area of the brewpub. We fiddled and fussed over our answers and cheered for each correct answer during the post-quiz answer revelations. We won on that very first outing in 2005, beating over a dozen other teams. Since then, our cast of characters has varied a bit, as has our Thursday night trivia success.

Tonight though, we won the Big Kielbasa.

To make things more interesting, team scores from each Thursday quiz accumulate to quarterly totals. This sum determines a quarterly champion. Our team, comprised almost exclusively of Rio Americano High School teachers, finishes in the top five each quarter. But last Thursday, we broke through and finished at the top of the heap. Team Rio was the quarterly champion at last! (The $100 cash prize paid for that evening's comestibles and libations.)

The top five teams (and a few wildcards) from two brewpubs then go at it at the quarterly TriviaBowl. You can see how serious this stuff gets! As Sac Brew quarterly champions, we went to the rival bar to represent our home pub and our school pride. We've been to these competitions before. As Sacramento trivia competition goes, this is The Bigs. We enjoy the contest, but we just don't take our trivia very seriously. So we usually finish in the middle of the pack.

The questions in tonight's TriviaBowl were brutal and we were short one player, but we stepped up and took top honors. The prizes included giant magna of Sac Brew's "Pickled Brains" Tonic (see photo above), limited-edition T-shirts, and the addition of a signed team vegetable to the "pickled brains" jar. And wow, what an aroma that thing unleashes when opened! I feared for my eyebrows.

As the member who contributed least to the win, it fell upon me to tell the story and spread the word. That and I was the guy with a camera and a blog. There is no history unless you record it.