Chicago quiz recap: Thursday, June 6

Happy Monday! And we at the BQT had a happy last Thursday, as Quizmistress Katie hosted one of our best Chicago shows yet at Edgewater's  Uncommon Ground, with lots of new faces. Hooray new faces!

Trivia with balls

To usher in swimsuit season, we were giving away doughnut holes, of course. A bag went to the best Smart-Ass Point of Round 1, when one clever team answered this query…

"Most people don’t realize this, but the peregrine falcon is the BLANKest animal of them all"

…with "peregrinest." Sometimes the most obvious answer is the best (or funniest) one.

For Round 2, it was the Chicago debut of one of my favorite BQT video-puzzle themes, "Crisp Game Arena" (challenging players culinary knowledge and their facility with anagrams). As with this edition in NYC and Boston, the toughest question was No. 10…

The answer is skordalia, a Greek dip made with garlic, olive oil, and potatoes. Obscure (hence No. 10), but valid. Nobody got it—though Katie did like the one team that wrote down "spanakopita" for every answer. And I gotta say, I was surprised that no team knew this one either, since I consider it eminently figureoutable…

Good God, I feel old

In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year, the first 26-year-old to get the title since 1952, when it was what still very famous person?

Do you know? Of course you do. No, really: You do.

A word about the audio round: It was the world (world!) debut of "'90s One-Hit Wonders One Word at a Time" (one of the features of this Thursday's NYC Big '90s Quiz Thing, with live band karaoke). It was a last-minute addition to the show due to technical snafus, and Katie reports that while the concept was aces, it was awfully challenging—as you can imagine, one word from each of ten songs goes pretty damn fast; the four run-throughs we had planned weren't enough. Rest assured, New Yorkers, I'll give it to you plenty of times this week. Thanks for being our guinea pigs, Chi folks.

But challenging or not, that didn't stop XBox Pancake—which has emerged as our most dominant Chicago team—from getting a perfect score on the round. This thrust them into the Three Way Finale, alongside Not in the Face and—returning after a hiatus—the family squad of Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader. Some tension, as XBP blew the first question (no, Buster Keaton never ate his shoe, at least not on film), but they bounced back with knowledge of Rubik's Cube and President Obama's Electoral College map. Therefore…

Seriously, only two people?!?

The standings:
1. XBox Pancake
2. Not in the Face: Perfect score in the Lightning Round
3: Are You Smarter Than This 5th Grader
4. Cameo
5. Blackbody Radiation and the Ultraviolet Catastrophe: A new team that came on the recommendation of their friends in Boston
6. SRS BSNS
7.  Enado
8. "You're Right Again!"
9. The Pirate Parents: A couple on date night whose sitter canceled so they had to bring their baby in a stroller! The smallest BQT player yet; lots of jokes were made about him being the team's ringer, etc.

Fun, right? And the fun continues at Uncommon Ground July 11—note that it's the second Thursday, not the first, 'cause we fought and won a revolution. Some details here; trivia awesomeness awaits!