Cheating is Winning, and Winning is Awesome

“I couldn’t let you win, because you cheated.” The dark man said to us, glaring through his goatee at our team of 8.  If memory serves, I believe we were going by the pseudonym “blood, bath and beyond” that night.  I slammed my hands on the table and jumped out of my seat, barely keeping my balance.  I had drunk much beer that night, and stability had long ago fled my intoxicated form.

“How dare you, sir?  How dare you?” I slurred, pointing a finger at him with one hand and grabbing the table with the other, lest I fall over.  My german friend Alex slammed his hands on the table and jumped out of his seat just as drunkenly.

“Yeah, how dare you?  We aren’t cheaters!  We came to the pub tonight to play an honorable game of trivia, and by Jove that’s what we did!”  He shouted.  I have often thought that the easiest way to combat someone calling you a liar is to get angry.  It could very well be your natural response to someone calling you out, even if you weren’t lying.  Too bad we were lying.  Lying our hearts out.

Don’t get me wrong, we didn’t go to trivia night at the pub with the intention of cheating, it just sort of happened.  Like in one of those teen horror movies when the popular kids play a trick on the nerd, and the nerd ends up dying and haunting them forever, which incidentally is seldom long.  We had intended to just guess on the ones we didn’t know, but after 3 or 4 in a row, it begins to get a bit discouraging, and the alluring call of our smart-phones grows incessantly louder, so much so that we are no longer able to resist their sirens call.

This isn’t our pub, but it’s as good as you’re gonna get this close to graduation

“Charles,” my friend Ashlee inevitably asks me, “you look like you need to use the rest room right now.”

“What?” I respond, confused and alarmed.  How did she know that I needed to pee?  “No I don… oh!  Yes, yes I do.  If you would excuse me…”  Using your smartphone is illegal in the pub during trivia time, and if anyone sees you doing it, they’ll report you to the Quizmaster, curse his name, and he will confiscate your answer sheet.  It is therefore necessary to stagger to the restroom if you want to cheat, far away from the prying eyes of the other teams.  The stalls provides the optimal protection, but sometimes they are occupied and/or stinky. The urinals work in a pinch, because most people just stare straight ahead while they do their business, and sometimes hiding in plain sight is the best option.  Of course, if someone does look over at you while you are at the urinal, all you must do is begin making zoo noises, and they will most likely leave you be.  If they don’t, then I only have this to say to you, my friend: run.  Simple, really.

We had sent seven or eight such expeditions to the lavatories that night, and had learned some rather impressive facts.  Ketchup, for instance, was sold as medicine in the 1830’s, and there are four cars and eleven light posts on the back of a $10 dollar bill.  Normally, when we cheat at trivia, we answer one or two questions that we know are correct incorrectly, so as to appear that we weren’t cheating.  We eventually learned, however, that we were probably going to get wrong some of the ones that we thought were right, and so the practice had fallen out of style.

The trivia quiz has two parts: useless factoids and name that tune.  It’s a lot harder to cheat on the song section, because there aren’t any speakers in the bathrooms, so we generally try to cheat as much as possible on the first part.  The songs that night were especially obtuse: TV themes from the 70’s and 80’s.  Fortunately, I had invited Richard, my boss, an honorable man and by no means a cheater, to join us that night and it turned out that he was amazingly gifted in the 70’s and 80’s TV show theme song department.  I don’t think he knew that we were cheating, though he was probably somewhat worried that we would cackle evilly every time one of us had to use the restroom.

After the songs were done, we made some last minute corrections and handed the answer sheet to Alex, who took it up front.  He returned with a big smile on his face, and plopped down into his chair with an air of satisfaction.

“Well?” I asked conspiratorially, “Is it done?”

“Yes,” he replied calmly, taking a sip of his beer, “It is done.  The quizmaster, may his hair be chewed off by a thousand camels, was dubious.  He asked me if we had cheated.”

“And?  What did you say?”  Ashlee asked angrily.

“Of course not, oh noble one!” Alex replied smugly, bowing to Ashlee as if she were the wretched quizmaster himself.

“And he suspects nothing?” I asked frantically, grabbing Alex’s shoulder and turning him to face me.

“Nothing at all.” Alex replied, shrugging off my hand

“You did well this day, Alex.” Ashlee commended.  She made a motion with her hands and we all leaned in.  All except my boss, who was furrowing his brow in confusion.  “It is finally our turn, my friends. This time, we will have the highest score!  This time, we will be the victors!  This time, the prize will be ours!”  Ashlee said the last line at an almost shriek, and we all raised our hands in the air and cheered.

“What is the prize?”  Richard asked.

“A $20 gift card!”  I responded, and we cheered some more.

“So that will pay for what, four beers?”

“Yes!  But there’s more!  If you win, you get the honor of sitting at the king’s table next monday!”

“Oh.  That’s nice”

When the time came around for the Quizmaster, curse him, we were positively giddy.  The incumbents were sitting at the king’s table, and from my vantage point I could clearly see the fear in their hearts.  It was manifest in every halfhearted laugh they dared to hazard, and in every movement that they made.  If there was room in my heart for pity, I would have felt sorry for them, but the world of pub night trivia is a cruel place my friends, and I felt nothing but the icy blackness of schadenfreude.  The quizmaster picked up the microphone, and he drew my attention away from the kings table before I could eat my fill of their misery.

“Tonight’s winners” he said, silencing the crowd with a wave of his hand, much like a Roman emperor of old quieting the mob in the arena, “With 36 points…” He paused here, and I looked at Ashley puzzled.  We had gotten 38 points, not 36.  Maybe there had been some sort of error, maybe there had…

“The Schemin’ Geezers!”  The king’s table erupted in an explosion of joy.

“How…?” I asked numbly, sinking into a black despair, “How can this be?”  The rest of the table was equally as distraught as me, all but Richard who clapped for the geezers.

“Good for them!” he said, and I think he meant it too, and we hated him for it.  We ordered more beer as the quizmaster went to congratulate the “winning” team.  He happened to walk by our table at one point, and i grabbed his sleeve and dragged him over to us.

“We had more points,” I aid threateningly, fumbling around on the table for a knife or something, though none seemed to be in reach, “why didn’t we win?”

And so we come back to where we started.  After alex and I had shouted at him so vehemently, the Quizmaster, may his house be struck by a falling satellite, seemed unsure of him self.  Perhaps he had judged us wrongly?

“Ok, you’re good liars, I admit, but I know that you cheated.  Look here, how did you know what the boiling point of liquid nitrogen?”

“I’m a chemistry major.” Alex said, and he was.  As it turned out, he actually did know the boiling point of liquid nitrogen offhand.  We didn’t have to cheat on that one.

“Well, how did you know which roman emperor wanted to put his horse in the senate.” He asked.  I raised my hand.

“How did you know which Shakespeare play had MacDuff in it?”

“Scottish name, scottish play,” Ashlee said, “We figured it had to be MacBeth.”  We didn’t have to look that one up, either.

“Classics major.” I responded truthfully, restraining a laugh.  Incredible, I thought.  He was asking us to explain only the answers that we didn’t cheat on!  He was beginning to look a little nervous now, and I could tell that he was worried that he very well may have slighted us from our victory.

“Ok, fine.  I’ll give you those, but there’s no way you knew the three large cats that can roar!  No body got that one right.”  Uh oh.  I was hoping he wouldn’t bring this one up.  It’s not that we cheated, far from it!  I knew all three.  It was that the way that I knew all three was kind of embarrassing, and I wasn’t looking forward to having to explain it.

“Oh, charles got all those!” Ashlee said, smiling as she happily pointed me out, damn her.  “He can tell you how he knew that one.”  Everyone turned at looked at me.

“Well,” I began, pulling at my collar nervously, “Lions are obvious.  I mean, who hasn’t seen the MGM logo, right?”  Everyone nodded, except for the Quizmaster, who rolled his eyes.

“Well yess, everyone got lions!  How’d you know the other two?”

“What is this, slumdog millionaire?” I asked angrily.

“Charles,” said Ashlee, somewhat annoyed, “Just tell him how you knew about the other two.”  Great.

“Ok, fine.  Well, I knew about Jaguars because of Age of Empires II: The Conquerors.”

“What’s that?” quizzed the Quizmaster.

“An old video game.  You could play as the aztecs, and they had a unit called jaguar warriors.  They were essentially guys with clubs who wore jaguar skins, but when you clicked on them, they roared, like jaguars I suppose”

“And the other?” he asked.  Here goes nothing.

“I knew that Panthers roared because in R.A. Salvatore’s beloved Drizzt fantasy novels, the main character, who is a magical dark elf, also called a drow, has a magical stone figurine of a panther.  The panther’s name is Guenhwyvar, and hen Drizzt lays down the figurine and calls her name, the panther magically materializes.  It occasionally roars, and I therefore assumed that the forgotten realms wouldn’t lead me wrong, and that Guenhwyvar roaring was an accurate representation of the average panther.”

Pictured: Guenhwyvar and Drizzt

Silence.  Dead, ugly, awkward silence.  My friends stared at me as though they had just discovered a new and disturbingly nerdy facet of my personalty that had hitherto been unknown.  I could tell they weren’t very happy with the discovery, much like how an archaeologist would feel upon finding an ancient Egyptian tomb, only to discover that it had been raided decades ago and was empty.  Not knowing what to do, I soldiered on.

“For you see, quizmaster, Guenhwyvar is no ordinary panther at all, but is in fact a creature from the spirit realms.  She lives in the Astral plane, and Drizzt’s summons merely create a portal through which she can travel into the mortal realm”

“Yes, I see…”

“No one is quite sure whether or not she can die.” I continued, raising my voice.  “She certainly can be injured, though.  On several occasion Drizzt and his companions had to send her back to her astral home, fearing that she may die there from her wounds, but she always returns completely regenerated.”

“Very good, but…”


“Yes, yes, very good.”  The quizmaster growled, cupping a hand over my mouth, thereby silencing me.   “It seems I was wrong.”  He looked around at us, telling us in no uncertain terms that was absolutely positive that he hadn’t been wrong, but that proving that we were dirty, filthy liars was too far above his pay grade.  “I can’t let you guys be the winners, because I already gave it to the other team, but I can give you a few coupons for free drinks and deserts.  Will that work?”

“Yes!” We shouted in unison, a bit too quickly.  An honestly cheated team, I realized far too late, would have rejected his pitiful coupons and demanded its divine right to sit at the king’s table.  A wry half smile crossed his face as he gave us the coupons.  We didn’t care if he had learned the truth of it, drunk as we were on alcohol and victory.  It was decided that I should hold on to the coupons, since I was the most regular attendant of trivia night at the pub, but when i got home, and the rush of winning began to wear off, I felt sick to my stomach.  We had cheated and lied to a person’s face, and for what?  Some coupons?  I had always prided myself on being honest when it counts, and now I had tarnished my reputation, or at least what little reputation I had left.  Disgusted, I threw the coupons into the trash can, and convinced myself that I had now cleansed myself of all the negative karma accrued during the night, and went to sleep, not regretting trashing the coupons one bit.  Well, at least not until next Monday, when I had an unquenchable thirst for Jamaican Cheesecake and I reached into my wallet to find it devoid of both coupons and money.


Every year at my school there is a competition called the 48 hour film festival.  In this competition, the participants are given a picture to build a movie around.  The catch is that it has to be filmed and edited in 48 hours, from friday at 5pm to sunday at 5pm.  They have a screening the friday afterwards to announce the winner.  My group won for the second year in a row.  Here is our film.  Keep in mind this was done in 48 hours and i hope you enjoy!

It couldn’t stayed buried forever forever

I have been terribly busy of late practicing battle of the bands, trying to keep up with school work and thinking about how i should be working on a 12 page paper due at the end of the month and have completely forgotten about posting on my blog.  I had horrendous writers block last weekend, and this weekend will be packed with the 48 hour film festival, so i dont know if ill get anything done.  But i do feel bad about not posting anything in two weeks, so here is another “classic” from my old blog.  Hope you re-enjoy it.

oh and here’s a funny picture of something impossible

How come no one has ever won more than 1 best picture award at once?

As I posted links to my now (nearly) world famous blog on Facebook, I was plagued by the personification of annoying: Security Questions. That is the facebook term. Most other people would call them worthless bullshit. The security questions are pictures of two words that have been morphed and stretched beyond recognition and then placed in front of shapes. You are meant to decode this fragmented mess and type the “words” into a separate box to prove that you are a human being who can read and, I assume, has a degree in cryptology. They exists to make sure that people do not create programs that spam posts on forums, facebook, twitter or what have you. I have no degree in cryptology but I can read better than (most) 5th graders, so I was able to post my blog successfully after a mere 10 or so tries. Per person. And each time I failed, they gave me new words to decipher. Great. 

While I was doing this, a thought occurred to me. In the right context, some of these “security” phrases could be cracker-jack movie titles! They are always so nonsensical and weird that I think the company that makes them must have a secret cadre of word slaves who thumb through dictionaries and come up with endless supply of the most bizarre combinations of adjectives and nouns imaginable, which are then inserted into these security questions. So while I was posting on somebody’s facebook page, I decided to click “give me new words” 10 times and write the phrases down. I then turned these into the best movie ideas the world has every seen, and all I can say is that at the next acadamy awards

James Cameron better watch out!
About erosion:
An artsy film about a family in Nevada who return to their home only to find it has been completely eroded. By erosion. Now homeless, they head to vegas to seek their fortunes as an all-family band, but the erosion follows them wherever they go. Can they escape the evil machinations of nature or will they themselves become…ERODED? 

Three senator:
A feel good romp for the whole family! A senator from California finds out that he has 2 identical twin brothers who he has never met because they were sent away to avoid being killed by pharaoh, or so his mom says, but she has gone completely mad in her old age. The brothers become great friends and decide to take turns going to senate so they can have more time off for fun. Hilarity ensues 

The tanked:
A college party goes horribly awry when a large quantity of mysterious beer that no one remembers bringing shows up and is consumed, turning frat boys into Hideous drunken zombies. Can’t the cure be discovered in time? 

The reposed:
A family man finds himself awake after spending the last 40 years in a coma. He is now 73 and has an incredible hospital bill to pay and only one way to pay it off: he has to find and capture Osama Bin Laden. 

From Buntings:
A British man from the town of Buntings 120 years in the future travels back in time to a mid 80’s Chicago to meet his great grandfather and warn him about a few things so their family will be insanely rich in the future. He ends up learning a thing or two about himself and decides his family is fine just the way it is. 

Cozily these:
The epic sci-fi trilogy of an old cat-lady (an old woman with no friends but her cats) who ends up being kidnapped by aliens from modern day earth and forced into slavery on some far away planet. She escapes and later accidentally rescues the galaxy from some sort of ancient evil and or phantom menace. 

Automate May:
The world has grown fed up with the month of May and has created a device that makes everyone fast forward through may. They essentially fall asleep on April 30th, live on autopilot for the whole month of May, and wake up in June! Of course, hilarity ensues when they find out that things weren’t as they left them! Why do we now have a giraffe honey? When did all these robots show up? Where are the kids? Find out next May! 

State’s stale:
The state of Wisconsin was going great, until they sent Bret Favre away to Minnesota! All of a sudden, the state’s massive quantities of cheese began going stale for no reason! After scientists realize why the cheese is going stale (the absence of Favretrons in the atmosphere), a crack team of cheese factory workers (Sylvester Stallone, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Murray from Flight of the Conchords, Jason Statham and Aziz Ansari) is assembled with one purpose in mind: to get Brett Favre to come back, by any means necessary! 

Defining 65:
Two brothers from south Alabama who hate each other decide to drive the whole extent of I-65 with their dying father, who is also 65, in order to reconnect. On they way they get waylaid by Somali pirates, find bigfoot, and learn a little bit about what it is to be family. Oh, and their father learns he doesn’t actually have cancer, because this is a comedy. 

Executive Ghosts:
Roger Rogers, a newly appointed executive of BP, finds out that his office is haunted by the ghosts of exec’s past, who all collaborate with him to clean up the oil spill, after he does a few quests for them. Rogers learns a valuable lesson about how important it is to FUCKING BUILD STUFF CORRECTLY AND NOT CUT CORNERS, ESPECIALLY WHEN YOUR COMPANY ALREADY MAKES 200 BILLION DOLLARs ANNUAL PROFIT, YOU JACKASS!!!
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