Gofa Wingdom wins again at Frank's, jackasses come out of woodwork with arrival of Spring

Having done the Frank's quiz for over a year now, I see the pattern. The warmer the weather gets, the more patrons come into the bar who we've never seen before, who don't know the quiz, don't like the quiz (in part I'm guessing because anything requiring knowin' stuff is traumatic) and let me know that early and often. It's nice that the bar gets the extra business, but what a royal pain for the regulars who came out specifically to play, and for me.

Who are these people, and why do they not drink publicly in winter?

This wouldn't be so bad if so many of these people didn't start a volume war with me, which is wearing. Add in the usual sprinkling of delerium tremens casualties Frank's attracts year-round mixed in with the functional population and/or a painfully unfunny heckler or two - this week we had two - and what should be a fun and easy task becomes a pain in the ass.

While I'm bitching about a sizable minority of patrons, allow me to suggest that a possible reason one might not know the answer to any given question isn't because of a cultural bias toward obscurity on my part, but instead because one might not actually know much about the world around oneself. This isn't my fault and there's nothing I can do to help others on that count. Read a freakin' book or something, watch PBS, go back to school. When you don't get non-academic pop culture references that pretty much every English-speaking American is aware of through background exposure, I have no suggestions for you beyond leaving me alone.

There, I've said it. Feels much better. I'm completely sick of having to defend the validity of every question to which someone doesn't know the answer. This only happens at Frank's incidentally; at the three other bars when people don't know things they don't start assigning blame outwardly.

I'd love to find out where some people work and show up and heckle them as happened in that one episode of Seinfeld. "You call that washing a dish? You suck!"

Also: I'm going to repeat the question. I always do that, and I repeat the entire freaking round every time after the tenth question. I've done the quiz at Frank's over 60 times now, which is a total of more than 3,000 repeated questions, most of them multiply-repeated. The odds that I'm suddenly not going to repeat the particular one you didn't hear are nil. Banana slugs display pattern recognition-based learning curves better than some Frank's patrons. Yelling "REPEAT THE QUESTION!!!" a millisecond after I read it the first time is nails on a damn chalkboard to me, and is never going to get a pleasant response.

Butterflies broken upon the wheel, we turn to this week's scores:

Beautiful Gold: Gofa Wingdom 175
So-So Silver: Roy's Avant-Guardian Angels 142
Shameful, Shameful Bronze: Shock the World 129

Also-rans:

Dons Quizzote 90
TKO* 81
Conner 59
Meltwater Sucks Blows** 29

* The male (no doubt self-identifying as some sort of alpha-bull-silverback-cock-man-oppressor) from this team pulled out a roll of bills and asked how much it'd cost to throw the game in their favor. This is more likely to work when offered before it's mathematically impossible for your victory to happen. Of course, if he could do that kind of math he'd likely not feel the need to try and buy a $25 gift certificate for $100... The same jackass also kept saying that I was doing "bad karaoke." Yes, in a sense I was doing poor karaoke indeed. I was also doing a poor job of baking a cake, building a house of cards and countless other tasks not even being attempted.

** Two weird things to share, although these were very nice people I hope come back: I swear that they initially printed Meatloaffuk Blows on the team name portion of the sheet, then insisted that I was misreading (?!) that, that they clearly printed Meltwater Sucks Blows (?!?!?), and later rewrote the team name as that as if to confirm it. There was no hint that this claim was pulling my leg. I still don't know what either phrase might mean, or how I could misread Latin-based English alphabet printing. Also, they somehow managed to get the last 36 or so consecutive questions wrong, which is close to a new record if not actually a new one for teams that play the entire game in earnest.

Are you now getting some idea of what hosting this quiz can be like on a weird night?