Trivial Triumph Reveals An Ages-Old Truth

The sports bar hosted a 20-question trivia contest and promised the top table/team a $50 gift certificate.

The emcee repeatedly warned the 'house' that cellphones and Blackberrys were taboo, and would disqualify the whole table's answer sheets. Calculators were also a n0-no.


I led our charge, getting difficult answers correct, like the determining "hives" as the answer to its medical term and definition, sulfuric acid in reply to the name for H2SO4, Yuri Gagarin's 1964 feat as the first man in orbit, and without the using a calculator, figured there are 86,400 seconds in an Earth day.

The table of 8 around the pillar from us, had 2 girls sitting with their backs to the windows. My vantage was the only one with full view of their party.

During the game, I'd glance over, casually, and see the two young ladies looking into their laps where their arms led my visual interest. They'd be looking down throughout the contest. At one point, both had Blackberrys above the table, thumbing away.

They were a coquettish, 19 or so, straight blonde hair, snow-blinding teeth, and C-cups brimming like bulbous lookouts welded to undersized lithe frames.

At game's end, these teenagers were the only people in the answers-shouting crowd to correctly guess that the opening line of a particular book was from Orwell's 1984.

When the emcee asked the room which state was the only one to border eight others, they blurted out Tennessee. Then the two informed the emcee was wrong. Two states each border 8 other states;  Missouri also borders 8 states.

 The questions they missed were ones that could not be easily found in a quick Google or Wikipedia search. The hard ones they missed were my sure-fire path to victory.  Could I best them? My table-mates were confident my brain was crankin'!

But, the young women  prevailed, with a 1-answer advantage. Rules and warnings aside, they won. Tits, teeth and youthful beauty triumphed, tonight. 

In a gestalt moment, I realized that decades ago, attributes such as theirs seemed to rule, to gain advantage.

So it's true today, and probably a universal truth that will remain as breeding-aged beauty commands influence and permissable short-cutting and line-cutting, like 18 items in the 10-item express line at the supermarket or 10 minutes late for class being no big deal.

I smiled as I recalled a woman friend's assessment of her feminine empowerment coming from her lap: "With one of these, I can get as many of those as I want."

And so live goes on, trivial or not. I still know a shrimp's heart is in its head, that the "The Vine Line" is a publication of the Chicago Cubs, and that Minnehaha was Hiawatha's wife in Longfellow's fictional epic,"The Song of Hiawatha."

If only I could scrape that type of knowledge out of my brain like the last squeezings of the toothpaste tube and sell it to Jeopardy contestants, I just might have something.

Tonight, I had my integrity.