Funny Guy Friday... Musings from my hubby... A Trivial Pursuit

     I was driving home from work yesterday, and I heard a bit of trivia. Chris Haney died. Who is Chris Haney? you ask. He was the co-creator of Trivial Pursuit.
     The story goes that he had returned home from purchasing a game of Scrabble, one day, and was lamenting the cost. He then realized that there must be money to be made in board games. He and a friend came up with the idea of Trivial Pursuit in about forty-five minutes, and began to sell it locally. The game became such a sensation that Hasbro purchased the intellectual rights to the game for eighty million dollars. Not bad for a concept that only took 45 minutes to come up with.
    As I continued my drive, I started to think... cool story, but... I HATE Trivial Pursuit! I have lived my entire life with a few simple rules, and one of them is that if people think that you are smart, don't open your mouth and prove them wrong. Trivial Pursuit forces a person to put up or shut up. I've typically elected to shut up. And after playing the game for five minutes, it always became clear to everyone that I was a one-trick pony, as I went through various rolling maneuvers to get from ORANGE-SPORTS AND LEISURE to ROLL AGAIN, then to another ROLL AGAIN, and then another roll in hopes of again landing on... ORANGE. This strategy was often foiled when I would get a LEISURE question. How did LEISURE get mixed in with SPORTS?
    I did find that when it came to Trivial Pursuit, I had one strength, and that was reading my opponents' questions. I would psych them out with a little strategy that I had invented. First, I would read their question to myself. Then, no matter how difficult the question might have been, I would roll my eyes, and lament, "Oh my Gosh, you guys get the easiest questions." After reading the question aloud, I would then fake putting the card back in the box. This gesture let them know that they should get this in a nanosecond, and if they did not, it sent the message that I was clearly smarter than they.
    For example, after rolling my eyes and sighing, I would read... "What is the longest word in Spanish?" and then I would fake putting the question back in the box. If my opponent hesitated at all, I would pull the card back, and get further into their heads by adding a comment like "easy peasy, mcsqueezy." I am not sure what mcsqueezy meant, but it let my opponents know that I was a bilingual intellect (Scottish is a language, isn't it?).  More importantly it rhymed, and it conveyed the idea that this really difficult question was an easy question for me. Since I was so convincing in my delivery of these taunts, my adversaries would be left pondering how the educational system had failed them so miserably. Anyway, once my opponents surrendered on the question, I would shake my head and add, "I can't believe that you couldn't get superextraordinarissimo." By elevating myself, I, in turn, demoralized my opponents.
    My wife tells me that I did not invent this strategy, but that it is used every night by Alex Trebec. I don't believe that because who else, but I, has the intellect to pull this off. Perhaps Hasbro will pay me $80 million for my intellectual properties. Until then, feel free to use my technique at any time. (By the way, the question in my example is a LEISURE question, further illustrating why I hate that game.)