There aren’t a lot of hobbies I’ve carried over from my college years. I had to stop most of them, but there is one thing that I’m absolutely, 100% sure to keep from my college years. Every Tuesday, at 9:00 P.M., at a little bar in downtown Boston right across the street from my old campus, five of my friends and I gather for our weekly trivia night. It’s been over five years since we all graduated, and we never miss it.
The man who runs the trivia is a garrulous native New Yorker in his early thirties named Jim who has been there for every single Tuesday of those five years – much to his benefit, as he’s now engaged to one of our team members (who he met at the trivia night). He doesn’t create the same sort of stodgy, dry and fifth-grade level trivia questions that poison most other bar trivia evenings. Instead, he makes every question into a multimedia extravaganza, complete with song clues or video clips. For example: the trivia host will give us the real name of a famous person, and then ask us to tell him the more common name we know him or her by. This week he gave us the name “Charles Lutwidge Dodgson,” and then played “Don’t Come Around Here No More” by Tom Petty as a song clue.
Got a clue? Remember the video? The one that creeped us all out way back in the 1980s? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0JvF9vpqx8&ob=av3e) Yeah, “Charles Lutwidge Dodgson” was Lewis Carroll, the Alice in Wonderland author. There you go, thank me if you’re ever on Jeopardy and that question comes up.
A few months ago, Jim was frustrated with his trivia setup. He was burning all of the songs and materials he needed for the night to a series of CDs, and he’d always end up leaving a few important discs behind at his Cambridge apartment right before the trivia kicked. Jim would usually have to end up singing the song clues, much to his embarrassment and our scorn. Our ears paid the price.
Not since I showed him ElephantDrive. Now all Jim has to do is upload all of his songs to the ElephantDrive server, and any song or video he needs to play is right there for him. There’s no more waiting, no more scrambling for CDs … and thankfully, no more singing. All thanks to ElephantDrive.
So, I’ll leave you with one of Jim’s all-time greatest questions. Can you name the eight different historical figures Bill and Ted kidnap in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1AEDwsoCx8
