You call that trivia?

When I lived in Japan, one of my favourite things to do, on mind-numbing ANA telephone-testing days (don't ask, just trust me it was boring), was to spar with Mark over "Trivbot", a neat web-based IRC application which spurted out general knowledge questions that you had to answer the quickest to get a point for your team. Mark usually creamed me, because, ahem, he was a quicker typist.

Now we're all back in Australia, it's time to admit what I knew in my heart to be true. Mark is far far better at trivia than me. Ask him who was the Secretary of the New Zealand Green Party in 1994 or how many pages was the 1999 hardback edition of the "The Ayn Rand Reader" and he'll know it. Actually, I'm not sure about that last question. That would be a bit sick.

Our bud "Jeremy" bought Trivial Pursuit's 20th Birthday Edition and last night 7 of us sparred over a game board and a bottle of port. Mark was a gun. He was pure genius. Even the Third Reich of Jer and I, with our outstanding knowledge of medical acronyms couldn't put him back in his box.

It seems my memory of the last 20 minut... errrr, years has fizzled in a frenzy of dead brain-cells. Mark is never coming to a TP extravaganza night ever again. Unless he's on my team.