Drink Tank Featured in The Sacramento Bee

Every Sunday Night I do a Pub Quiz at the Streets Of London Pub. It is a Very Popular Event in Midtown. This past Friday, the Sacramento Bee ran a Cover Story on the Pub Quiz in its Weekend Section. Our Team, Drink Tank, was Featured in the Article Because We Basically Kick Everyone's Ass. Drink Tank is made up Me, Danny, Elissa, Joel, Matthew and Rebecca. In the Photo Below, I am Sitting to the Right of Joel. Here is the Article - McPickles

Trivial matters
Test your wits at Streets of London's weekly pub quiz
By Lisa Heyamoto - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PDT Friday, September 22, 2006
There are game people and there are anti-game people. Game people will engage in a death match over Scrabble, know the secrets of effective Pictionary communication and have all kinds of useless knowledge taking up valuable real estate in their brains.

Anti-game people would rather have a beer.

Perfect, then, that the British pub quiz combines the founding principles of both camps.

In Sacramento's midtown, the Streets of London Pub offers a weekly quiz night that has been going strong for years. It's one of the bar's most popular nights, and each Sunday, quizmaster Ken Koch rolls in with his trademark dog and his chili-pepper shirt to rattle off the rules to this glorious, glorified game of Trivial Pursuit to a bar that's packed with the cerebrally faithful.

Rule One: There can be no more than six players at each table or on each team. Fair enough. After all, six mediocre brains should, under most circumstances, equate one exceptional one.

Rule Two: No shouting. "If you've been drinking, I highly advise you to write your answers down," Koch boomed to the crowd on a recent Sunday night. "As we all know, alcohol is the great amplificator and your answers might enable the stupid team."

Rule Three: No cell phones. Well, that makes sense. This isn't "Millionaire," after all.

Rule Four: There is no Rule Four. Bully for you if you get the reference.

Rule Five: Koch's answers have been painstakingly researched and will be the true and final answers. At least he's using his powers for good.

Rule Six: "I will disqualify teams that are disrespectful, especially friends of the bar staff," Koch said, we presume sarcastically.

And finally, Rule Seven, which was, in fact, a repetition of Rule Two: No shouting. Or, to be more specific, "no shouting of random football team names and laughing uproariously," Koch said.

So. Now that we've established the rules, let's get to the good stuff. Koch said it takes him about three hours to come up with each week's brain strainers, and he asks a variety of questions on everything from pop culture and history to anagram puzzles and song lyrics.

His favorite question lately: Who said of their album, "It's so good, every time I hear it, I like, cry"?

The answer is, of course, Paris Hilton.

"I try to structure the questions so everyone at least feels they're a little (good at the game)," Koch said.

Unless, that is, you belong to team Drinktank and you've already proved your indisputable smarts -- a whopping seven times in a row.

With six members of differing areas of expertise, Drinktank is indeed a behemoth of a team, missing only one of 30 questions that recent Sunday. For the team members, it's a nice chance to catch up each week, but it's also a chance at trivial exorcism.


Left to Right: Rebecca, Elissa, Danny and Joel (Sacramento Bee).  

"Where else can you use all that pointless knowledge?" asked Rebecca Erb, 26, whose specialty is Shakespeare and other random things.

Their winnings, as always, were two pitchers of beer and two entrees, courtesy of the pub. Second place garners two bottles of house wine and third place winners are the lucky recipient of a DVD of ... porn -- a prize to which Drinktank is no stranger.

"I would say that between us, we have (a number of) very good porn titles," said anagram man Matthew Downey, 34.

As for my team, we fared slightly poorer, though I'm proud to report that we did manage to land in the Top 10. I'm even prouder to report that that was partly due to my own anagram prowess after I managed to form a movie name/book title out of the following phrase: CIAO FAT FOUR. (The answer being "Out of Africa," and no one was more surprised than I was that I had figured it out.)

Because there are game people and there are anti-game people, and those of us in Category A like to brag.