Quizzo was a popular bar game in the city of my grad school, and for about a year, a group of us attending the Thursday night game on a regular basis. The rules of Quizzo were simple: Teams of people answered trivia questions read over a loudspeaker. There were four rounds of questions, and the team with the most right answers at the end won a $25 gift certificate. But you didn't want to win Quizzo to get the gift certificate, you wanted to win Quizzo for the glory. Our team didn’t usually win, but we held our own and had a lot of fun.
But sometimes, instead of holding our own, we were really stupid. On one such night, our team consisted of me, Housemate, Scottish Guy, Bitter Guy, and The Doktah, and one of the questions was, “What state has the most coastline?”
Scottish Guy, Bitter Guy, The Doktah and I started discussing likely answers. California, Texas, and Florida were all contenders. Scottish Guy said it must be Alaska, because of all of the islands of it’s coast. But then Housemate said, “No, it’s Rhode Island.”
Needless to say, we were very skeptical. Rhode Island? The state so small that you barely notice it’s there? Was he kidding? “No, I’m serious!” insisted Housemate. “I remember reading about it on a road trip through New England! Rhode Island actually has a lot of coastline!”
Well, he seemed pretty confident. And it also seemed like such an unbelievably stupid guess that he must know it to be true. Why would you ever guess that Rhode Island has the longest coastline unless you were privy to some secret information? And it wouldn’t be the first trick question in a round of Quizzo. So, following this logic, we wrote Rhode Island down on our answer sheet and told Housemate that he owed us all a round if Rhode Island was not the answer.
He still owes us that round.
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3 comments:
Heh. I actually thought "Rhode Island" while I was reading the post, but it does not have the most coastline. It, instead, has more of its land mass (percentage coastline) touching water than any other state, which is why its called The Ocean State. I SO suck at trivia but know this because one time I was like "Why does RI get to be the Ocean State? There are other states that have way more ocean than RI."
That must be what he was thinking of. Still.
I agree.... Rhode Island must have the largest ratio of coast to mainland. It all depends on how the question was worded.
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