bout de papier, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2022), pp. 40–43
LP: Welcome, fans. We’re live streaming the championship round of Full Contact Trivia here on Nutflakes
NewSports. I’m Lou Pompadour and with me are Leigh “Truck” McNamara and Geraldo Manders. We’re coming to you from Holodeck Hall in the Department of Extreme Studies at our own Nutflakes College. The crew is setting up for the final faceoff and an excited crowd is filing in. If you’re joining us for the first time, the moderator for the match is the Al called GEODE. a
GEOBE: THANK YOU FOR THE INTRODUCTION, LOU, ON BEHALE, sass | OF ALL SILICON-BASED LIFEFORMS.
GME I still say they should have used Deep Blue.
LP: Of course you do, Ger. You’re our colour commentator. How do you rate the finalists, Truck?
LM: I prefer “Leigh”.
LP: I know you do, but you’re the size of the Roughriders’ front line, so “Truck” is easy to remember.
LM: Stay out of dark alleys, Lou … But to answer your question, it’s going to be a close one. The Centre, led by Don Gordo Beluga, has been the big surprise of this contest so far. They came from nowhere to sweep past early favourites like the Amblesnide and Tiddlycove Croquet and Chowder Club, the Space Agency’s Ladies Who Launch, and the Treasury Board Secretariat.
LP: They also knocked off the Spanish Inquisition, right? One of the historical teams brewed up by the holodeck?
LIM: Yes, they did, Lou. No-one expected that. But the Iberians were eliminated when Torquemada lost the fight with the moderator about using the rack to extract answers.
LP: Just to clarify for the fans, Truck, the disqualification was not for unnecessary roughness. I mean, this is “full contact”. It was because
he tried to use the rack on the audience.
GMA serious red card there.
LM: Right you are, Ger. The opposing team is Elizabeth’s Cabal,
dir g such big names as William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and Sir Walter Raleigh. They ve given us some real excitement.
LP: My tig ore was the sword fight.
LM: For fans who poet on line for that match, Shakespeare 76
ot the question, “What is written inside the Prince of Morocco’s ~ casket in The Merchant of Venice?”. He answered, “All that
glitters is not gold.” The ref, I mean the moderator, wouldn’t take it, saying the word was “glisters”. Shakespeare said that was a typo and he wrote the play, so he should know. Then Bacon piped up that Shakespeare was a fraud and that he, Bacon, was the real author. They drew swords. Then a third guy raced in, said he was the Earl of Oxford, claimed that, no, he was the playwright and joined the melee. So did Errol Flynn from the Hollywood Legends. He just can’t resist a good fight. After all the usual cut and thrust, swinging from chandeliers, slashing of candles, and snipping of buttons from each other’s doublets, the judges called the match for Flynn. That left “glisters” up in the air — Shakespeare got a mulligan — and the play was credited to a man a three centuries after it was wor LM: True that. My highlight of the tournament so far was the philosophy fight.
LP: It would be. You’re the only one who understood it. You read too much.
LM: It was simple. GEODE asked Bishop Berkeley to define Solipsism. He said it claims the world might not exist outside your mind. Like, the chair beside him might disappear as soon as he stopped looking at it. They gave him the point. But the materialist Hobbes asked the bishop to close his eyes, then picked up the chair and broke it over his head. Marx said he wished the solipsists were right, since then the capitalists would disappear when he stopped writing about them. Einstein from Schrédinger’s Cats butted in to remind everyone that quantum theory said the chair both existed and did not exist unless someone was watching. Sartre argued that the absence of something was itself a real object, complaining that the commissary had given him coffee with no cream when he had ordered coffee with no milk. The others jumped him and things got hot. In the middle of the fight, a hockey game broke out, which the Leafs lost as usual.
LP: Like I said, only you … Well, it looks like things are ready to go. The two teams are in their boxes. On top of Shakespeare, Bacon and Raleigh, I see the Cabal has gone for Sir Francis Walsingham to round out its starting line-up.
LM: As you know, Lou, he’s Queen Elizabeth’s top spy and codebreaker. They must be expecting puzzles. On the other side, Don Gordo has also brought back two of his heavy hitters. One is Mabel Stanley. She’s the Ranee of SuWaNi, but also the lead singer of the heavy metal band Edible Granite. She has been tearing up the course on pop culture questions. The other is her husband, the Rajah and old Centre archivist, Dryan Tweedie.
He’s a man who knows the answers to all the dusty questions. But who’s their fourth?
| LP: Some guy named Felix Africa. He’s editor of the Centre’s in-
house rag Aide memoire. He’s a newbie to the tournament, from a town in Alberta somewhere.
GM: So, a greenhorn from Vermillion?
LP: High-fiving just encourages him, Truck. OK, everybody’s ___ waiting for GEODE to flash the first questions. Wait a minute, __ fans! There’s a cloud of smoke and someone strides out of it. It’s
an old man with a long white beard. He’s wearing a long grey — cloak and: a broad-brimmed hat, and he has an eyepatch. There’s a
big black bird sitting on each of his shoulders and he’s cauving _
> – its a spear!
: UM: Sounds like Odin, the op Nore oo He’s in charge of both
__ war and knowledge — a natural for this contest, if you think about it. Another surprise from the holodeck, I assume.
GEODE: ACTUALLY, NO, IT APPEARS TO BE THE REAL ODIN. UNLESS, GIVEN THE RAVENS, IT’S SOME KIND OF CORVID-19 COMPUTER VIRUS.
LP: Well that’s one for the books. The old man is saying something…
GEODE TRANSLATION FROM OLD NORSE: WARRIORS OF THE WORD, | THE ALL-FATHER GREET YOU. ASGARD BEING UNDER LOCKDOWN AND VALHALLA HAVING RUN OUT OF MEAD, | FOLLOW THE STORM ROADS SEEKING OTHER HALLS OF WISDOM AND MIRTH. | SEE CHAMPIONS HERE STRIVING AND WOULD LIEF JOIN THE CONTEST? WHAT SAY | PLAY THE WINNER OF THIS MATCH, NO HOLDS BARRED?
LP: Wow. No-one knows what to say. Everybody must be asking, is this guy for real?
GEODE TRANSLATION FROM OLD NORSE: | GROW IMPATIENT, MORTALS. IS THIS HOW YOU TREAT YOUR GODS?
LM: Did you see that? The Tuba Festival Band struck up the “Ride of the Valkyries”. The old man waved his spear at them and turned their instruments into swans.
GEODE TRANSLATION FROM OLD NORSE: | KNOW NOT WHICH | HATE WORSE, TUBAS OR WAGNER.
GM: A black swan event, for sure.
LP: But the swans are white, aren’t they, Ger?
LM: Umm … yes they are, Lou.
GEODE: WE ARE CLEARLY DEALING WITH A BEING OF SOME POWER. | CHOOSE TO RESTART THE MATCH.
LP: All right, GEODE has called for calm. The teams and the spectators are back in their seats. Odin has conjured up a moss-covered rock to sit on. Autumn leaves swirl around his head and the sharp electric reek of an approaching storm fills the air.
LM: Hey, that was … almost poetry, Lou.
LP: We all have our off moments, Truck. GEODE has turned to the Cabal, which won the toss, with its first questions. It’s a list of quotations from plays of their time. They need to identify the authors. A soft serve to start, for sure. Sir Francis is consulting his team. There seems to be an argument.
LM: He knows where the bodies are buried. He put a lot of them in there. No-one is going to cross him.
LP: Now he’s turned on the mike and … he’s telling GEODE that the Cabal can’t answer the questions!
LM: Clever move there, Lou. Neither team wants to win and have to face off with Odin. Hard to tell what would be worse. If you lose, only God — Odin — knows what you’d have to pay. And if you win, well, Odin is not a good loser. Either way, it would be a slugfest. So the Cabal has punted.
LP: What if the Centre does the same thing?
LM: Under the rules, if the match ends in a scoreless tie, the Centre still wins the tournament based on their previous point totals.
LP: GEODE’s screen now shows the Centre’s questions. There’s a box with 13 rows of squares and a blue column down the middle. Beside it is a box with 13 clues. GEODE says they’re anagrams for the names of big magazines, with hints. Don Gordo has passed the team’s laptop to his rookie, Felix. What’s your take on that, Truck?
LM: I think they’ve decided to play it up the middle. That gives them longer to figure a way out of Walsingham’s trap. For this question, Africa is their best point man, with his publishing connection.
LP: Well, he’s sure doing a fast job getting the answers up on the big screen. Funny, I thought the words on the blue stripe would spell something out, but they don’t.
GEODE: THEY ARE IN OLD NORSE. HANG ON.
LM: OK, Felix has signalled he’s finished. Looks like a perfect 10 to me. GEODE has asked Don Gordo to read out the blue-stripe words. The Don looks nervous. I think he’s worried over what the words mean and how the old guy will take them. But he squares his shoulders and does it. Odin looks up. He scowls. And he … disappears in a pillar of fire? Holy cow!
GEODE: ALTHOUGH HE WAS REAL, HE HAD MANIFESTED THROUGH THE HOLODECK. SO | CODED A BANISHMENT PROGRAM INTO THE SYSTEM. BUT A HUMAN ENTITY HAD TO GIVE THE GO, AND | COULDN’T TELL ANYONE OPENLY TO DO SO WITHOUT ODIN INTERCEPTING THE MESSAGE.
LP: Works for me, and I think the fans will agree.
GM: A blue-ribbon performance.
LM: Which moves us to the question of where the tournament goes from here.
LP: GEODE is ahead of you there, Truck. He’s just awarded the victory to the Centre, saying the Cabal defaulted. The Cabal isn’t happy, you can see that. But the spectators are clearly ready to support the team that saw Odin off. So the Centre wins the 2022 tournament of Full Contact Trivia!
LM: The whole lineup of contestants is back on stage for the closing scrimmage. Celebrities from the stands have joined them. A beaming Don Gordo accepts the heavy Abbott-Haney Cup from a hologram that looks a lot like Foster Hewitt.
FROM STAGE MIKE: YOU SHOT, YOU SCORED!
LM: Yup, that’s Foster. Now the commissary table is being lowered from the rafters. Everyone takes a pie. And — they’re off. Wow, did you see the way that strawberry shortcake full-faced the PM?
LP: And with the tangy smell of lemon meringue and banana cream filling the air, this is Lou Pompadour signing off for Nutflakes NewSports.
AND THIS IS GEODE SIGNING OFF TOO: GOODNESS GRACIOUS, GREAT BALLS OF FIRE!
LM: Curious…
GM: Colour me confused!
Let’s let Gerry, Leigh, and Lewis sort that one out. Meanwhile, can you duplicate Felix’s feat and provide the Old Norse phrase that banished Odin? bout de papier will award a book prize signed by A Aalto to the submitter of the first correct answer drawn from a hat on November 30, 2022. Not necessary for winning, but can you fill in the chart and say who the Abbott-Haney Cup is named for?
Answers
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2022), pp. 40–43. Read the rest of this issue →
