Friday night I went to "quiz night" at the Caledonian School, a language school that has a pretty nice bar in the basement frequented by a young expat TOEFL crowd (with some TOGFL mixed in). People team up, everybody antes 25 crowns and the team that wins the the trivia contest gets the pot. Drunken debauchery ensues. A good time was had by all.

Thing is, a lot of the questions were damned hard. Readers of this blog may have figured out by now that I'm the sort of guy who seeks out a certain level of useless knowledge. And there was some really useless knowledge flying around on Friday.

Stuff like: Which are the two left-handed Beatles? Which three races make up the Triple Crown? (And for a bonus, what was the last year a horse won the Triple Crown?)

The funny thing is, I asked my friend Ray these questions last night at Tulip, and knew the answers to the first two questions right off the bat. (The word "are" is the giveaway for the first question: Paul and Ringo. The races are the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes.)

As for the year, he made an educated guess of 1977. The correct answer is 1978. We got it right, based on either my hunch or my guess. (The horse was named Affirmed. By the way, when I retire, I think I'd like to start going to horseraces.)

Anyway, the point is that the world's a big place, and some people know some stuff, and then sometimes unexpectedly don't know some other stuff, because Ray then asked if Holland and the Netherlands were actually the same place.

Our team came in a close second.

UPDATE: Now you know why we didn't win: Holland and the Netherlands are not the same place.