Trivia Vagabond: The George & Dragon Pub (June 20)

"I hate 'guessing' trivia," a friend of ours said yesterday. "I don't care if we don't know the answer. But there has to be at least a nonzero chance that some applied consideration will get the team within spitting distance of it."

He was speaking about another quiz he'd been to, but by the end of the quiz at Fremont's George & Dragon pub we were chuckling wryly at his foresight.

Applied consideration left us far beyond spitting distance for questions like these: "How long is the Great Wall of China, in kilometers?" "What's the name for a musical note that's half a minim?" "What's the official newspaper of the Salvation Army?" "By what other name is Lindisfarne known?"

These aren't bad questions, but if you don't know the answer, no amount of reasoning or discussion is going to get you anywhere close. Better questions from last night, just because they could be reasoned out: "Aside from golf, what ball sport has the largest playing field?" (Horses need a lot of room -- polo!) "According to a recent survey, what does the average American man do 5.33 times a week?" (How we missed "shaving" we're not sure, but we put down "prepare a meal.")

Also, we think we should've gotten credit for Percival on the question "Which knight found the Holy Grail?" Yes, Galahad successfully completes the quest, but Percival found it first. But we were 13 points out of first place, so quibbling seemed pointless.

We've certainly written our share of difficult questions. But, having read Ken Jennings' Brainiac and several other pieces of question-writing advice, we try to write questions with more than one way to approach them. If brute recall force won't get you the answer, we want you to be able to make a reasoned guess. And if all else fails, we try to make the question interesting. Granted, it doesn't work every time, but that's our goal.

It's a stylistic preference, of course -- if memorization is your bag, the George & Dragon's got a great quiz for you.

We ended the night scoring 21 out of 40; the winning team got 34, apparently having spent more of their educational years playing Quizbowl. In the UK.

We've also been spoiled by our experiences elsewhere: at the George & Dragon, you have no idea how you're doing over the course of the quiz, as the question setter scores all the answer sheets and only announces the winning score at the end. Winning team takes the whole pot. And there's no rundown of all the competing teams, so your motivation to come up with a clever team name is only as strong as your belief that you'll win. (We dusted off our recurring theme in honor of returning to the G&D, and played as An Inconvenient Smurf.)

Other good things about the George & Dragon: their curry chicken is delicious, as is (according to a teammate) their steak sandwich, neither of which are on the menu at the Old Pequliar, our usual trivia stomping grounds. And the jalapeno poppers? Yum.

And they've expanded their outdoor seating area since the last time we played there -- if you go reasonably early, you can play on the porch during the warmer months. They could use a better speaker out there, but it works.

By the way, next week is Seattlest trivia week at the Old Pequliar again. James hosts Tuesday night at 8:00. We'll remind you again, but you can pencil it in on your calendar now. Be sure to show up and let us know which questions were annoyingly unguessable.