me on the cbc; trivial pursuit

Oh, there is one other bit of news. Thanks to the glorious reporting skills of Katherine, yours truly will be on CBC Radio One this Saturday. It’ll be just after the 2 p.m. news on Definitely Not the Opera, the CBC’s pop culture show. I’m not sure what made it through the edits, but I’m probably talking about the Mazie Project or blogging in general. If any of my Canadian homies saw fit to tape the show, I would be, commes les Quebecois disent, toujours reconnaissant.
This knocks a big item off my life to-do list (“Have my voice broadcast to the people of my ancestral lands”). Canadaphiles unite!
One other thing I feel I should mention, if only to taunt Fiona, the friend I was visiting in Boston last weekend. Fiona’s a very, very bright woman. Just a couple of weeks ago, she got a master’s at Harvard, to add to her Yale degree and her two years spent teaching in a Princeton program in China.
Aside from her intelligence, Fiona can also be very competitive. Which is why it gets to her that she will never defeat me in Trivial Pursuit.
I’ve probably played Trivial Pursuit fewer than a dozen times in the last decade — except for those times I’m with Fiona. She always wants to play. It started five years ago, just after our college graduation, when I was spending a couple of weeks at her house in Seattle. (We were dating at the time.)
We played a few games. And I won them all. From that point on, it became a matter of principle — she had to keep trying to even the score.
Unfortunately for Fiona, it’s never happened. We haven’t kept count of how many games we’ve played, but it’s certainly into the dozens. I’m something like 38-0. Fiona doesn’t like losing. At all.
So Sunday, when I was about to get on my flight back to Dallas, she decided to challenge me again. The first game was close — but I still won. Poor Fiona — her need for a victory reduced her to begging for odd rules (like, “Let’s play a partial game I can end early, and whoever’s ahead at that point will be an official winner”). In the end, we decided to rush through one more complete game. Six pie pieces to three: it wasn’t close.
I’ve thought about throwing a game to make her feel better. But then I realize that in a couple of years, she’ll be busy curing diseases, snipping out tumors, and otherwise saving lives. And I’m still be asking stupid questions to illiterate school board members. And I figure I might as well have something to hold over her.