Damn you, VH1!
As recounted previously, I was part of a team that tried out for VH1's World Series of Pop Culture. Our team name was the Haimburglars, we knew our stuff, and in case you can't intuit whether or not we'll be on the show, I invite you to read the first sentence of this entry again.
The tryout was Friday in downtown Austin. We assembled in the hotel that hosted the event, and I changed into my most excellent team uniform: a baby blue t shirt with a picture of Corey Haim and gothic text reading "Lost Boy". (Yes, we had those custom made, and yes, I will post a picture in the very near future.) Solely based on our shirts, I thought we were a lock. They were the kind of shirts that, after you gave them one look, you fell in love with the wearer and tried to give him $20. Many of the other teams didn't even have shirts and the ones that did were usually knock-off bowling shirts. Our shirts said, "We're going to beat you at trivia, and we're going to do it while wearing pastels." That's some chutzpah.
The tryout was a short-answer test, and there were maybe 100 people in our group; there were multiple tryouts over the weekend. I can speak for the entire team when I said we did well; we estimated that each of us got between 60% and 80% correct. Couple that with the shirts and the fact that most would-be game show contestants aren't exactly prime era Tom Selleck, I thought we were in. I was ready to call up Expedia on my cell phone and book the closest hotel room to Flava Flav. Then, they came back into the room and informed us that only one team made it, out of the perhaps 50 in our heat.
Our victory is delayed, but not denied, VH1. The Haimburglars are a fact of life, like puberty and property taxes, and your whole organization needs to deal with it. Next year, we're in.
Posted by Cody at February 12, 2007 10:07 PM