The Dark Side of Lanolin

Two neighbor friends and I go to local trivia nights as often as our schedules align.

In addition to doing pretty well in trivia, we pride ourselves on choosing a creative moniker, as the trivia game we frequent most often offers a prize for not only trivia prowess, but also best team name.

In the past we've been:

• Team "My Stepbrother is part of a throuple and my family largely ignores this"
• Team "The Twerking Corgis" (for which we won best team name and some Guinness glasses)
• Team "Keep our Team's Name out your effing mouth" (following Will Smith's infamous slap)

Last night, we tried a different trivia night and could simply not think of a name. We racked our brains, tried to think of topical ideas...nothing. In a fit of desperation, my friend, Lisa, suggested using the first two letters of each of our names, so we'd be Team "Kaboli." However, when she typed "Kaboli" into her phone, it erroneously autocorrected to "lanolin." 

Gentle reader: I have an endearing personality trait of finding things like "lanolin" hilariously funny and repeating the word about 800 times while laughing so hard tears stream down my face. And last night was no exception. It got even funnier when Lisa mentioned that lanolin was made of sheep's wool, and I accused her of keeping her in-depth knowledge of lanolin a secret for the entirety of our friendship - particularly because we have walked thousands of miles together while chatting about almost every topic. (Everything but wax secreted by the sebaceous glands of wool-bearing animals, I now realize.)

While I googled to ensure she was correct about its origins, I came upon an article entitled, "The Dark Side of Lanolin," and just like that ... we had a team name.

Team "The Dark Side of Lanolin" settled into the trivia game at a new location for us - a local brew house in a Brutalist work/live development in Northern Virginia. While we wanted to like it, there were many strikes against it: acoustics being so bad in the concrete-heavy, Brutalist building that we could not hear the emcee and heard way too much of fellow competitors sitting around us; being required to read questions and answer on our phones which made us wonder why they even had an emcee and how they could possibly prevent people from googling answers as there was plenty of time to do so between questions; and poorly-worded questions that were ambiguous and caused confusion. Additionally, we had to go to the bar to order food and drinks which is not a big deal usually, but when you are in the midst of a trivia competition, you don't want to take the time away from the game to do so.

Granted, we are also biased as we love our "home" trivia location, where answers must be written and submitted on paper and phones have to be stowed throughout. There are good acoustics and table service, and the emcee is hilarious. And the trivia is exactly the right amount of challenging so the three of us can most often noodle through to the correct answers.

I mean, one time Lisa almost came to blows with an opposing team whose representative WOULD NOT ACCEPT the fact that we were right and he was wrong, but she stood her ground and we were ultimately granted the win. (She may have been slightly scared to walk into the parking lot following the game, but hey, WE GOT THE POINT!) 

The word "sebaceous" is giving me hives,

Brutalism