The Sweet Potato
By Timmy T. Tater, Editor and Chief Spud
I need to air a grievance, and I need to do it in front of witnesses, because otherwise I’m just going to keep muttering about it to my grocery cart at Save A Lot.
My family — let’s call us the Tater Family, because that’s what we are — has a long-standing tradition of restaurant trivia. I’m no rocket scientist. Ask me to solve for X and I’ll ask you if X stands for “extra breadsticks.” But hand me a category on obscure one-hit-wonder bands, forgotten sports trivia, or deep-cut song titles, and suddenly I’m useful. I’m the Designated Hitter of the team — can’t play the field, but I’ll clear the bases when it counts. A real David Puddy (your daily Seinfeld reference) of a teammate: not flashy, mostly silent, occasionally correct at exactly the right moment. High-Five!
None of that matters to the story. I just needed you to like me before I got mad.
Here’s the deal. Most trivia nights let you name your team, and most hosts encourage you to have a little fun with it. I’m a big Impractical Jokers guy, and one of their running bits is coming up with ridiculous names for imaginary office cubicle-mates. One of the all-timers — a name that made even Sal crack — was “Jugs McBasketball.” Two words. One of them isn’t even a real word. Slapped together for the sole purpose of being silly.
So I used it.
The host called the leader of “Jugs McBasketball” to the host table and told me it was “inappropriate. You must pick another name.”
Now, we were in a bar. If “Jugs McBasketball” is too much for a barroom crowd holding domestic drafts and a stack of buffalo wing baskets, I don’t know what to tell you — but I’ll go ahead and tell you anyway: it isn’t. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a name. It’s nonsense. It’s two mismatched syllables cosplaying as a name.
Fast forward to this week. Same host, same bar, same trivia night. A team strolls in and registers themselves as “Penn State Coke Line.”
No flag. No foul. Just penciled right onto the scoreboard like it was “The Quizzard of Oz.”
Now, for those keeping score at home — and apparently the host was not — there was a drug bust up in Happy Valley this week, some fraternities got swept up in it, and it made a bit of news. Good, bad, or indifferent, I genuinely don’t have a horse in that race. Kids occasionally do dumb stuff, sometimes they get arrested for it, the news cycle chews it up and moves on. That’s not my grievance.
My grievance is this: how in the world does a team name that’s a direct reference to a literal drug bust sail through, while “Jugs McBasketball” — a phrase with the depth and meaning of a fever dream — gets flagged as inappropriate?
I want consistency. I want a rulebook. I want the host to sit down, write out the standards, and post them on the specials board next to the fried pickle price. Because right now the system we’re working with appears to be: nonsense words bad, actual crime references fine, as long as nobody at the podium follows the news.
We didn’t win trivia that night, for the record. Somebody on another team apparently knew the atomic number of tungsten, which feels like cheating in spirit if not in rule. But we went home with our dignity, our joke, and now, evidently, a whole column’s worth of material.
I really can’t believe I wrote this about something so, well…”trivial.” Sorry, it was like a hanging curve, I had to swing. However, if this makes our relationship uncomfortable, you don’t have to read my wonderments next time. However…
Jugs McBasketball rides again next week. Try me, host.
