Willocalypse
Ladies & Gentlemen, Introducing WILLOCALYPSE: THE COMIC BOOK!!!
HOME VENUE: HawHide
OFFICIAL TEAM DRINK: PBR
NEMESIS TEAM: Bat Penatar
LATEST WILLOQUALISM: Willocalypse is the kind of trivia team that when they move in next door, your lawn dies.
“The Birth of Willocalypse,” by disenfranchised polar bear Chris:
Our trivia team name is an increasingly anachronistic in-joke between the two founding members: myself, and Mikey. As the two of us were driving to the Hawthorne Hideaway last March to participate in our very first ShanRock hosted bar trivia event, our conversation turned to the song “Wild Wild West,” the eponymous single from “Wild Wild West: The Movie: The Soundtrack.” I can’t remember how our conversation turned to a 9 year old promotional rap single, considering the film said song was crafted to promote is an unwatchable abortion. Perhaps it was fate.
To our chagrin, we both realized we knew almost every word to the song. Neither one of us was sure how those words lodged themselves into our memories, nor could we ascribe any deeper symbolism to lyrics like,
“Wild Wild West/Jim West/Desperado/Ruff Ryder/No You Don’t Wan Nada/None a dis/Six Gunnin’ dis/Buffalo Soldier/Just like I TOLD ya…”
This spontaneous recollection of an old Will Smith song led us to a discussion of Will Smith’s 1999 record, “Willenium,” — as in, what kind of person tries to brand 1,000 years with a stupid pun? Is that awesome? Is that not awesome? What happened to that branding effort? At this point, we entered the bar and drift away form this topic.
Flash Forward 10-20 minutes. We are inside the Hideaway. We are drinking cheap beer. One of us has recently been defeated in billiards, at the hand of his trivia teammate. The conversation turns to the Mayan astrological calendar, which will end sometime in 2012.
(Our conversations take a lot of turns. Scenic detours, if you will).
We consolidate our knowledge. We are fascinated by doomsday prophecies. This line of thought peters out quickly, however.
“So. The end of Times.” I say, lackadaisically.
“Heavy.” says Mikey.
“So the Willenium ends… prematurely?” says I.
“No, that’s the genius of Will Smith — if the Willenium doesn’t work out, he can always release a record in 2012 and call it “Willocalypse,”
We laugh at ourselves, we laugh at the stars, we laugh at our finely honed sense of the absurd. Moments later, we are handed a sheet of paper and notice a line clearly designated “Team Name.”
We are just naive young men, and so we write down “Willocalypse,” as our team name. On a lark.
VIDI VICI VENI