The Witching Hour, or Day 89 in Doha

I don't know if 6:00pm is the witching hour anywhere, but it sure was a popular time to start events.

First off, Carnegie Mellon Qatar (more specifically one of the professors, Ben Reilly) hosted Brain Bowl, an in-house quiz challenge between four nonsensically-named teams of four. This year it just happened that there was a team from each class. And this year it just happened to be that the winners from last year won this year too. Go, Class of 2011!

But it wasn't just them that won... more on that in a second.

After checking out Brain Bowl for a bit, I then went to have a look at the Turkish culture night at the Ceremonial Court. Not seeing anyone I knew (and not wanting to stand alone in the huge line for shawarmas), I went with Abdalla to some Winning Eleven video game tournament hosted by the Multimedia Club. There was a lot of boys and a lot of pizza, so I said hello to the few I knew, then headed back to Brain Bowl.

I got to Brain Bowl for the final round of questions. In the middle of each round is an audience question. When I had been by earlier, the audience members had received t-shirts, and we all know how I love free t-shirts (five or so just this semester!) So when the question showed this:

I knew exactly what was going on. Since it was April Fools', many of the questions asked about "famous hoaxes." Me, being bored earlier today, read the Wikipedia article for April Fools' Day, where this hoax showed up. Apparently, after announcing that the Italians were harvesting their spaghetti, many viewers called into BBC asking where they could get a "spaghetti bush."

Well, it was my lucky day. Turns out that the final audience question did not just give a t-shirt; I got a ~$100 (300 riyal) gift card to Virgin! I already spent it on an external hard drive that doesn't require an outlet...

After my big win (and the win of my fellow juniors), Khaled and I walked over to the Ceremonial Court again. The whirling dervishes were doing there thing (and to think, I watched a similar service three months ago in Istanbul). The line was still long, but I had stolen pizza from the Multimedia Club event, so only Khaled cut in line a bit.

If they even got their food. I left shortly thereafter. I had had plans to go see a movie and dinner at 6:00, but these plans were easy to push until 9pm or 10pm.

So Abdalla and I saw The Bounty Hunter. While none of our pictures inside the the theater worked, I would still recommend it.

Now, to be ready for a weekend of work!