Month: January 2011

Trivial Matters With a Vengeance

On January 27, 2011

Okay, so some of this is covered in my review of Wordplay, but here it is from a slightly different angle. But before we go there, answers to the last entry’s questions:

Following in the footsteps of Anthony Michael Hall and Jason Lively, he played Rusty Griswold in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. More famously, he appeared as David Healey, Darlene’s boyfriend and eventual husband, in 92 episodes of Roseanne. Name this actor who currently stars as Dr. Leonard Hofstader on The Big Bang Theory.
Answer: Johnny Galecki

In the 1960s, Marvel Comics loved to liven up its titles by throwing in an extra adjective. I’ll give you a comic book title, you fill in the missing adjective, for five points each.
1. The Incredible Hulk
2. The Amazing Spider-Man
3. The Invincible Iron Man
4. The Uncanny X-Men
5. The Mighty Thor
6. The Astonishing Ant-Man

During CU‘s 2001 revival of the Trivia Bowl, I heard rumors of this thing called a “Basement Bowl.” I gathered it was some kind of trivia-oriented deal held in somebody’s basement. As you may recall, I had the epiphany in 2001 in which I realized that these are my people, so I wanted in on this Basement Bowl thingy. Sadly for me, it’s not easy to invite yourself to somebody else’s event, at least not for me it isn’t. So I asked around about it, discreetly, and got vague answers that sure, the Bowl’s always looking for new blood, and I’ll pass your name on.

I never heard back.

The next year (the final year of the revival), the same scenario played out. This time, I was more direct, asked more people, and was once again assured that my name would be given to Leonard, which I learned was the name of the guy in charge of the Bowl. I even went so far as to send email to Jason Katzman, who I knew as the film critic from CU’s unofficial newspaper, the Colorado Daily, during my student tenure. He’s part of the trivia crowd, and has a day job at the CU Bookstore, meaning that we sort-of-kind-of share an employer. I had briefly talked with him at the Bowl, and sent a follow-up email saying how much I love the trivia thing and how I’d love to be a part of any other trivia events he knows about.

I never heard back.

A couple of years later, the much much smaller-scale bowl began. That year, I once again participated, and made a connection with a guy named Dave Gatch. Dave is a wonderful guy, extremely bright and very funny, like a lot of trivia people. He’s also interested in reaching out to relative outsiders such as myself, and so that year he started taking me under his wing. In the summer of 2006, he invited me to attend the Basement Bowl at last.

And now, a bit of background. Leonard Fahrni is one of the true characters of the trivia world. Like Gatch (like all of them, really), he’s quite intelligent — he has four undergraduate degrees [3 of these simultaneously, from a triple-major] and three master’s degrees. I dunno, maybe four by now. Going to school is kind of his hobby. He teaches math at Metro State College. Plays trumpet in the National Guard’s 101st Army Band. (Actually, I know he retired from the military recently, so this may no longer be true.) He can be acid-tongued and caustic, but he can also be amazingly hospitable and generous. Oh, and he lives in his parents’ basement.

This basement is the home of the Basement Bowl. Leonard is a longtime fan of the trivia bowl, and during its heyday he watched for several years before forming his own team. When he did, they got blown out. He decided that practice was needed, and inaugurated a habit of getting some like-minded people together to write trivia questions for each other as practice for the yearly Bowl. He even got some mad scientist friend to build a buzzer set, just like the real thing.

In time, the habit morphed from practice into just a friendly event, a chance for friends to get together and do something they love. Basically, a bunch of trivia geeks descend (literally) on the place, bringing packets of toss-ups and bonuses with which to quiz others. If someone is moved to create one, there can also be multimedia quizzes, with sound clips and video clips and so forth. It’s not required that you create a game to come to the party — it’s just that most of the time at the party is spent playing these games, so the more games, the more fun.

Leonard sets up the buzzer system, but there are no set teams — everybody just sits down kind of free-form at the beginning of each new game, and a general social etiquette makes sure that everybody gets a chance to play some. Whoever wrote the game moderates it, and people just sit themselves down on sides, 4 to a team. It is very casual and non-competitive. It starts around 1:00, and goes until the questions run out. Leonard serves lasagna and salad around dinnertime, and guests generally bring drinks and snacky stuff for everybody to munch.

And OH MY GOD IT IS SO MUCH FUN.

My first time there I felt a bit overawed by the whole thing. These were people who had known each other, many of them, for upwards of 30 years. They are very tight and very bright. Some of them have actually won life-changing amounts of money on game shows. I brought a game to my first Basement Bowl and acquitted myself reasonably well, but boy was I blown away at the speed and knowledge of the people in that room. It was amazing.

Well, I must have done something right, because I got invited back. And last Saturday, I attended my 10th one. Laura is always awesome about these, taking on Dante for the day. I try to pay her back in various ways, like when she wants to climb a 14er or attend a meditation seminar or something, but I definitely appreciate how supportive she is of my fun.

For my part, I’ve tried to keep improving in the material I create for the Bowl. I’ve created at least one regular game each time, as well as some other stuff — a music game and a geek game (covering stuff like D&D, Buffy, Internet memes, etc.) I print out sheets with visual clues for bonuses, like TV screengrabs, film stills, album covers, etc. I’ve done all-audio games, like a disc of 55 song clips from one-hit-wonders. Games like that are played as an all toss-up round, often with the top scorers getting some sort of prize. I’ve also branched into video, thanks to the wonderful DownloadHelper, and integrated quite a bit of multimedia into my regular games.

And that, three blog entries later, is what “Basement Bowl” means. Now to start writing the entry I intended to write in the first place. But first: The Geek Bowl!

Trivial Matters 2: Electric Boogaloo

By paulobrian

On January 25, 2011

In Uncategorized

In my last entry, I explained the structure of the trivia bowl, and talked about its history at CU. Before I continue, let me provide some answers to the questions I posed there:

Q: James Rado, Gerome Ragni, and Galt MacDermot were the writers behind what song medley, which won Record Of The Year, topped the charts for six weeks in 1969, and was the biggest hit in the 5th Dimension’s career?
Answer: “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In”

I’ll name a fictional computer from a movie, you name the movie, for ten points each.
1. MU-TH-R 182 model 2, the ship-board computer on the space ship Nostromo, known by the crew as ‘mother.’
Answer: Alien
2. Deep Thought, a computer created by a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings who look to us exactly like white mice.
Answer: The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
3. EMERAC, a room-sized computer recently acquired by the Federal Broadcasting Network, whose worth is advocated by inventor Richard Sumner and doubted by reference librarian Bunny Watson.
Answer: Desk Set
4. WOPR, or War Operations Plan Response, a military simulator housed at NORAD.
Answer: Wargames

Now for my trivia autobiography (a redundant phrase, perhaps.) I grew up loving music, movies, and to a lesser extent, TV, as well as comics, theater, and the other sorts of topics that show up in the trivia bowl… except for sports. I was always a casual Bronco fan, but never somebody who could quote statistics or even name all the players. I enjoy seeing the games, but I never mind missing them either. I had a fling with baseball fandom for a couple of years, but then they went on strike and I got thoroughly disgusted with the whole thing.

As for basketball, hockey, NASCAR, golf, etc… don’t care. Never cared. I don’t mind watching tennis, and a bit of Olympics, but I only know the most surface facts about any of this stuff, if that. I do know a little about the WNBA and women’s soccer, thanks to Laura, but now that we have the Dante Distraction, soccer has left the limelight, and many of the WNBA games have moved over to some silly premium cable channel, so even that knowledge is pretty patchy.

Anyway, when I came to CU, I was only dimly aware of the trivia bowl, pretty much as “that thing that sounds kind of interesting but that I’m way too busy to do.” Finally, in 1993 my friend Robby told me that he knew a couple of teachers from our high school who wanted to field a team for the bowl, and asked me if I’d be interested. Robby was/is a total sports guy, as well as music and movies. Our mutual friend James covered TV, as well as some knowledge in all the other areas, and one of the teachers, Ron Hoover, was an absolute monster on old movies. So I said sure, and when we played our first game, wow. I still remember a visceral thrill from buzzing in on toss-ups before the question was finished, because I had such a strong feeling about the answer:

HOST: “Enya has had multiplatinum success with albums like Watermark, but before she–”
ME: BUZZ! “Clannad.”
HOST: “Clannad is correct.”

Whoo! Man, it was exciting. The other thing I remember is the fun of guessing on answers after the question had been read, if nobody else was buzzing in. Sometimes it even worked out:

HOST: “Who has the record for most guest appearances on The Love Boat?”
ME: [After a long pause in which it becomes clear that nobody is going to attempt this.] BUZZ. “Uh… Charo?”
HOST: “Yes, it is Charo!”

Our team actually won a game or two, but got blown out in the later rounds by more experienced and knowledgeable teams. There was a ceremony after the final game, and I was named Rookie Of The Year! Sadly, I had to work, so wasn’t able to accept in person. Even more sadly, 1993 was the final year of the trivia bowl. It is really a bummer to be Rookie Of The Year in the final year of something.

The whole event was dormant for a number of years, but when the CU Program Council brought it back in 2001, I knew I wanted to play. I got together a team of me, Robby, our mutual friend May from high school, and my friend Trish from work. Again, we did well in the early rounds and got stomped later, but that year I had an epiphany: these are my people. I attended every game I could (which was a lot — the tournament went all week, starting with 64 teams and narrowing down to two) and soaked the whole thing in. That was the year I officially fell in love with the trivia bowl.

Unfortunately, I was in the minority. The revival lasted one more year, in which our loss came to the team who went on to win the whole thing… a team led by Ed Toutant, the second biggest winner in the history of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. But attendance was anemic, and while the whole thing was super DUPER fun for me, it was a losing proposition for the Program Council, who pulled the plug in 2002.

After that, the event was held for a number of years in a much, much more scaled down form every fall. It was little conference rooms rather than the Glenn Miller Ballroom, with maybe 6-10 teams competing, no audio/video questions, and a more regimented quiz-bowly format which values strategy over entertainment. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — I made sure to play every year, and it was one of my favorite things, but it was a far cry from the heyday of it all. Now even that is gone, or at least it hasn’t been held for the last couple of years.

That smaller scale, though, enabled me to forge some relationships with trivia bowl “royalty” — the various Hall Of Famers who now moderate games and form a coterie whose history stretches back 30 or 40 years. One of these people, David Gatch, sort of took me under his wing a few years ago and got me invited to a very kooky event called the “Basement Bowl.”

…and that’s where part 3 will begin. But just to keep the trivia power flowing, here’s another toss-up and bonus.

Following in the footsteps of Anthony Michael Hall and Jason Lively, he played Rusty Griswold in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. More famously, he appeared as David Healey, Darlene’s boyfriend and eventual husband, in 92 episodes of Roseanne. Name this actor who currently stars as Dr. Leonard Hofstader on The Big Bang Theory.

In the 1960s, Marvel Comics loved to liven up its titles by throwing in an extra adjective. I’ll give you a comic book title, you fill in the missing adjective, for five points each.
1. The _____ Hulk
2. The _____ Spider-Man
3. The _____ Iron Man
4. The _____ X-Men
5. The _____ Thor
6. The _____ Ant-Man

Trivial Matters

By paulobrian

On January 23, 2011

In Uncategorized

Having just been to another Basement Bowl, I’ve been ruminating on a blog entry about what makes a good trivia question. And I do want to write that, but first I’d like to address those of you who may be saying, “another Basment Wha?”

Let me say: this is going to be long. Consequently, I’m breaking it up into a series of posts. This first one is the big lump of backstory that’s required to understand my personal trivia history. Your eyes may glaze over. This is normal.

I can go back quite a ways with my connection to trivia — I remember having books like Fred L. Worth’s Trivia Encyclopedia sitting around the house as a kid, and playing Trivial Pursuit with my family. (My dad dominated, though really he was only competing with one other adult.)

Meanwhile, the University of Colorado, my alma mater two times over and now my employer, started hosting an official Trivia Bowl in 1968, sponsored by a professor who’d just led a CU team to victory in the GE College Bowl. The difference was that while the College Bowl focused on various academic areas, the Trivia Bowl was dedicated solely to pop-cultural ephemera: music, movies, TV, sports, and “garbage”, which encompasses things like comic strips, theater, radio, etc.

The games follow a standard “quiz bowl” format. Two teams of four array against each other. Each team member has a buzzer. The moderator reads a “toss-up” question worth 10 points. At any point during the reading of the question, an individual may buzz in with the answer. If she interrupts with a wrong answer, her team incurs a 5-point penalty and the other team can listen to the entire question. A wrong answer that doesn’t interrupt incurs no penalty. No conferencing or teamwork is allowed on toss-up questions — if the judges see a conference, that team is automatically disqualified for that question, and the other team has a chance to buzz in.

A correct answer on a toss-up earns the right to a “bonus question”, worth anywhere from 20 to 40 points, and on these, teamwork IS allowed. (It’s usually essential, in fact.) These are usually multi-part questions, often with some kind of theme tying them together.

Example of a toss-up question:

James Rado, Gerome Ragni, and Galt MacDermot were the writers behind what song medley, which won Record Of The Year, topped the charts for six weeks in 1969, and was the biggest hit in the 5th Dimension’s career?

Example of a bonus question:

I’ll name a fictional computer from a movie, you name the movie, for ten points each.
1. MU-TH-R 182 model 2, the ship-board computer on the space ship Nostromo, known by the crew as ‘mother.’
2. Deep Thought, a computer created by a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings who look to us exactly like white mice.
3. EMERAC, a room-sized computer recently acquired by the Federal Broadcasting Network, whose worth is advocated by inventor Richard Sumner and doubted by reference librarian Bunny Watson.
4. WOPR, or War Operations Plan Response, a military simulator housed at NORAD.

Teams compete against each other in a long tournament — at the height of the trivia bowl, it started with 64 teams and narrowed down to two. The game consists of two ten-minute halves, though later in the tournament these periods are sometimes longer. There’s multimedia fun too — audio and video for both the tossups and bonuses.

The Trivia Bowl got quite popular, playing to packed houses in the Glenn Miller Ballroom throughout the 70s. A version of it was broadcast on ABC’s Wide World Of Sports at one point. Teams tried to outdo each other with silly, funny names (e.g. “Children Of A Lesser Godzilla”, “Bill Clinton Sings ‘Devil With A Blue Dress On'”), and the level of competition was impressive — there are people out there with some frighteningly encyclopedic knowledge about pop culture. The matches lasted through the week, and on the Friday before the finals there’d be a concert by some oldies act — Del Shannon, The Guess Who, Bo Diddley, etc.

The Bowl’s popularity endured a slow decline through the eighties, and by the early 90s attendance was sparse indeed. CU finally pulled the plug on the event in 1993, with a brief revival from 2001-2002. The year after that, a guy named Paul Bailey continued the Bowl in diminished form — people gathering in small conference rooms to answer questions, no audio or video, and no audience. But still fun.

Okay, that’s all for now. Next post will explain my personal history with all this, and give answers to the questions in this post. If you don’t want to wait that long, I will be happy to confirm or deny any answers that appear in the comments.