This weekend, I’ll participate in The World’s Largest Trivia Contest^TM. I’m a little preoccupied with preparations for that, including some significant travel. To provide some sense of the madness of minutiae that dominates my mind this week, I’ll share some of the most personally memorable answers from my many, many years of involvement with the contest. Every one of my teammates has stories like this. These are mine.

In the last couple of years, there’s been a notable increase in the number of questions in the Trivia contest that focus on album covers. Specifically, they tend to describe the cover of some relatively obscure album cover or cite one small detail in a more famous one, then the teams are asked to provide the title. A few contests ago, before these sorts of questions were especially prevalent, the voice over the radio asked “What classic rock album features a picture of Joe Allen as a human corkscrew?” We hunted the Web to no avail. While album covers are plentifully available, they’re rarely described providing the words a Google search can hit upon. I started brainstorming with one of my teammates. As I recall, we were about the call in Strange Days, the album by The Doors with circus performers on its cover, even though we were quite certain none of those practitioners of Big Top arts could be reasonably described as a human corkscrew. As our time was running out, I thought of the wall of photos on the Exile in Main Street cover, especially the handsome fellow with the trio of orbs jammed in his pie-hole. Surely a human corkscrew might be somewhere in that menagerie. We called it in with no time to spare and discovered we were correct. Better still, in the scoring system of the contest, the fewer teams that get an answer right, the higher the point value of that question. This was one of those blissfully rare answers that yielded points in the triple digits. In the busy activity of moving on to the next question, we never bothered to look at the album cover and spot old Joe so it was months later before I listened to my copy of the Rolling Stones classic and saw the human corkscrew’s sad, sketched face, so at odds with the zooming letters above his head.

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More information can be found at the official Trivia site or try to get your hands (and eyes) on a certain documentary. You can also listen in to the radio station that hosts the contest. In order to see how things are going with the team I play on, Twitter is your best bet.