This weekend, I will once again participate in the annual staging of The World’s Largest Trivia Contest^TM, the main fundraiser every year for the college radio station in central Wisconsin that is my most prized alma mater. At this time last year, I shared some personally memorable answers from the madness of the contest, noting that every one of my teammates has similar stories. It is those stories from my teammates that I’ll share this time around.

My friend Heidi actually began her Trivia career participating in a rival contest down Highway 10 (a contest that, fair’s fair, is a little older and was the direct inspiration for the one staged in Stevens Point), an endeavor that the rest of us unkindly treated with mocking condescension. Whatever we think of her training ground, she’s damn good at the contest the way we play it, which also means she’s good at laughing, drinking and talkin’ smart. She’s our beloved Casino Queen.

I love Friends. I always describe it as like porridge; it may not have the most flavor but it will fill your belly. I find its bland, predictable humor comforting and it is quite often the “white noise” I fall asleep to. And I know everything there is to know about Friends. When I play Friends Scene It with my mother and sister (also hardcore fans), the house rule is that I have to go around the board at least twice (sometimes three times) to win … and I still do. I know that Marcel was a Capuchin monkey. I know that Rachel’s middle name is Karen and Chandler’s is Muriel. I know Monica loves spider burners. I know that Ross has an alter ego called Red Ross and that Joey fell in love with Kate on the set of Boxing Day. I also know that Phoebe missed that play because she was on hold at Monica and Rachel’s with a company that held her about-to-expire warranty on a broken phone. I even know things I don’t know that I know like when Oz asked what sustained Phoebe after being on hold for 24 hours. I remember he asked it on Sunday night of one of my weaker Trivia performances and Dan describes my reaction as akin to a computer processing through its files, but in truth my mind practically went blank until the word “riboflavin” bubbled up. I called it in with shaky hands and then spent the next two songs worried that I had gotten it wrong. I couldn’t picture her saying it and I wasn’t entirely sure how I had come up with it. This is my biggest Trivia fear: that my team trusts me and I give the wrong answer; it is why it takes me so long sometimes to take notes because I have to go back over things twice, sometimes three times to make sure I have heard it right or written it down right. But on that question I was right, off the top of my head or bottom of my subconscious depending on how you look at it, and at the end of those two songs we were some 65 points richer for it. It wasn’t my biggest point question but certainly one of the more satisfying.

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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.