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.

Though the team I’m a part of has become pretty good at this goofy contest, adeptness at answering Trivia questions isn’t necessarily a prerequisite. For example, my friend Paul Kennedy was first introduced to our shared Trivia team as someone with voluminous knowledge of the pop culture ephemera that tends to fuel the questions, a quality which he indeed possessed. But he truly endeared himself to his new teammates by ruthlessly eviscerating the contest’s chief writer on the complaint line over his inability to distinguish between the nickname “Dumbo” and the given name “Jumbo Jr.” For more information about his famed pursuits, one need look no further than IMDb.

I would like to address wrong answers. There are plenty of opportunities to be wrong during the 54 hours of the contest, and some of them fall into distinct categories. One is when an individual is sure of an answer and calls it in immediately, but is wrong. Example: “Who is the alter-ego of Michael Dorsey?” I was sure it was sexy crooner Englebert Humperdinck and convinced the team of that and called it in quickly (this was pre-internet). Ahh, no. The answer was Dorothy Michaels, Dustin Hoffman’s character in Tootsie. (Englebert was born Arnold Dorsey, so at least the Dorsey part was correct.) That one was on me.

But, the category of wrong answers I find fascinating is what I call the Foundation of Sand. This happens well into the contest, and it happens EVERY YEAR. It is a function of the mindset that overtakes a team that is over-tired, over-caffeinated, and probably over-served. The account that follows is fictionalized, but the thought process happens every year in the room.

Question: Which fictional character was given the nickname “The Feral Cat” by her coworkers?

Our minds race. Hmm, no context. Is it a film, book, radio, or comic book? Could this be from an old movie, or a new release? Our internet search turns up nothing. Someone hypothesizes. “Could it be Samantha Stevens?”

“Didn’t she always turn into a cat on Bewitched?”

“That is totally something they would call Serena, her evil twin.” The foundation begins to tip.

“She didn’t have a job in that show.”

“She did in the movie version.”

Who are we talking about now? Creeeak.

We keep looking. As the first song comes to a close, we have forgotten about Samantha and Serena. We listen to the question again. Someone finds a reference to a cat in a Bogart movie. Dead end.

The comments fly. “You know, Will Ferrell was in the movie Bewitched. Will Ferrell. Feral Cat.”

“And, we had a Will Ferrell question earlier this hour. Could be a theme.”

Another teammate tries in vain to remember the lyrics to a song about a cat. Someone brings up Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The second song is halfway over.

And so we continue to build a case on what amounts to less than circumstantial evidence, our foundation of sand.
We need to call something in. And we call in “Samantha Stevens.” This answer, whose life began with a shaky premise, has become Q-E-fucking-D in our heads. And when the answer is read, and the answer is NOT Samantha Stevens, our team likes to tack on this coda: “I like our answer better.”

It may not have been the correct answer, but it was OUR answer. And we love it more than any points that Oz would have given us.

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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.