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 return to a bit of a tradition around these parts and share a few personally memorable answers from the twenty-five years or so that I’ve been involved with this contest, in one way or another.

There are dangers and benefits to knowing the guys who write the contest. Back when I was still a student, I loaned the chief writer and coordinator of Trivia a copy of a favorite paperback novel, Bradley Denton’s Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede. There was no ulterior motive to it. We were (and are) friends, and I thought he’d enjoy it. Months and months later, I noticed the missing tooth on my bookshelf and asked if he’d finished reading the book. He told me he had, but also that he wasn’t going to return it until after that year’s Trivia. By this point, I’d graduated, and he knew I’d be playing in the contest with the station alumni team, still in its earliest days (now we’re a year out from our silver anniversary). It wasn’t hard to figure out why: he was going to ask a question from the very obscure book in the contest, and he wanted to prevent me and my teammates from having the source material on hand. I tried to buy another copy of the book, but to no avail. I’d be reliant on my very shaky memories of when I’d read the book, years earlier. Sure enough the question arrived in the last stage of the contest, asking the name given to a very special 1968 Barracuda with a 426 Hemi. While I didn’t know it off the top of my head, it was a significant enough detail that I found my way to it with a little creative brainstorming amongst individuals who I’m proud to call my teammates. We called in “The Oklahoma” in the nick of time and nailed down our team’s first ever 400-pointer, which means that only one other team got it correct; pretty impressive in a year in which 535 teams participated.

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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.