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.

For the uninitiated, the 90FM Trivia contest largely isn’t dealing with the sort of queries that might get tossed around the corner of the bar: the last person to hit .400 in a Major League Baseball season, the name of the dog on Frasier, who played that one guy in that one movie. Those questions are in there, but most are far more obscure, the sort of thing that almost sounds impossible to answer when first heard. This requires the taking of notes. Teams can’t count on getting things right just by combing their collective memory; details need to be written down. This creates the fairly agonizing scenario of meticulously compiling endless details from certain movies and television shows only to have those particular media offerings never turn up in the contest. On the other hand, sticking around for a few years can turn that around completely. The year Katharine Hepburn died, we were certain–so certain!–that the contest would have an abundance of questions culled from her movies, so went out of our way to take notes on as many as possible (which, granted, wasn’t a hardship the way it is with other performers). Our theory was wrong, and nothing came of our efforts. That year. A few years later, though, was a different matter. In the middle of the contest, the question came up: “In the big screen flick Pat and Mike, when Collier Weld sends Pat Pemberton flowers, what message is on the card?” We tore into our notes and wound up earning triple-digits with our answer, a huge number in a contest in which most questions wind up in the ten to twenty point range. That patience-virtue equation? It holds up.

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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.