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.

Yep, this is going to be Complaint Line Week here at the annual Trivia Answer of the Week feature. One thing that the writers of the contest have taken to doing occasionally involves slipping an answer into one of the letters to contestants sprinkled throughout the rulebook. For example, in the midst of one such dispatch from the contest organizer or maybe it was one of the student managers of the radio station, there resided the assurance that the answer to a certain question in a certain hour would be “Brussels.” When the question in question arrived, it asked for the country–I repeat, country–of origin of the six-foot-four man full of muscles who sold bread to the central figure in the Men at Work song “Down Under.” Now, the writers of Trivia are crafty devils who like few things better than misdirecting participants down some blind alley. Surely, the prompt that “Brussels” was the correct answer was a bit of trickery, since Brussels, while surely a lovely place, a jewel of Europe, is not, as a point of fact, a country. Knowing exactly which country Brussels is the proud capital of, we called in and responded, “Belgium.” Because the question asked for the country. Once the answer was given as “Brussels,” we were quick to call in and voice our discontent, all to no avail. The fact that the wrong answer was provided was apparently considered just enough, the way, say, a misprint in a textbook answer key would apparently allow for all of mathematics to be shifted to accommodate the error. Of course, the problem is compounded by the fact that the tall, strapping individual was only selling bread in Brussels and nothing in the song’s lyrics actually indicates definitively he is from there. Indeed, after offering up a Vegemite sandwich, it is this seller of baked goods who announces he comes from a land down under. So technically our answer was wrong, too. However, that didn’t make the official answer right.

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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.