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.

I’ve been a little unkind with my procession of Trivia Complaint Line posts this week, so let me turn the car here at the end. Sometimes that direct connection with the writers of the contest actually validates our extensive efforts in gathering trivial information throughout the year. (The fact that many of the folks on my team have personal connections to the writers, thanks to years helping to run the contest at the college radio station, surely helps in this aspect.) We once called in on a fairly simple issue, something we got resolved satisfactorily right away. With that out of the way, the contest writer quickly pivoted to asking us a question, wondering what source we’d used to provide the correct answer an hour earlier to a query about the birthday of CSI: Crime Scene Investigations central character Gil Grissom. Easy, we said, we had it in our notes, the voluminous collection of personally researched and documented pop culture information that is a must for any team seriously competing in Trivia. Evidently there was a raging dispute because a large number of teams had found a different birthday listed in several online sources. I don’t totally believe that our teams’ report that we held the preferred answer in notes settled the matter, but I do believe it was evidence in the writers’ case. Silly as it may seem, there’s a pride to be derived from that.

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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.