This coming weekend, I’ll participate in the fifty-fourth staging of The World’s Largest Trivia Contest^TM. As per tradition, this week is filled with idle reminiscing about trivia answers that have been especially memorable for me over the years.

The weekend-long trivia contest aired on student-run radio station WWSP-90FM is the largest of its kind, but it’s certainly not the only one. Just as some University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point students back in the day swiped the basic structure of the event from the campus radio station at Lawrence University, so too did the 90FM iteration of sending questions over the airwaves receive a homage from fellow young broadcasters to the west. KVSC-88.1FM, the educational radio station at Minnesota’s St. Cloud State University, has spent more than four decades perfecting their own iteration of Trivia Weekend, and I can attest it is the only alternative contest that is in the same league as the one staged at my beloved alma mater.

I’ve long been impressed with the KVSC contest, and then I saw it in action. Well, I helped with the action, really. I’ve been honored to be employed as the broadcast outlet’s station manager since the summer, and I’ve been wowed — though not surprised — by the dedication, ingenuity, and overall joyful spirit of all involved. There’s plenty of DNA in common with the contest that I’ve known intimately for more than thirty years, but the KVSC contest has its own flavor and charm. Among other things, the question writers are far more likely to play upon whatever that year’s theme might be. So when I was given the opportunity to pen a couple questions myself, I dutifully considered options that fit right into Camp Trivia. Luckily, I had a good lead right there on my breakfast table.

One of the questions I wrote was as follows: “While eating breakfast cereal, you might see a place where fireflies make their own fireworks and you’re urged to be ready for rhyme time. In this place, you can see a pirate with bunny slippers roasting a hot dog over the fire and a penguin wearing earmuffs. What is the name of this destination for summertime fun?”

Plenty of teams correctly identified this mythic place as Camp Cap’n Crunch. I genuinely can’t overstate how special it was for me to put that query into the field of Trivia play, and truly hope that at least a few folks were as entertained by it as I’ve been by my favorite questions over the years.

More info about 90FM’s Trivia can be found at its official website or at the radio station’s online home. There’s also a feature documentary about the contest, but it’s fairly hard to come by these days.