This coming weekend, I’ll participate in the fifty-fifth 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, in that contest and now from another weekend-spanning events of quirky questions.

Trivia Weekend has long rewarded research skills as much as accumulated knowledge. Now deep into the era when the internet makes reference material widely available, the contest arguably rewards adeptness at searching far more than the ability to tap into accumulated appreciation of pop culture to come up with an answer. Because of that, it’s especially satisfying when coming up with the correct response to a question is about more than entering the right prompts into Google.

The team I’m on is especially strong when it comes to music questions, which should be the case given that many of us are alumni of the 90FM, the radio station that is home to the World’s Largest Trivia Contest. It’s a point of pride, in fact. So the energy in room precipitously rises when a question such as this one reverberates out of the speakers: “Three versions of a song made it into the top 20 in a single year. More than 50 years later, another version of the song made it into the top 10. In between, it was featured in a memorable big screen performance. What is the name of this catchy tune?”

The boom of brainstorming happened immediately. Around the table, different theories were proffered. The main approach was naming off pop hits that we know were covers of very old songs at the time they climbed the charts. Having a team roster packed with player who grew up in the nineteen-eighties helped. After Taco’s version of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” was named, we were promptly able to suss out the reference to the “memorable big screen performance.”

We called it the correct answer and earned a mighty 275 points. That hefty reward means we were only five teams that got it right out of the nearly three hundred participating. Research is admittedly king in the contest, but knowledge helps, too.

More info about 90FM’s Trivia can be found at its official website or at the radio station’s online home. More info about KVSC’s Trivia can be found at the radio station’s website.