This coming weekend, I’ll participate in the fifty-sixth staging of The World’s Largest Trivia Contest^TM, as staged by radio station WWSP-90FM. As per tradition, this week is filled with idle reminiscing about trivia answers that have been especially memorable for me over the years — from both the 90FM Weekend and a kindred contest that takes place on the other side of the Mississippi.

I noted yesterday that I am currently privileged to write questions for KVSC’s Trivia Weekend. I’m not the only member of my household for whom that’s true. As I noted around this time last year, my partner in all things pens plenty of questions, too. For purposes of this exercise, I asked her to pick one of her favorites from this past year. I’m not surprised that she landed on this one:

This TV series has all the elements of a classic Western: trains, lawmen, chases on horseback, and the risk of being buried alive in the desert southwest. During a season finale episode, a song is heard that is performed by an artist that recently played on campus at an event co-hosted by KVSC. What is the name of this song?

As someone with a longstanding weakness for Westerns, she was pretty pleased with the Wild West Trivia theme we settled on for this year’s KVSC contest. She also committed herself to coming up with questions from nontraditional Westerns, especially those created with an Indigenous American perspective. The AMC series Dark Winds was always in the mix for those reasons.

Dark Winds moved from probable to certain source after we attended an on-campus concert that KVSC helped present. The headliners were the Rangers, a group comprised of performers from the Iron Range of Minnesota and featuring the legendary Ojibwe-American musician Keith Secola. Before the group played Secola’s song “NDN Cars,” they specifically mentioned its inclusion in the most recent season finale of Dark Winds. One rewatch later, she knew exactly how to construct the question, including a “risk of being buried alive” hint to provide guidance to the exact scene for any teams that wanted to check their work.

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.