Riddle
Me This
 Early
this past summer a friend of mine invited
me to play on his team in
a weekly trivia contest, held every Wednesday
at
a local
wing joint. Having a certain capacity for
useless knowledge I said
"Sure!"
It was fun for a while. The weather was
great, the people were nice, and the girls
were cute but it didn't take long to figure
out that
it
wasn't
really "trivia" we were playing. Week
in and week out it was the same categories:
movie quotes, name that tune, TV theme
songs, name that singer, sports and, occasionally,
one crummy round of science questions.
Ooh, and sometimes they'd
throw in a math question. Math skills are
very useful but, and I'll put this as nicely
as I can, Math problems are not fucking
trivia questions!
Almost all of the questions in this contest
were not trivia, they were trivial,
plucked from the recycle bin of industrial
entertainment.
It was pure pop culture, also known as
"mass-market media", the exact oposite
of "trivia". Trivia is not just knowing
all the words to the "Gilligan's Island" theme
song,
it's knowing who wrote the tune. Trivia
is not remembering
the movie a specific quote came from, it's
knowing who was the casting director of
that film.
It's a
shame, really, as this sort of contest
is perfect
for expanding knowledge. If you knew in
advance, for example, that the categories
would be "Moby Dick", "the
human circulation system", "Francisco
Pizarro", or "industrial welding" you
might take the opportunity to escape your
comfort zone and learn something new in
order to win.
Yes, I broached my concerns with the nice
man who ran the program but it was clear
that his job was to keep the crowd coming
back each
week, and he knew that no one has time
to study these days when they have twelve
hours
of
sitcoms
queuing on the Tivo.
"I'll take 'Who Gives A Shit?' for 200,
Alex."
=Lefty=
|
