I am surrounded by weirdos. I haven’t slept in 19 hours. My blood content is 73% black coffee and Kool-Aid. The scientifically-proven worst song in the world, “Africa” by the 80s band Toto, is blaring from the radio, jack-hammering its way into the deep recesses of my mind where it will remain there for months. The room most closely resembles a Cold War era intelligence meeting, with each person in the room completely engrossed in the glowing screen of his or her computer. My friend next to me is glazing over the online Southwest Airline Flight records from 2002, desperate for any hint that might lead to his goal. On a slightly unrelated note, he hasn’t bathed in weeks. It’s Trivia time at Lawrence, and it is the best weekend of the year.
When you think of a normal trivia game, you usually assume that the questions being asked, while difficult, are usually within the reach of normal human knowledge. “Who wrote Game of Thrones?” “What language do they speak in Morocco?” With a quick expedition into one’s own memory, questions such as these are pretty answerable. Questions for Great Midwest Trivia contest, Lawrence’s own three day trivia fiasco, are much more intricate. A question might go along the lines of “According to the blog of the producer of the sixth most popular television show in 1986, what is the most comfortable seating arrangement for a dining room?” (Note: I made that question up as an example. Please don’t try to find the answer because it definitely doesn’t exist). Players then phone into the radio station where the questions are being broadcasted by the “Trivia Masters” where they attempt to give the right answer. These trivia questions are complex and often lead players on a sadistic Internet scavenger hunt to the darkest corners of the deep web, requiring from everyone involved in Trivia, players and Trivia Masters, a dash of insanity.
If scouring the Internet for meaningless scraps of information isn’t quite your thing, then there are certainly many other ways to join in the unique customs of Trivia. Trivia players compete on teams in order to try and manage the madness. Anything can count as a team; you could be on a team with your residence hall, club, or even just group of friends. Once in a while, there will be action questions meaning that the teams must do some sort of action in a competition of interpretive weirdness. This year, one of the action questions involved the teams to gather outside of a concert then pretend to be paparazzi as the musicians left. Another action question was simply “Make brunch magical.” You could also have fun by answering phones for the Trivia Masters while other times its nice to just hang out with your team and soak in the Trivia atmosphere.
Here’s my team, Cardboard Dave, frantically searching for some random answer to question that I have no hope of remembering.
Trivia, as a whole, is Lawrence’s most unique and oldest tradition. It’s hard to believe, but next year will be the 52nd year of Trivia. It’s an institution at Lawrence, and one of the weekends that I look forward to the most.