APPLETON, WIS. — Ungoogleable. That’s not a verb, it’s a goal.
Where some dream of fame and fortune, the student master minds behind Lawrence University’s annual Great Midwest Trivia Contest aspire to writing questions to which even the smarty pants Internet can’t provide answers.
That playful push-pull to the obscure and offbeat resumes Friday, Jan. 26 for the 42nd edition of the nation’s longest-running trivia contest, a 50-hour mental marathon dedicated to the most difficult — and least important — questions imaginable.
“The term ‘trivia contest’ is, unfortunately, a hopelessly inadequate label for the kind of madness that emanates from Lawrence University every January,” said James Hall, a senior from Omaha, Neb., who is entrusted with this year’s esteemed title of Grand Trivia Master. “To call this event a trivia contest is like calling the Super Bowl a football game, or calling Elvis Presley a singer, or calling a 1961 Lafite-Rothschild a wine. While technically correct, that description captures none of the mystique, excitement or significance of the weekend.”
Or perhaps more accurately, insignificance. Mix funky music with mountains of minutia, serious sleep deprivation and first-place prizes such as a bathroom scale covered in orange shag carpeting or a big o’ bag of human hair and it becomes obvious the Lawrence trivia contest is anything but a dull weekend.
Beginning at its usual inconsequential start time of 10:00.37 p.m. Friday evening, the first of some 325 weird and wacky questions will be webcast via www.lawrence.edu/sorg/trivia to dozens of on-campus and off-campus teams near and far. Last year 11 on-campus and 62 off-campus teams squared off and hunkered down for the contest. Teams have three minutes to phone in answers worth varying degrees of point values to the WLFM studio phone bank.
Following trivia tradition, Lawrence President Jill Beck will start the insanity by asking the contest’s first question, which, also by tradition, is always the final question of the previous year.
Since its debut in 1966, Lawrence’s Great Midwest Trivia Contest has seen 12 presidents (eight in the White House, four at Lawrence). It has weathered the evolution from reference books and almanacs to the Internet world of information-at-a-computer-mouse click. And it even withstood the loss of its broadcast license (it was sold) when the campus radio station, from where the contest originates, was converted from an over-the-air medium to an all Web-based broadcast format in late 2005.
Despite the sweeping changes, the contest has remained true to its credo for more than four decades
