Last year, I wrote about the Beatles album Love, an astonishingly brilliant mash-up of Beatles songs crafted by George and Giles Martin. That album is the soundtrack to a Cirque Du Soleil show of the same name, which appears in only one place in the world: the Mirage hotel and casino in Las Vegas. Well, when I knew I would be going to Vegas, ( Read more... )

I got both a bachelor's and a master's degree in English Literature, and for quite a while there I thought I was going to become an English professor, one of those new media and popular culture types combined with a wide swath of 19th century novels and poetry. Then I watched Laura go through her Ph.D. process, and thought, "There have to be less ( Read more... )

On day 2 of TCONA, the first trivia event was scheduled at 8:30am, but it was the Quiz Bowl Seeding Test, which I co-wrote. So I wouldn't be taking it, which was all for the best, since I'd had a late night. I left my sister asleep in our room and toddled on down to the conference room around 9:45, as the test was breaking up ( Read more... )

If you tend to read what I write here, you'll know that this has been quite a trivia year for me. The most recent highlight is that I played in another pub quiz tournament with the Anti-Social Network (renamed The A-OK's for this event), i.e. the same team that won The Geek Bowl. And we won again! This time the purse was $1000. It is astonishing, ( Read more... )

I had a very fun and slightly uncanny trivia experience last week, which reminded me of one more principle I forgot to include in the trivia players advice post:

ALWAYS GUESS
Now, naturally this advice does not apply to trivia games whose format penalizes wrong answers. In Jeopardy!, for instance, I would never advise someone to guess every time, ( Read more... )

I said before that I was all out of question-writing advice. That's still true. And I did miss the Basement Bowl, which was a bummer. (Though the trip to Estes Park was very nice.) But the trivia fire is not extinguished! Far from it. I've got my tickets and hotel squared away for TCONA, and I'm midway through my rookie season in the Learned League ( Read more... )

Sad to say, I just found out I'll miss the next Basement Bowl, due to vacation. Drat! On the plus side, I'm scheming to attend the Trivia Championships of North America, a weekend-long trivia explosion scheduled for Las Vegas in July. In any case, it's time for one more installment of this series. Previous posts have focused more on the ( Read more... )

I had another great trivia day last Saturday, this time a "Clubhouse Bowl" -- just like a Basement Bowl, except held in a guy's apartment clubhouse rather than a basement. There were trivia bowl-style games along with a bunch of Jeopardy! games run on a magic Jeopardy! simulator created by one of the gang. There was even "Trivia Battleship" -- a ( Read more... )

As promised/threatened, here's another installment of "Paul's Random Thoughts About Trivia Questions." Carrying on with question-writing principles:

( BE MORE FUNNY! )

Now, it's true that I've had some trivia experience. However, I wouldn't exactly claim to be an expert on question-writing. Compared to many of the people I know from that world, I'm a raw newbie. Not only that, there are people out there in the world who actually make their living (or at least a side income) from writing questions, like for ( Read more... )