Trivia!

Last Saturday I was again part of the annual trivia contest to benefit the Deerfield Public Library. My own trivia team, the Flying Zupan Brothers, host it. Well, most of us. Kias and I recused ourselves from hosting process and instead played. Kias managed to rustle up a huge team this year - 20 of us. I knew Joe the Federal Marshall and his wife but didn't know the rest of the crowd from Cambridge.

Here's Dumb Donald, one of the hosts, just prior to the start of the contest. Notice the Cheeseburger in Paradise necklace that one team gave him as a bribe.



The contest consists of four rounds, each of which consists of 25 questions to be answered and five pictures of people to be identified. In addition, DJ Anderberg plays tunes during each round and teams must name the artists behind the first five songs. There's also the Cinema Nutbuster, a series of questions about a particular film that must be answered by the end of the second round. This year, the featured film was Forrest Gump. Luckily we had him on our team.



Every year the first question of the first round always has the same answer which is the name of a former Zupan. Speaking of former Zupans, I got to meet one of the originals, Chuck, who is the brother of my blue-faced drunken Finn buddy, Kias, shown here:



Kias has several siblings and Chuck was the third that I've met.

Questions varied widely from film and TV to geography, history and all points in between. There are always several questions relating to local sports figures and I always have no idea on the answers.

I am a Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher who was born in Madison, WI and won 30 games 7 times during the 1890s. Who am I?

Who is the only senior on the Wisconsin Badgers Men's 2005-2006 Basketball team?

I had no fucking clue. I memorized the name of the guy who downloaded the 1 billionth song from iTunes, the name of the song and the artist yet the question was never posed.

Here's my team preparing for the contest:



And here's an action shot:



This year there was Spotted Cow on tap so I was spared the PBR treatment. Kias hit a streak of amazing luck as, whenever he'd go to the bar to get our pitchers filled, he'd always come back saying that he got us free Cow. Someone would always leave pitchers at the bar to the bartenders just gave them to him.

Unfortunately, we didn't win but we did have a good time. We killed ourselves a few times by second guessing ourselves. We'd get the right answer and then question it as time ran out in the round. Someone would talk the talk and convince the rest of us that our initial answer was wrong and get us to change it. So we did only to find out that we fucked up. Not sure where we placed, exactly.



The Zupans will next host a trivia contest in Rio on the 25th. I don't have much info on the contest at this time, though. And don't forget the biggest trivia contest in the world up in Stevens Point. The 37th contest will take place on 7-9 April. The Zupans will be there! A documentary about the contest was filmed a couple years ago - Triviatown - and it is finally being released. It will be shown at the upcoming Wisconsin Film Fest. You can see it on 1 & 2 April.