Road Apples
July 10, 2006

Life, liberty and the pursuit of trivia

By Tim Sanders

This past Monday, July 4th Eve, several of our relatives gathered with our niece and her husband at his parents’ lake house. We did all of the 4th of July things that most Americans do to celebrate the hard work and sacrifice of their founding fathers.There was grilling (no injuries), jet skiing (no injuries), pontoon boat rides (no injuries), and evening fireworks (only minor injuries). Later that night, after the children were safely in bed and the rest of us were tired and a bit silly, we divided ourselves into teams to play Trivial Pursuit. We played only one game, which lasted until the wee hours of the morning, and found that game to be much more dangerous than grilling, jet skiing, or fireworks. There were two black eyes, a concussion, and three cracked ribs by the time the game was over.

I would assume that everybody knows the rules to Trivial Pursuit, but since every time I assume something, I’m wrong, here are the basics:


1. Trivial Pursuit is a board game invented in 1982 by a couple of evil Canadian newspapermen whose purpose was to smuggle the game over the porous U.S. border and spread general mayhem across our country.

2. The object of the game is to collect plastic wedges in your team’s pie-shaped token by answering a variety of questions in categories such as "Sports and Leisure,""History," "Geography," and "Things only People with Way Too Much Time on Their Hands Would Know." These questions are listed on individual cards.

You collect your wedges while moving around a circular track on a game board. By which I mean your team’s token is moving around that game board track, not your actual team members. The movement is accomplished by rolling a die, which is half of a pair of dice. The team which collects all of its wedges and manages to move up a spoke of the track to the hub, is then ... oh, never mind. The point is, you gotta know a lot of truly meaningless information which will never, under any circumstances, do you a bit of good in real life unless you intend to become a highly paid trivia professional, or simply enjoy annoying your friends.

3. The reason it is preferable to function as a team is that a) there are usually not enough tokens to go around, and b) when you miss a question, you can always blame your teammates.

4. Each team is allowed to discuss their questions before answering them. This can lead to problems. Often other players get bored during these lengthy discussions and either go to the bathroom, or nod off at the table. So about halfway through the game, somebody usually says "HEY, WE GOTTA HAVE A TIME LIMIT HERE!!" Then that same somebody appoints himself time keeper and pays very strict attention to those seconds passing by until it is his team’s turn, at which point he’ll be too busy discussing his own team’s answer to look at his watch.

5. And speaking of time constraints, there will always be at least one very annoying player (the other night it was my wife) who insists on counting spaces in various directions on that board to determine just what the team member with the die needs to roll. That is because she actually believes she has mastered telekinesis and can will him to roll just what is needed. It also means other teams have to listen to something like this: "What do we need? We need a four–no, wait, that’s ‘Science and Nature,’ we need a five ... either a five, or a two, which would get us to ‘Roll Again.’ Go for a five ... NO, WAIT, go for a six, we don’t have a yellow wedge yet!" After this continues for a few minutes, the other players, often in unison, shout "OH LET HIM ROLL, FOR PETE’S SAKE!"

6. The owner of the game will naturally be suspected of memorizing the questions and answers in advance. Sometimes those suspicions are supported by the owner’s husband, who is not on his wife’s team, but can distinctly remember her walking into their bathroom with a roll of toilet paper under one arm and something that closely resembled that Trivial Pursuit game under the other. He also remembers her emerging after long study periods with bizarre questions like, "Hey Bill, did you know that Edison’s third incandescent light bulb used a filament made from carbonized hog bristle?"

7. There is nothing equitable about this game. Your team gets questions like "What was Kuala Lumpur’s average weekly rainfall, in millimeters, during the last three months of the year 2000?" This question is followed by a vigorous team discussion as to how a little Australian teddy bear that lives in eucalyptus trees can have an average weekly rainfall at all. That, naturally, leads somebody on your team to state, "No, wait, they said kuala lumpur, and a lumpur’s one of those little African squirrel monkeys with a long, ringed tail." A heated argument over the relative dampness of Australian teddy bears versus African squirrel monkeys goes on for several more minutes until your opponents threaten violence, so you take a chance, pick up the die, roll a "one" and agree that "snake-eye" is your final answer. In millimeters. You are wrong. It is your other team members’ fault for distracting themselves with all of that African ring-tailed squirrel monkey stuff.

Your opponents, on the other hand, get questions like: "According to the movie ‘The Three Faces of Eve,’ how many distinct personalities did the schizophrenic lead character have? (HINT: Think ‘Stooges’ and ‘Wise Men.’ Any answer between two and four will be acceptable. )" Fearing that this is a trick question, your opponents debate the answer for half an hour before finally tentatively agreeing on "three." They win a wedge for answering that stupid question, which even the cat knew the answer to. Your team, on the other hand, came within 214 millimeters of being correct about that koala lemur thing, and got absolutely no credit whatsoever for it.

As to the injuries during that Independence Day game, I was kidding. There were no cracked ribs, the purported black eyes were only slightly bloodshot, and the concussion was just thrown out there as an excuse for answering "Elton John" to the question "What queen’s Silver Jubilee was celebrated in 1977?"