Steven de Ceuster is one of Belgium’s foremost quiz gurus and a co-founder of the International Quizzing Association. He kindly agreed to be interviewed on this blog on the subject of the World Quizzing Championships, which he helps organize (well, organise), and on European quizzing in general. As you may recall, I’m fascinated with how prevalent quizzing is in European culture, and with the idea of a prestigious national quiz tournament, a Super Bowl of trivia, so I wanted to find out more about the IQA’s events.

About a thousand players took part in the last WQC, but, until now, there hasn’t been an official leg of the event here in the States. I did take the quizzes via email earlier in the summer and had a great time–though my unofficial final score out of 210 (somewhere in the 130s) would have barely made the top ten. Steven feels, as do I, that something like the WQC could really take off in the States, but the quiz types he’s talked to so far haven’t seemed interested. If you’d be interested in playing in the WQC in North America, or have ideas on how to get the word out to the right people, let me know.

Ken: You’re one of the directors of the annual World Quizzing Championships. Describe how that event functions, for someone who’s never seen an international quiz competition.

Steven: Well, I’m one of the directors of the IQA, the International Quizzing Association, of which I am co-founder. The IQA organises the World Quizzing Championships (WQC) as well as other quizzes.

The IQA was founded a couple of years ago by quiz enthusiasts from different countries and has grown over the years to include more countries. Most members of the IQA are representatives from the official quiz federation of their country, or if there is no official federation, of the biggest quiz organization of their country. Founding members were the UK, Belgium, India and Estonia, who were later joined by the Netherlands, Singapore, Malaysia, Finland, Norway, Croatia, France and Germany. People from other countries like the Philippines, Australia, Rumania, Ireland, and the USA have participated in events, but as individuals rather than official reps of their nations.

The aim of the IQA is to elevate quiz to a similar status as other mind-sports like chess and bridge. For that reason we have been working with quiz organizations from around the globe to develop and run international events. Until now 5 such events have taken place: 3 times a European Championship and twice a World Championship (plus a test event in England in 2003).

The WQC is an inidividual written quiz that is organised around the globe at the same time. In Western Europe the time is 3pm to 5pm on June 3rd (which means it will be morning in the US, evening in India, late evening in Malaysia; for countries like Australia where this would be past midnight, a difference of max 2 hours is allowed).

The quiz consists of 240 questions, to be answered in a maximum allowed time of 90 minutes. The questions are divided over 8 categories of 30 questions each, as listed below:

• Culture (comprises Fine Art, Architecture, Religion/Mythology,…)
• Entertainment (Pop Music, Classical Music, Television,…)
• Media (Film, Literature, Comics, Language…)
• History (History, Current Affairs,…)
• Sciences (Exact Sciences, Social Sciences, Flora, Fauna, …)
• World (Geography, Technology, Transport,…)
• Sports (Sports, Games, Records,…)
• Lifestyle (Food & Drink, Fashion, Tourism, Design,…)

The total score of an individual is the sum of the best 7 categories. So the worst category can be dropped (this was originally done to attract more women to the competition so they could drop ‘Sports’ and now it is part of the rules). The result on the worst category however will be taken into account in case of an ex aequo.

To assure fairness, the knowledge of English (or any other language) should not be a deciding factor. That’s why for the WQC all questions are translated to the native language of the participants. In Belgium most people get the questions in Dutch, in Finland in Finnish etc. They will all be allowed to answer in their native language too.

This format is probably very different of what you’re used to (believe me, it’s very different from what we do in Belgium normally). Obviously buzzers cannot be used for a WQC because of the distances and the language problem.

The people participating in the event are assembled into one venue to ensure there is no foul play (like working in groups, taking more than the allyoted time, using reference works or the Internet) where a country representative is present. This guy coordinates things in that country and will not participate in the quiz itself. Obviously, a big country can have multiple venues (India had 4 this year: Delhi, Pune, Bangalore and Calcutta), but in every venue there was a trustworthy person to oversee the event and send the scores.

The idea is that within 1-2 hours after the end of the event the complete scores are e-mailed to some central location (normally in the UK) where they are all processed and the results are then re-distributed to the various venues so everywhere the result can be announced.

K: Does the WQC have corporate sponsorship, and therefore prizes for winners? Does it receive media attention of any kind?

S: Well, the WQC was sponsored by Microsoft last year (more in particular MSN Search) but the amounts were limited and only used for the costs of the venues. The IQA provided a trophy for the overall winner and the national organizers provided prizes for the local winners and category winners. These trophies were stuff like Britannica Encyclopedia on DVD, books on art, history etc. and stuff like that. Not comparable (yet) to what you win on TV shows.

Media attention grows every year. In Belgium news of the WQC was picked up by most national newspapers (on average an half-page article) and was in the national evening news (a 2-minute item). Last year the European Championship gave us a 15 minute slot on prime time (9pm). In Sri Lanka there was also television coverage and in other countries it was mainly covered by radio and newspapers.

K: Is the WQC the only event of its kind, or are there other chances during the year for quiz fans to compete with players from other countries?

S: Apart from the WQC, the IQA also annually organises a European Championships (EQC). The EQC is an international face-to-face event that takes places once per year in a location somewhere in Europe.

The EQC consists of following quizzes:

• Individual EQC
• Team EQC
• Pairs EQC
• National Teams EQC

The individual, team and pairs competitions use formats that are choosen by the organizing country. The national teams EQC follows a fixed format that was devised by the IQA. After a selection round, the 4 best teams play semifinals face-to-face and finally a final.

International quizzing saw the light at the first EQC, in Bromley (London) with only 2 countries present (England and Belgium). In 2004 the event took place in Ghent (Belgium) with participation of quizzers from England, Belgium, The Netherlands, Estonia, Norway, Wales and Scotland. This event was completely filmed by Belgian television and broadcast (a summary) during prime time (9-9.30pm) on public television.

In November 2005 the event took place in Tallinn (Estonia) with quiz players representing England, Belgium, The Netherlands, Estonia, Norway, Wales, Scotland, Croatia, Finland, Rumania and Ireland.

Next event will take place in December 2006 in Paris and will also see for the first time the participation of quiz players from Germany, France and Lithuania.

People who want to quiz all the time against international competition or who want to find out the latest about international quizzing, can visit the International Quiz Forum.

K: You were also one of the question-setters at the most recent WQC. What do you aim for when designing a quiz for participants of dozens of nationalities? Is it really possible to make a quiz “culturally neutral”? Do you recall any particular challenges or troublesome questions in this regard?

S: What we aim for in the first place is a quiz that is fair for all. This is not an easy task as most questions (especially on the more cultural subjects, like literature, movies, music, but also those on sports, history and geography) somewhat favor people from some one or another cultural background.

We try to tackle this in three ways:

We acknowledge that some questions will favor some countries and other will favor others. What we try to do is have a pretty fixed split on the questions. For instance on literature: we will ensure that some questions are on English-language literature, some on French literature, some on Japanese, Russian etc. Those percentages are pretty strict. Obviously we only once every few years will have a question on, say, Finnish literature. This may seem a disadvantage for the Finns, but as they belong to a smaller cultural community they are assumed to have a bigger interest in other-language literature than someone with English as mother tongue. What we also try to ensure is that a question about a certain country is not impossible for people from other countries. For instance, television reporters can be very well known in one country, but does a guy from Sri Lanka has a chance to know them?

The other way in which we want to ensure fairness is to have it made and checked internationally. The set of 240 questions, divided over 8 different categories, is made by an international team of professional or semi-professional question setters. At the last WQC the team was comprised of one person from the UK, one from Estonia, one from India and one from Belgium. The team makes sure that every subject is represented and also that the questions are fairly spread geographically. An extra question setter from somewhere in the Americas would probably be good. The questions that were set are then sent to responsible parties in all countries who can vote what questions actually will make the quiz (we normally make 3x too many questions) and in some cases can veto questions which they deem would give an unfair advantage to any given country.

All the questions are originally set in English, but are translated to the native language of the quiz players (except in India, where because of the multitude of languages English is used as lingua franca).

Every year it’s quite an exercise to get it exactly right. We know we are never going to please everyone. But as long as the remarks that “the questions were too foreign” are equally spread over all nations, we probably are not doing too badly. Another proof is that in last year’s WQC there were 6 countries represented in the worldwide top-10 and that there were category winners (or joint-winners) from 8 different countries.

In the longlist for the last WQC there were a number of questions we had to delete because they were untranslatable. Especially questions where two or more clues are given are sometimes difficult to translate, or where one thing is derived from another. Here some questions that were vetoed:

St. Audrey died in 679AD of a throat tumor which she blamed on the vanity of wearing pretty necklaces. Thereafter silk ribbons were called St Audrey by merchants in the Middle Ages. Cheap and bright substitutes of the same appeared soon for general use. What term has entered the dictionaries as a result? (Answer: “tawdry,” from “St. Audrey.”) Untranslatable.

An imaginary creature in the children’s book If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss in a passage in the book says, “I’ll sail to Ka-troo / And bring back in it a kutch, a prelep and a proo, a nerkle, a ______ and a seersucker too.” The book was published in 1950 and was the first to use the word left out. It was earlier used to imply a dull, unattractive person though now the usage is somewhat different. The word please? (Answer: nerd.) Untranslatable.

Antelopes and gazelles rely on speed to escape from predators. However, impalas and springboks have another form of evasion. They arch their backs and leap repeatedly 10 feet up in the air, thus disconcerting the attacker. What is this evasive action called? (Answer: pronking.) Not every language has a name for this.

In greyhound racing, at the starting point dogs are restrained in stalls by leashes. These stalls have a specific name which has been borrowed by cricket for a fielding position. What name? (Answer: slips.) Deemed impossible to know for foreigners.

Sometimes the problems occur in unsuspecting places. Imagine the answer to a questions is “blue.” No problem? Wrong. In Italian there is apparently no word for the color blue. The words “celeste” (light blue) and “azzurro” (bright blue) and “blu” (dark blue) are used. So an Italian would have to know what kind of blue is meant before he could answer the question correctly, making it a bit harder. In Japanese there is no “normal” word for “sister,” only for “older sister” and for “younger sister”: same problem.

K: What’s in the future for the WQC? In its third year, it certainly seems to still be gaining in popularity.

S: Well, the WQC still seems to be expanding. For next year we’ll probably have some new countries like Denmark and Sweden but also in Africa and Asia there seem to be more countries that could join. We would also welcome some American or Canadian organizations to work with us and organize legs at various places in North America.

Apart from that we are working very hard on establishing a sponsored “final” to the WQC, which would mean flying the top players from the different countries to, for instance, the UK to have there a televised showdown. At the moment I can’t tell too many details because negotiations are ongoing, but I’ll let you know when it materializes.

(In the second half of the interview, which I’ll run tomorrow, Steven talks about the larger world of European quizzing, and attempts to answer the question I always ask myself when I look at European quiz standings: “Why Belgium?!”)

I had to be up at 7 to pre-tape an interview with an Atlanta radio station for my visit there next month. Um, if we’re pre-taping this, why am I still getting up at 7 a.m.? Anyway, after the interviews, thinking I might be confused, the deejays helpfully explained that I didn’t actually have to fly to Atlanta tonight for the signing they’d plugged on-air. Instead, the interview would be delayed a few weeks by the magic of radio! Wow, really? Thanks guys!

Despite a very tough week of questions, there were fifteen perfect scores on Tuesday Trivia VIII. I couldn’t be more impressed with Sandeep Bhatt, Jayne Boda, Benjamin DeMott, Raj Dhuwalia, Paul Freund, Mitchell Kaufman, Macrae Kennedy, Andy Kravis, Mike Leger, Steve Perry, Ron Precup, Rael007, Rob Stevenson, Travis Vitello, and Jeopardy! phenom Brian Weikle. And you may as well count Gillian Westcott, whose slightly-more-specific response to Question Seven didn’t arrive until too late for me to note it in the new mailing.

That Google-Unfriendly Question Seven asked, “What, specifically, do these classic works all have in common? James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, Dickens’ Great Expectations, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Puccini’s La Boheme and Tennessee Williams’ Period of Adjustment?” There were only 29 correct answers to this one, which even Raj said he was “very close to giving up on.” The answer: all six works begin on Christmas Eve. I, frankly, thought this question would be impossible. I’ve read three of those works and still had no memory that they were Christmas-themed. I wonder if the giveaway for many players was La Boheme, since I think Rent borrows the same begins-and-ends-on-Christmas-Eve structure. Interestingly, as with the Chinatown question a few months back, I got the idea for this question from a work that turned out not to qualify. I thought Little Women began on Christmas Eve, but re-reading the first chapter, I think it starts about a week before Christmas.

I also had some complaints about the Madden NFL question, with many players insisting that Eddie George was the famed “cover curse”’s first victim. I’ll let reader Christina Warren explain:

Beware; fanboys will undoubtedly bait you into a debate about whether or not Sanders deserves to be credited with the “Curse” because he shared the cover with JM…future curse-bearers like Michael Vick appeared alone. I worked at video game/major electronics stores for the better part of six years; sadly, I know these arguments all too well.

I should count my blessings…at least no one tried to argue the finer points of the People Sexiest Man Alive “curse” with me.

Edited to add:  I noticed some sendmail problems on my host’s server Monday night while the new trivia mailings were going out…if you didn’t get one and it’s not in your spam/bulk folder, send an email to webmaster at ken-jennings dot com where the subject line clearly indicates the problem. (“Re: Tuesday Trivia VIII (08/22/06)” doesn’t really cut it.)

I began this blog way back on June 16. If you’re old enough to remember, cast your mind back to those naive carefree days of three months ago, when snakes had not yet boarded their respective planes, Pluto was still a planet, and Lance Bass loved the ladies. Heady times, full of promise.

And, since June 16, I haven’t missed a single day of blogging, despite a cross-country move, weeks of writer’s block, and the debut of America’s Got Talent. The blog’s been like a Flintstone vitamin: it wasn’t always fresh or interesting but, dammit, it was daily.

That makes 74 consecutive days blogged–the same length as my 2004 Jeopardy! streak. Tomorrow, for the first time, the blog will be new-post-less, in silent tribute to Nancy Zerg. Nancy, wherever you are: this non-post is for you.

The daily post will be back Wednesday, and I do want to blog from the road during my book tour next month, but it’s possible that I may not be the same daily Iron Horse, so I want to prepare you for the occasional Ken-free day. It’s just possible that somewhere, somehow, someone else may be posting pointless, nerdy stuff on the Internet during those days when I can’t, so I encourage you to shop around.

I spent forty-five minutes yesterday morning sitting in a car waiting to meet up with someone who was late. I was bored. Joni Mitchell started singing “California” on my stereo. Ten minutes later, through the miracle of MP3 shuffle, I heard the first chords of Springsteen’s “Nebraska.”

And I wondered: what’s the greatest song in history that shares its name with a U.S. state? “California” and “Nebraska” are two pretty solid nominees. But what about the dull earnestness of CSN&Y’s “Ohio”? Or the simple fun of the Beach Boys’ “Hawaii”? Or Sonic Youth’s unlikely Aerosmith tribute, “New Hampshire”? Should I salute or ignore the pre-Sufjan efforts of acts like the Dambuilders and They Might Be Giants’ John Linnell to write songs about whole swaths of the Union?

I was at the point of putting the tiara on Arrested Development’s irresistible “Tennessee,” but then I remembered the sugary, strings-drenched pop bliss of the early Bee Gees hit “Massachusetts.” Hard to beat that.

So Pluto is history. At least at Disney-owned ABC News, the story includes a quote from a Disney spokesman reassuring us that Pluto the Pup has come to terms with the bad news.

I don’t see the need for all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over distraught schoolchildren, new textbooks, etc. It’s science. Stuff gets upgraded and downgraded and re-classified all the time.

So we lose Pluto, but since I left school, we’ve gained:

• An ocean. In 2000, the Southern Ocean was “created” by some outfit called the International Hydrographic Organization, making headlines for the first and last time in its history.
• A new “taste.” The receptor for umami, or “savouriness,” was discovered in 2000.
• Two or three new taxonomic kingdoms. We learned animals, plants, and protists, but now, depending on who you ask, you can add Fungi and Monera, or replace the whole bunch with Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya.
• Two food groups. Until 1992 it was fruits and veggies, meat, dairy, and grains. Now fruits and vegetables have split up (but who gets the kids? who gets tomatoes?), beans have moved in with meat, and there’s a little stripe for oils. A little tiny stripe, the government sternly reminds the fat kids.
• A Great Lake. Apparently those nutty Vermonters, after a few bong hits, tend to consider Lake Champlain the “sixth Great Lake,” but only Patrick Leahy has tried to make it official, in 1998, for the purposes of the U.S. Sea Grant Program. After much amusement, this redefinition was “clarified” away two weeks later.

So don’t hyperventilate over Pluto. Busybody bureaucrats and scientists give, and busybody bureacrats and scientists take away. Tomorrow “indigo” will be gone from ROYGBIV, or there’ll be a new Lucky Charms marshmallow, or maybe a new eighth deadly sin. All part of life’s rich pageant.

I forgot to mention it yesterday, but the Confessions of a Trivial Mind blog is now being mirrored over on Amazon.com’s Brainiac page. And when I say “mirrored” I mean “I have to ctrl-C/ctrl-V it there every morning because they don’t have the RSS stuff working properly yet.”

(If I say “properly” instead of “right” do I sound more like Neil Gaiman’s blog? “After a perfectly lovely week spent staying with friends in Glasgow, San Francisco, and Provence, I got home only to find that six of the tomatoes in the garden had ripened. So I picked them and some basil and ten minutes later had some lovely roasted-garlic bruschetta drizzled with olive oil, and had started three new short stories and an introduction to a Harlan Ellison tribute and lyrics to Stephen Merritt’s new operetta and…”)

Whoa, channeling Neil Gaiman makes me feel lazy. Enough of that.

Here are the answers to yesterday’s not-really-answerable-but-mildly-interesting quiz on the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall:

1. Will Rogers is the only honoree to die in a plane crash.
2. Astronaut Jack Swigert was portrayed by Kevin Bacon.
3. Stephen Austin has a state capital named after him. It’s Montpelier, Vermont. Little-known fact.
4. King Kamehameha I is the Hall’s only monarch.
5. Jefferson Davis is the only honoree to be indicted for treason. I wanted the question to ask which honoree served a jail sentence, but it turns out the Hall is full of ex-minor-Confederates who did time. One reason for this: a lot of the statues were donated in the early years of the 20th century, when misty, vaguely racist nostalgia for the glorious Lost Cause was at an all-time high.
6. Lew Wallace, the Indianan Civil War hero who wrote Ben-Hur, is the only honoree to have written a best-selling novel.
7. Roger Sherman of Connecticut signed both the Declaration and the Constitution (and so did seven other men, but none of them have been Statuaried).
8. Jacques Marquette (a Wisconsin statue) was born in France.
9. John C. Calhoun is the only Hall denizen to resign as vice president. (Duh, Spiro Agnew is not one of Maryland’s nominees.)
10. Sacagawea died younger than anyone else in the Hall (around 25, historians guess).

I also learned that the respelling of the “Sacajawea” of my youth isn’t just an annoying Khadafy/Qaddafi thing. It’s actually a hard ‘G’ and we’ve just been saying it wrong all this time. In the Hall, she’s actually “Sakakawea.”

Reader Matthew Fogarty, who used to give Capitol tours while interning there, wrote in to say:

There’s a ton of great trivia in the Capitol. For example, here are a couple questions:

• While several Presidents and high-ranking officials have “lain in state” in the rotunda, only three Americans have “lain in honor”. Name them.
• While you’re at it, what’s the difference between laying in state and in honor?
• What is the catafalque, where is it kept when not in use, and what was originally intended to be “stored” there?
• John Gadsby Chapman made a mistake in his famous painting, The Baptism of Pocahontas, which hangs in the rotunda. What was the mistake?

I also used to give tours of the White House, which is another home full of useless knowledge. For example:

• Who started the ritual of playing “Hail to the Chief” when the President enters the room, and why?

Answers below.

• Rosa Parks and Jacob Chestnut and John Gibson (the two officers slain in the 1998 shooting incident). Incidentally, Chestnut was the first African-American to lie in honor.
• A military color guard watches over those who lie in state.
• The catafalque is the casket that holds the bodies of those who lie in state or honor. It is normally kept in a tomb below the crypt that was originally intended to inter the remains of George and Martha Washington. The Washington family had the remains moved to Mount Vernon.
• One of the Indians has six toes.
• Sarah Polk, wife of James K. He was so short that, when he entered a room, no one would notice.

Maybe Matthew can confirm a story we heard during our White House tour. (Our guides–actually a U.S. senator and his wife–couldn’t have been nicer. They had done the tour eleventy zillion times and knew when to prod the guards to give us all the trivia.) I think we were told that there are only two White House portraits that aren’t of Presidents or their families. (As I recall, Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King.) True?

And we were sworn to secrecy, so I can’t reveal which Statuary Hall statue is actually the honoree himself, turned to stone by the basilisk who lives in the Masonic Chamber of Secrets beneath the Capitol!

Oh, all right. It’s William Jennings Bryan. Shhhh.

Last time I was in D.C., I got a tour of the Capitol. (I actually got to go out on the floor of the Senate only because the pages, who had a Jeopardy! desk calendar on their desk, recognized me. I think it was the only time minor Z-list celebrity has ever got me “in” anywhere… never tried whipping out my game show credentials to get a table at a crowded restaurant or backstage at a concert.)

As I browsed the sculptures in National Statuary Hall, I realized that I was looking at an untapped gold mine of trivia. National Statuary Hall (and the surrounding chambers) hold a collection of 100 statues donated by the states–each state gets to choose two prominent citizens to immortalize at the Capitol. If we’re asking trivia questions about Oscar winners, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and state quarters, why not National Statuary Hall?

So I wrote a little quiz on the denizens of National Statuary Hall. (Who all come to life at night, by the way. Henry Clay and Father Damien play bridge against Philo T. Farnsworth and Ethan Allen.) It’s sort of a hard quiz because, let’s face it, who knows who the statues are in Statuary Hall? They’re an eclectic bunch. As you might expect, the nominated Idahoans aren’t quite as well-known as the selections that were available to, say, Virginia or Massachusetts. And, possibly because they were selected decades ago, some of the selections are head-scratchingly bizarre. (Sure, Illinois, why nominate Abe Lincoln when you could have temperance movement battle-axe Frances Willard? Why should Pennsylvania send yet another Ben Franklin statue when Revolutionary War major general John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg is crying out for recognition?) But you can guess at some of the honorees, even if you’ve never seen the statues.

Here’s the quiz. If you need a hint, the honoree’s state follows each question in hard-to-read white type; highlight to read. Who’s the only person in National Statuary Hall…

• Who died in a plane crash? Oklahoma
• To have been played on-screen by Kevin Bacon? Colorado
• With a state capital named after him? Texas
• To be a hereditary monarch? Hawaii
• To be indicted for treason? Mississippi
• To write a best-selling novel? Indiana
• Who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? Connecticut
• Born in France? Wisconsin
• To resign as vice-president? South Carolina
• To die in their twenties? North Dakota

Answers tomorrow.

The Mountain Goats have a new album out. I’ve been a fan of the Goats (just one guy, really: North Carolina-based indie troubadour John Darnielle) for a couple years, on the strength of two searing, literate albums my brother Nathan introduced me to: 2002’s Tallahassee and 2005’s The Sunset Tree.

Dylan likes those records a lot too. “No Children,” Tallahassee’s bitter centerpiece about a failing marriage, is a particular favorite when it’s on in the car. It’s a little disturbing when Dylan asks to hear it, since he doesn’t know the proper title. “Can you play ‘I-hope-you-die-I-hope-we-both-die’?” Parents of the Year, right here!

For some reason, when Darnielle’s not singing falsetto, his warm, nasal tenor reminds me a lot of Kermit the Frog. So he’ll be singing about addiction, divorce, abuse, and heartbreak, and you keep thinking he’s going to break into “The Rainbow Connection” at any time.

So the night of the album release, Darnielle was doing an in-store here in town at Easy Street Records, and I’d never heard him live. Besides, in-stores are great for the not-getting-any-younger music fan. The band comes on when they say they’re going to, you don’t have to sit through three sucky openers, nobody smokes or drinks, the set wraps up in 45 minutes and you can get to bed on time, possibly with a signed CD. So I went. (Mindy wanted to go until she found it was at 11 p.m. Mindy is the not-getting-any-younger-or-any-less-pregnant music fan.)

It was a good show. Darnielle was playing a lot of the new album, Get Lonely, live for the very first time, which was exciting. Especially the song where he didn’t know all the chords to the bridge.

But I told you all that so I could tell you this: after one song (I think it was “Song for Lonely Giants,” but I’m not some crazy fanboy who went and stole the setlist after the show) a girl in the crowd yelled to the stage that it reminded her of The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. (Darnielle is a chatty, witty stage presence and likes to talk between songs.) Having just blogged about Calvino, I perked up my ears, in the desperate, reflexive manner of the content-starved daily blogger. This could be a blog post.

“I’ve never read Calvino,” he said. “But I keep meaning to.” And started strumming the next song.

So there’s your scoop: John Darnielle hasn’t read Italo Calvino. Alert the media. I blogged about it anyway.

I haven’t reviewed all the numbers, but when over half the respondents get the Un-Google-able Seventh Question right, and almost a quarter answer every question correctly, then I know it was an easy Tuesday Trivia week.

I knew that this week’s seventh question didn’t require the usual mental contortions. It straightforwardly asked, “What do these people have in common: Jose Canseco, Patrick Ewing, Kelsey Grammer, Alexander Hamilton, the Empress Josephine, Camille Pissarro, and Sidney Poitier?”

I was so entranced by what I thought was the cool part of the question (that unlikely names like Alexander Hamilton, Josephine, Pissarro, and Kelsey Grammer! were Caribbean natives) that I didn’t fact-check one of the names on the list. Poitier’s from the Bahamas, right? He was even their ambassador to Japan for a while. No problem.

Well, yes and no. Poitier’s family was from Cat Island, but he was born two months premature while his parents were visiting Miami. Not only does this bode badly for my book tour next month (Mindy’s due in mid-November!) but it royally screwed up the trivia question. Many players saw that I’d made a mistake; others tried heroic contortions to make the Caribbean answer fit. (“All were born or raised in the West Indies,” etc.) My favorite was the two people who said the connection was “Parents of the Caribbean.”

So my apologies if that threw anyone off. I also admire the two players who said the answer must be “shots”…Canseco’s steroid shots, Ewing’s jump shots, Hamilton’s duel shot, etc. Very creative. My favorite answer: “They all had a baseball bounce off their heads for a home run, except the last six.”

I’d be surprised if Question Seven was as easy this week, but you people always surprise me…

I think there’s a general impression that Trivia People are not always Big-Picture People–that is, that knowing all the 2-letter words in Scrabble or the names of all the Bad News Bears doesn’t necessarily correlate with more meaningful measures of intelligence. I go into this a bit in Brainiac. (Whose cover you may have noticed is now splashed all over the site. It’s hard out here for a pimp.)

We had our friends Nephi and Gina (or, as I like to call them, Gφ) staying with us over the weekend. For some reason, we were talking about books we remembered from the Scholastic book fairs of our childhood, and Nephi mentioned James Marshall’s hippo protagonists George and Martha.

“I always had a theory that they were named after George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” I said, feeling very clever indeed.

Nephi looked at me sort of funny. “Oh, I always assumed they were named after our first President and his wife.”

Long silence. Somehow it had never occurred to me that the James Marshall hippos and the Edward Albee boozers were both named after, oh, just the most famous married couple in American history. Something that many five-year-old George and Martha readers probably grasp immediately.

So chalk one up for the Cliff Clavin side of the “trivia acumen vs. intelligence” argument. (I also thought the expression “You’ve got another think coming” was “You’ve got another thing coming” until just a couple years ago, but maybe I should save that for another post.)

One of my favorite novels is Invisible Cities, by the late Italo Calvino. (Note to self: check for other novels that have the same initials as their authors.) It’s a novel of ideas, in the best sense of the phrase…except that it’s not really a novel. It’s a series of vignettes–tanatalizing descriptions of fantastic, imagined cities drawn from a travelogue/dialogue between Marco Polo and Kubla Khan. Marco’s Invisible Cities aren’t triumphs of municipal planning, but they are triumphs of imagination. Zirma, the redundant city, where every element is repeated dozens of times in hopes that travelers will remember it. Valdrada, the mirror-city, constantly aware of its own reflection in the lake below. Leonia, the endlessly renewed city, reborn fresh every morning.

Invisible Cities is a beloved world classic. But until last week, I’d never even heard of Calvino’s The Memoirs of Casanova, its unfinished sequel. In Memoirs, Marco Polo has been replaced with another Venetian, the famous lover Casanova. And the structure is identical to Invisible Cities, but instead of listing fantastic, ephemeral, half-remembered cities, the narrator catalogs fantastic, ephemeral, half-remembered romances with women. Tullia, who pretended there had been no twenty-year gap in their romance. Irma, constantly at war with the memory of another woman she resembles. Sofia, about whom Casanova knew so many details that he found he knew nothing about her at all.

The approach might seem over-familiar to a fan of Invisible Cities, but it’s always exciting to discover a sequel you never heard of to something you loved. Sadly, Calvino never produced a novel’s worth of Casanova vignettes. Like so much of the writing he did late in life, Casanova petered out before it became a book, and the five finished vignettes, about six women, are only available in Numbers in the Dark (in Italian, Before You Say “Hello”), a recent volume of Calvino’s previously uncollected short fiction. Maybe someone should write a novel in which Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges sit on a veranda somewhere, trading concepts for fantastic, ephemeral, half-remembered stories they wanted to write to but never did…

Two observations from going to the movies last night (neither of which are actually about the movie, Who Killed the Electric Car?, which is great).

First. There was a recruiting ad for the National Guard before the movie started. The ad started with a title that said something like, “For over 370 years, the National Guard has been there.”

It took me a second to blink at that, but blink I did. For 370 years? I assume math isn’t the U.S. military’s strongest point, but are they really trying to imply that the National Guard was founded in the 1630s? Wouldn’t the U.S. National Guard have to be, you know, not 150 years older than the U.S.?

A bit of on-line research suggests that the ad was referring to December 13, 1636, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony first organized its militia into regiments. Maybe I’m missing something, but that seems a little arbitrary to me. Is there any real sense in which the National Guard of today has descended, in unbroken lineage, from Pilgrims? This seems a little like dating the founding of the Florida Marlins back to Abner Doubleday and the Civil War.

Second. Have you ever seen this poster in a theater lobby? It’s always disturbed me:

Click on the thumbnail if you’re not familiar with the poster. The same grins that seemed youthful and innocent on the G- and PG-rated moviegoers turn, in an excellent demonstration of the Kuleshov effect, into vacant leers by the time you get down to NC-17. Actually, all of the R and NC-17 moviegoers creep me out in some way. Why is that single mom naively bringing her be-sweatered intellectual pre-teen to an R-rated movie? The Squid and the Whale might be educational, but probably not in the same way she’s thinking. The same couple who took their kid to Curious George in the first panel apparently gets a sitter when they go back the next night to spice up their marriage with some tasteful European softcore. But this time accompanied by that pervy loner in the ski jacket. Gee, why not just draw a trenchcoat on the guy?

But mostly I’m upset by the rabbit. He’s happy to be at a G-rated movie, and needs to have his eyes covered during some of the naughtier PG-13 goings-on. Then he’s not there for the R. He’s definitely a minor, right? But wait…in the bottom panel, he’s back for the NC-17 showing! He apparently snuck in wearing sunglasses. That’s a great lesson for the kids–thanks, MPAA!

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that one of mathematics’ seven most important unsolvable problems had been cracked…and by a reclusive Rasputin-looking Russian mathematician who may not even want the million-dollar prize! Personally, I think the bearded, crotchety “Grisha Perelman” is a hoax invented by a cabal of mathematicians trying to make math look interesting, by flogging the tired old mad-scientist stereotype a little more. They’re sick of all the young people thinking mathematicians are going to be cute, sensitive Will Hunting types. All the shrieking girls when you get out of the limo at math conferences…that has to wear on you after a while.

I don’t pretend to know much about the Poincaré Conjecture–or indeed, about any higher math–but I did get some of the flavor of long-unsolved math conjectures when I read John Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession, about the Riemann Hypothesis, earlier this year. The Times makes Perelman’s proof sound like an elegant and unexpected one, so maybe it’s not a brute-force computer proof of the kind that cracked the four-color map theorem in 1976.

On the other hand, the Times points out that Fields Medals have twice been awarded for recent progress toward a Poincaré solution (in 1960 for a proof in five dimensions and in 1983 for a proof in four) so maybe this was thought to be one of the more “potentially solvable” of the Millennium Prize problems. It’s not as if p-versus-np was suddenly proved last night. Hey, do any math types out there have any sense of the expected “order of difficulty” of the seven (or six!) Millennium Prize problems? I think there should be Vegas odds. “I just put $200 on Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer over Navier-Stokes at Harrah’s.” “Oh yeah? What was the spread?”

In the mail yesterday: four hot-off-the-presses hardcovers of Brainiac! (Just like the advance proof, but with Meredith Vieira’s last name spelled right and real page numbers replacing the “000″s throughout.) My editor (and currently very-respectably-61st-ranked Tuesday Trivia player) says that they just had to go back to press to meet demand, which has to be a good thing, considering the pub date is still a month away.

So I suddenly feel like an author! Maybe most authors, when they get their first copies of their very first published book, feel like John Updike or Philip Roth or something. There must be something wrong with me then, because, upon opening the package and seeing the shiny dust jackets, my first thought was, “This is just like George McFly opening his package of A Match Made in Space at the end of Back to the Future!”

I’m a little late with the hot magazine-cover news again, having been in L.A. when my copy arrived, but the new Entertainment Weekly Fall Movie Preview, with new 007 Daniel Craig on the cover, has an amazing gimmick inside: five very funny imagined Entertainment Weekly covers, retroactively celebrating the debuts of the last five Bond actors.

The covers all have sly little period jokes. Some of them are if-we-knew-then! winks, sort of like the terrible scene in Tucker where some courtroom extra guffaws something like, “The Germans and Japanese, build our cars one day? Haw haw! That’ll be the day!” Some of the references are just funny because they take place in a parallel universe where EW was around in time to celebrate Maude and The Love Bug.

But–take note, trivia buffs–the chronology doesn’t quite check out on a few of the covers. The biggest goof is the Timothy Dalton cover, dated July 31, 1987, which includes the headline “Computer Special: How E-mail Jokes are ‘Forwarding’ the Future of Comedy.” You kids today with your text messaging and your Black Cherry Fresca probably can’t imagine a time before e-mail, but e-mail was not a mass-culture item yet when I got my first account in late 1992. In 1987, according to Wikipedia, even the White House had only had e-mail for less than a year. Surely the ubiquitous e-mailing of hilarious “You Might Be a Redneck” lists didn’t begin until almost a decade after Entertainment Weekly’s date, right?

Have you seen the existential-horror Garfield strips from Halloween 1989 that are being passed around? The first time I saw them, I thought they were fake, so I’ve attached the official links from garfield.com so you’ll be convinced. (On another note, all the strips posted there are in color! Pity the poor Jim Davis sweatshop peons who spent weeks recoloring decades’ worth of s#!%ty Garfield comics for that on-line archive.)

Monday, October 23
Tuesday, October 24
Wednesday, October 25
Thursday, October 26
Friday, October 27
Saturday, October 28

I just love the WTF moment provided by these strips. If you’re like me, you’re not really used to anything at all happening in Garfield. Ha ha, Garfield doesn’t want to get out of bed. Good one, Jim Davis’s staff of ghost artists. But in these strips, Garfield is suddenly thrust into a Kafkaesque nightmare! “You have no idea how alone you are, Garfield!” Sure, it still sucks. But it sucks in a different way!

Lots of Internet theories have sprung up about these strips. Has every Garfield since October 1989 just been Garfield’s hunger-crazed delusion? Is he dead? Why did Jon abandon him? Pretty much every crazy theory you ever had about Lost now applies to Garfield.

Jim Davis apparently explains the strips away as just as a Halloween whim, but I’m not buying it.

I guess there should be some trivia link to this post. Okay, Bill Murray and Lorenzo Music, who voiced Garfield in the movies and on TV, respectively, have played the same character before. Music was the Saturday-morning-cartoon voice of Murray’s Dr. Peter Venkman when Ghostbusters became The Real Ghostbusters. Until the bastards replaced him with Dave Coulier! Cut – it – out! So I guess Lorenzo Music is the made-for-TV version of Bill Murray.

That’s Noah Cross threatening “Mr. Gitts” in Chinatown, but he could just as easily have been talking about the final question in last week’s Tuesday Trivia.

I asked, “What unusual distinction is shared by these eight movies, listed in chronological order? Be specific; I won’t prompt on partial answers. The movies: Five Graves to Cairo, Brighton Rock, The Third Man, Stalag 17, Chinatown, Quiz Show, Othello, A Civil Action.”

Of our 300+ respondents, almost one in six realized that the each of those movies has a distinguished director in a key role. The directors–none of whom also directed the movie they were acting in, by the way–are Erich Von Stroheim, Richard Attenborough, Orson Welles, Otto Preminger, John Huston, Martin Scorsese, Kenneth Branagh, and Sydney Pollack. As directors go, these are pretty big guns. All have notable careers and an Oscar or at least a nomination on their résumés.

It seems like a pretty good answer, but I want some of these Patented Un-Google-able Seventh Questions to really strain the brains of even our sharpest players, so I warned them to “be specific.” And only eight players went the extra mile and realized that it’s the villain in each movie who’s played by a well-known director. So that was the answer. Famous directors as heavies. Congratulations to Eric Berman, Sandeep Bhatt, Joshua Davey, Raj Dhuwalia, Robert K S, Rosemarie Keenan, Brian Rostron, and Steve Rutta, the only players to figure this out. Raj now leads, once again, the overall standings, since Ney Rios was one of the close-but-no-cigar #7 answerers. Note that Robert K S now has five correct Question Sevens to his name, more than anyone but Raj.

I love that some of the screen’s creepiest villains (Harry Lime, Noah Cross, Rommel, Pinkie Brown, etc.) were played by directors, but I’m not quite happy with the question as I wrote it. For one thing, Branagh and Attenborough had longer careers as actors than directors. I might as well have listed Blue Velvet on the strength of Easy Rider, or Apocalypse Now because of One-Eyed Jacks. (Actually, Brando played the “heavy” in everything he did after about 1968! Thank you, tip your waitress.) Anybody have better suggestions for directors-as-villains movies?

An update to yesterday’s post: some forum posters reminded me of William Hurt in A History in Violence, and someone even floated the suggestion that Robert Mitchum’s Oscar nom for Story of G. I. Joe should count as the first ever comic-book movie to get an acting nod.

And an update to the book tour schedule: notice the new Portland event, the new Chicago lunch event (open to the public, if they clean up a little), and the L.A. schedule rearranged a little to add a library signing in Cerritos. It’s official: I won’t see my eight-months-pregnant wife for six weeks! What a husband.

It’s been a week and a half since our last odd-movie-connection post, and I’m getting a little twitchy.  So here we go.

Two movie performers hold three unusual Academy Award-related distinctions.

1. They are two of only four performers to be nominated twice for playing the same character.
2. They both won Oscars that were widely considered to be “make-up” awards for past omissions.
3. They are the only two performers ever to be nominated for roles in a comics-based movie

Who are the performers and what are all the films involved?  (If I’m wrong about #3 being unique, I’d like to know, but I spent a few minutes poking around and couldn’t find a third.)  Our message boards are here.

I found out last night that I’m officially allowed to say that I was in L.A. for the last couple of days to appear on the premiere episode of 1 vs. 100, a new NBC prime-time quiz show to air in the fall.

What I don’t know–and apparently NBC lawyers are being consulted here–is if I’m allowed to say anything else about the show. If you’ve ever read a standard game/reality show appearance agreement, you know they overreach astoundingly. The non-disclosure clause in the 1 vs. 100 agreement essentially says that I’m not allowed to say anything about the show, including its mechanics or outcomes, ever. Not just until it broadcasts, but ever. Jeopardy! gave me a similar contract for the Ultimate Tournament of Champions, and I asked them to rewrite it to something more workable. Otherwise I’d be violating it even today every time I told my wife about my alarming little man-crush on Brad Rutter.

So if and when I get the go-ahead from NBC I can tell you about fourteen enchanting hours I spent yesterday listening to Bob Saget make fart jokes. (Actually, he was great.)

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I was poking around on the Web today trying to figure out why Douglas Hofstadter’s new book, I Am a Strange Loop, has slipped its Amazon-listed pub date by two weeks. (This is his follow-up, more than 25 years later, to the Pulitzer-winning Godel, Escher, Bach. It looks like it’s been pushed back until next year.) An Amazon commenter was reminded of an idea from Hofstadter’s Scientific American column Metamagical Themas:

I would love to see a book consisting of nothing but a collection of reviews of it that appeared (after its publication, of course) in major newspapers and magazines. It sounds paradoxical, but it could be arranged with a lot of planning and hard work. First, a group of major journals would all have to agree to run reviews of the book by the various contributors to the book. Then all the reviewers would begin writing. But they would have to mail off their various drafts to all the other reviewers very regularly so that all the reviews could evolve together, and thus eventually reach a stable state of a kind known in physics as a “Hartree-Fock self-consistent solution.” Then the book could be published, after which its reviews would come out in their respective journals, as per arrangement.

This reminded me of a reality show I would love to see. The contestants on this show would not be competing for a record contract or a job with the Donald. They would compete to see who would host the next season’s version of that very same show!

It would take the whole hollow, self-referential reality show ethos to a brand new level. Consider: on each show the contestants would have to demonstrate their skill at running future contestants through that very skill-testing demonstration for the next crop of contestants, and so on infinitely down. It would need a good recursive Hofstadterian title, though, like

Who Will be the Next Host of

Who Will be the Next Host of

Who Will be

Bob Saget

rules

ok

!

!k

!k

!

Four reasons to stop by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on a Friday night:

1. The free jazz concerts on the plaza.
2. The permanent collection is free after six, thanks to their program called something like Would You Philistines Even Go See Art If It Were Absolutely Free Sponsored by Target. It’s eerily deserted in there at night. You can walk through four or five galleries at a time without seeing another soul. It’s the closest you can come to after-hours Basil E. Frankweileresque privacy without becoming a gentleman art thief.
3. The David Hockney portrait exhibit going on through September 4. I’d never seen any of his delicate crayon drawings and they’re amazing.
4. It’s the only major American museum with a tar pit next door.*

*If you are a woolly mammoth, disregard 4. If you are a woolly mammoth who doesn’t like David Hockney, disregard 3 and 4.

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I’ve been thinking a little about yesterday’s blog post, about the new TSA no-liquid guidelines. Yesterday at SeaTac, I was sitting next to some “Cookie Lee” ladies. (I think this is some kind of MLM for cheap jewelry, but I’m not sure.) They had just spent three to four hours (!) in security lines, but that’s not what they were complaining about. Instead, they were clucking sadly at the full tubes of pricey Clinique lotion that they’d seen in the airport dumpsters, along with the Dasani, Chapstick, Colgate, and other verboten items.

Business travelers on short jaunts make up a huge segment of America’s air travelers. And, say what you will about these tireless “road warriors” and their hollow, empty lives, you have to admit: they sure know how to fly. These guys hate to check baggage, so all their vital toiletries were always carried on–and now you can’t do that anymore. Millions more Americans are going to be buying travel-sized deodorant and hair gel and toothpaste in hotel gift shops. So who benefits? Follow the money.

I’m not saying an international consortium of cosmetics, hair care, and toiletries companies is necessarily behind the latest terrorism scare. But can you prove they aren’t?

Here’s a can’t-miss business idea for the New Normal: the return of tooth powder! Even when we’re at threat level Orange, you can brush your teeth on the road in comfort with the old-timey dentifrice so beloved of cackling, toothless prospectors. For example, I don’t think anyone buys Pepsodent anymore, so maybe it’s time for Pepsodent to re-invent themselves as America’s patriotic tooth powder of choice. “You’ll wonder where Threat Level: Yellow went, / When you brush your teeth with Pepsodent!”

Just a quick note from a Los Angeles-area hotel to point out that I’ve posted book tour dates for September and October here. If you’d like to come say hi when I’m near you, mark your calendar. There may still be late-breaking additions or corrections, so keep an eye out. I really wish I could visit everywhere, but this is already a pretty full plate, thanks to the fine folks at Random House.

(Actually, that’s a bit of a lie. After the condition-orange fun of flying today, I’m not really looking forward to this grueling Presidential-primaries-style schedule at all. Except for meeting people at the stores. That should be cool. Until the carpal tunnel kicks in. Also, I probably won’t be allowed to fly with toothpaste, so my breath will be terrible.)

The security lines at Sea-Tac (and other airports, I assume) are apparently stretching out into the parking garage, so I need to leave for the airport, like, now, as opposed to three hours from now, as I would on a normal day. *Sigh*. (I pronounce that with the asterisks, like Charlie Brown.)

I loved the news story yesterday on Ellen Burstyn getting an Emmy nomination for a 14-second performance. This, of course, is being taken as a sign that the new Lost-snubbing Emmy nomination procedure is deeply screwed up. My favorite part of the story is that the nominations were announced almost a month ago! So few people care about the Miniseries and Movies categories that it took over three weeks for anyone to notice this. How many more weeks before the press catches on to those weird nominations for “Captain Kirk but when he’s a loyer (sic)”, “the Bear in the Big Blue House”, and “that hot Latina weather lady on Channel Six”?

It’s often said that Beatrice Straight holds the Oscar record for brevity, since she won an Academy Award for a six-minute, single-scene performance in 1976’s Network. Sylvia Miles is usually called the nomination record-holder, since she was nominated for only five minutes or so in Midnight Cowboy. The real shocker is Anthony Hopkins, since some sources have his Oscar-winning Best Actor performance in The Silence of the Lambs clocking in at only 14 minutes.

Fourteen minutes?! Is that even possible? Poking around on-line, I found vastly varying times for all these so-called “records.” Some sources have Judi Dench’s scenes as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love as shorter than Beatrice Straight’s in Network, for instance. The numbers go five minutes or more either way.

I think I know why: how do you count? Is Anthony Hopkins “on-screen” during Jodie Foster’s close-ups in the famous jail scene, for example? I mean, obviously he’s not, but should he get credit for that time? You may hear his voice in many of those shots. What if the shot is of Clarice-ss-ss-ss but Lecter’s reflected in the glass? I’m having a hard time believing that the “14 minutes” number includes, for example, the whole escape scene, where Hopkins is almost never visible yet always present.

Somebody get a stopwatch and find out. (By the way, the 60 Minutes stopwatch got a Supporting Actor nom for its 15 weekly seconds of screen time and single line of dialogue: “Tk tk tk tk tk.” The new nomination system has got to go.)

Nine Tuesday Trivia players have contacted the site to say they didn’t get this week’s quiz. I was puzzled, until I saw that all nine had Hotmail addresses.

So Hotmail is apparently either bouncing some of our quiz e-mails or marking them as spam. If you didn’t receive this week’s quiz, do two things: first, add webmaster (at) ken-jennings (dot) com to your address book. Then, email that address and request a replacement quiz.

(Then, get a Gmail account!)

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I wanted to take a second to recommend Brick, since it came out on DVD yesterday, and I’m guessing a lot of people missed it in theaters.Rian Johnson’s debut film takes a pretty standard film noir/detective story and–ingeniously–places it in a modern-day high school setting. Third Rock’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the quiet teen outsider who turns gumshoe when an ex-girlfriend goes missing.

What’s great about the movie is how well all the standard noir tropes end up working in a high school setting. The confusing mysteries of social strata and shifting identity. The picaresque stream of self-consciously kooky characters. The stylized, almost impenetrably slangy speech patterns. The casual violence and small-time crime. The copious free time of the up-at-all-hours protagonists. The powerless-but-surly authority figures. In fact, you watch the movie and you realize, there’s no other setting but high school where most of this stuff would be plausible.

In fact, Brick makes a pretty good case that all noir is adolescent fantasy, now that I think about it.

A record six-thousand-and-change players took part in last week’s Tuesday Trivia quiz; about three hundred sent in replies so we could ogle their scores here. (That’s about typical, by the way; since the beginning, 95% of our solvers have preferred the don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach to trivia. I can’t really blame them. Would you rather yell Jeopardy! answers at the TV from your couch, or play in the studio? What if there were no cash or prizes? That’s what I thought.)

Sixteen players answered all seven questions, and seven of our winners were first-time players. A special shout-out to Bobby Goldstein, whose name was inadvertently left off the winners’ list in this week’s mailing. The other fifteen: Ellen Choate, Hugh Davis, Benjamin DeMott, Mitchell Kaufman, Mike Leger, Diane Linthicum, Gregory Narver, Rael 007, Ney Rios, Christiane Rodes, Sdcmm1, Colin Smith, Travis Vitello, Amanda Wallwin, and S K Williams. Ney Rios’s perfect score creates another tie at the top of the standings, because his nemesis Raj Dhuwalia didn’t know the Nelly Furtado question.

The Uber-Tough Question Number Seven was actually one of the most-answered questions last week, as I’d predicted. One hundred eight players managed to figure out what Charles Lindbergh, Mel Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Jerry Stiller, and Shakespeare had in common: they were married to women named Anne. So the Anne-swer to the question, the famous two-time member of the club, was Henry VIII, who beheaded Anne Boleyn in 1536 and annuled his marriage to Canadian chanteuse Anne Murray in 1540. We managed to trip up a few players by including Ronald Reagan on the Anne list, but many knew that Nancy Davis Reagan was born Anne Francis Robbins.

The “Alabama” clue in question 4 proved to be a pretty good tipoff that the famous vehicle in question was the Montgomery city bus on which Rosa Parks made history. What amazed me was the dozens of respondents who confidently answered “the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile” for that question. I’m mystified. Why, of all the famous vehicles in the world, the Wienermobile in particular? I’m guessing this is the first time in history the Rosa Parks bus has been so widely confused with the Wienermobile. How would the civil rights movement have been different if Rosa had been riding the Wienermobile home from work on that fateful day? We may never know.

Someone tells me that the NPR quiz show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! just re-broadcast a segment that they taped in Salt Lake City back in February. I assume there weren’t a whole lot of Utah-based quasi-celebrities, and that’s why I got the nod to be the celebrity guest on “Not My Job,” where accomplished people are asked trivia questions about subjects comically outside their field.

If you’re not a Wait Wait listener, they have, like, six years of shows fully archived on their website, so go take a gander. The actual quizzes and scorekeeping on the show are no more important than on Whose Line Is It Anyway?…they’re just an excuse for comedians and commentators to riff on the week’s news.

If you are a fan of the show, definitely try to see it in person. Host Peter Sagal gives the panelists free rein to yuk it up, and only the very bonnest of the bon mots make the air. In Salt Lake City, I think almost an hour of material was cut before broadcast. And the cast is happy to sit around and gab with the audience afterward. So if you’re a Roy Blount, Jr., stalker, bring your creepy scrapbook and your copy of Catcher in the Rye. Everyone was incredibly quick and funny and friendly in person–they put the PR back in NPR. (It was Adam Felber, Mo Rocca, and Paula Poundstone my week, which is A-list Wait Wait. Before the show, I thought Paula was being a little aloof, but then I saw the stack of newspapers–she was frantically cramming for the quizzes. Afterwards, she was warm and chatty.)

Also, I found out from Peter Sagal that he was a Jeopardy! runner-up himself, back in the late 1980s. (His game does not appear to be in the J-Archive.)

But what I realized on the show that night (besides the fact that Mo Rocca gives lectures sponsored by AXE body spray) is that there’s more to quiz success than knowledge or speed. There’s an element of strategy and games-person-ship too. In other words, if you don’t know the answer to the question, taking a moment to think about what you do know about the question will often produce the right answer.

Because, you see, trivia questions aren’t chosen randomly from an old World Book by blindfolded Oompa-Loompas (except, interestingly, on 1970s daytime game show $ale of the Century). Nope, someone has to actually sit down and write trivia, and that introduces a human element into the question. Now the Jeopardy! gameboard isn’t an impersonal monolith looming over your bed, like at the end of 2001. Now you know there’s a person, a pyschology, inside there to figure out.

So you can bring to bear a whole host of meta-knowledge about the question and its author. Which answers might be too easy or too hard here? Which answers would be clever and question-worthy and which would be dull? Which offer a clever twist? Is the question specifically worded to highlight or obscure any giveaway material? And so on.

On Wait Wait, there’s even more psychologizing available to the player, because the questions are usually (a) multiple-choice and (b) funny. Now you have a person at a desk trying to surround one odd-but-true answer with, essentially, two stand-up comedy jokes. He wants his lies to blend in with the real fact, but it’s hard. So now you’re not just a trivia psychologist, you’re also a literary critic. You’re scouring the “text” like a biblical scholar trying to figure out which Old Testament chapter was written by Isaiah and which two were written by “Deutero-Isaiah.”

Since the “Not My Job” gag is to come up with comically incongruous subjects for the guest, my three multiple-choice questions were on casual sex, NASCAR, and People’s Sexiest Man Alive. (Get it? Because I’m Mormon, smart, and, um, apparently not sexy.) I had to get two out of three to win the nominal “prize” (NPR newsman Carl Kasell’s voice on some home listener’s answering machine!)
The first question:

Okay, Jeopardy!’s Ken Jennings. Let’s say you wake up in bed naked with someone whose name you don’t remember. According to the authors of the Worst Case Scenario books, what would be the best strategy?

a. Immediately get up, run to the bathroom, and start rummaging through the medicine cabinet looking for prescriptions with a name on them.

b. Get up, pretend to trip and fall and hit your head, and feign short-term memory loss.

c. Just be honest and admit it, because chances are he/she doesn’t remember your name either.

I didn’t remember this particular “Worst Case Scenario” (though–fun fact!–those books are co-written by the son of Dylan’s pediatrician!) so I tried to figure out the question from another angle. (Be the question writer. Be the question writer.) A actually seems sort of clever and workable. B sounds like a joke, and an implausible one at that. C also sounds sensible, but it’s not much of a payoff–that is, seeing that advice in a book wouldn’t really give a Wait Wait writer that moment of “Aha! This would be a great question!” So I guessed A, with no knowledge. Correct! I’m one for one.

NASCAR was founded 53 years ago, but didn’t seize race fans’ interest until the next year, when NASCAR president Bill France Sr. revisited the idea of racing true stock cars–that is, cars unmodified from the showroom floor. This innovation led to a number of interesting developments like which of these?

a. Drivers renting a car in the morning, racing it in the afternoon, and returning it in the evening.

b. One driver who won at Daytona in 1950 in his family car with his one-year-old son still asleep in the back.

c. A rule handed down by NASCAR officials saying the price had to be wiped off the windshield before the car could be raced.

Again, the breakdown is similar. A seems funny but plausible, the kind of anecdote you might hear an old-timer telling on a sports talk show. B seems over-the-top in the same way that B did above. It sounds like a punchline. C is–again–all right, but not terrible compelling. I guessed A again, and what do you know? Two for two.

The final question–moot for the home listener, who had already won the prize, but which I really wanted to answer as a point of pride. Not too many “Not My Job” guests go three-for-three.

According to Radar magazine, if People magazine approaches you with an offer to name you the Sexiest Man Alive, what should you do?

a. Accept, but only on the condition that they pretend you wouldn’t agree to an interview. It makes you look like you’re above that sort of thing.

b. Decline, because of the famous and feared “Sexiest Man Alive curse.”

c. Decline all coverage of you and wait until you can triumph over a disease, because those stories create much, much better buzz.

I don’t know anything the tone of Radar magazine, so I have no clue. Here, it really could be the sensible A or the snarky C. Luckily, in this case, I had heard of a Sexiest Man Alive curse before, and was pretty confident in guessing B. Psychology is nice, but knowledge trumps it every time.

So you can bluff and puzzle your way through quite a bit of trivia you don’t know. Good Jeopardy! players are making educated guesses a lot of the time–maybe one in three or four questions, if they’re gamers. On Millionaire, where the questions are multiple-choice, there are similar skills at play (though Millionaire doesn’t have to be funny like Wait Wait, so the wrong answers often blend in with the right one really well). All of this is very lucky for Matt Daisley of Salt Lake City, who now has Carl Kasell’s voice on his home answering machine, thanks to (mostly) sheer guesswork.

While skipping church a month ago, I had an great Sunday mixtape idea, which I blogged about here. (To sum up: pop songs with “Jesus” or similar in the title that were actually (a) about Jesus, and (b) vaguely respectful toward Him.) “If somebody actually makes this, send me one,” I concluded.

My request zoomed through the series of tubes that is the Internet, finally emerging in the homes of Minnesota’s own Andrew Anthony and Jory Bowers, who took the request in a somewhat more serious manner than had been intended. Yesterday their completed mix showed up in my mailbox (labelled Now That’s What I Call Jesus!) and now I’m listening to Tom Waits croak “Jesus Gonna Be Here.” Thanks Andrew and Jory!

Speaking of Tom Waits, IMDb says that Tom Waits and Lyle Lovett were originally cast as the cowboy singers eventually played by Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly in A Prairie Home Companion (which we saw last night). Tom and Lyle would have been ugly, but good. They look alike. And the guitar work would have been a lot better.

I’ve heard from a couple people who actually believed the thing a couple days ago about James K. Polk being a crazy absinthe drinker. Um, no. That was a joke. I’m dreading Monday’s inevitable New York Post story. “Jeopardy! Nerd Whigs Out, Pokes Polk!”

And we now introduce what I hope will become a regular feature on Ken-Jennings.com: Today’s Bewildering Conversation with a Three-Year-Old.

Me: Dylan, you’re going to run into something. Why are you wearing that hat over your face?
Dylan: I’m a grinder soldier.
Me: What does a grinder soldier do?
Dylan: That means I eat crime.
Me: You eat crime? What does crime taste like?
Dylan: Oranges.

It’s true, my only son can’t pass a Turing test.

I believe it was The Quiz Blogger who pointed me to the India Quiz Time website. Take a few minutes and try last year’s Maha!Quizzer championship quiz. Could you have been India’s top quizzer of 2006? What if you had to stop the quiz every few minutes to break into song, as their Bollywood-inspired rules stipulate? Just kidding.

I took a quick swing through the questions, expecting a strong emphasis on Hindu myth, cricket, Bollywood, etc., but it’s actually a fairly international quiz. By my count, just one in every six questions is India-only. I scored 67 out of 150 possible, which doesn’t quite make me the nerdiest guy in Bangalore (last year’s winner scored 75) but if you gave me a fighting shot at the India questions, I might have been close.

And now I’m hungry for lamb saag and maybe some tandoori.

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My brief wistfulness over the Sleater-Kinney retrospective I linked to yesterday was nothing compared to the way I felt a couple hours later when I heard that Arthur Lee had died of leukemia. I didn’t discover his 1960s band, Love, until just a year or two ago, but Lee’s obits make it sound like he was that great rock archetype: the remarkable talent squandered too young.

I have Forever Changes, Love’s landmark third album, playing right now, and its title is oddly accurate: almost forty years later, it hasn’t aged a day, which makes it practically unique among late-60s psychedelia. (I’m second to no one in my love for the Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle, for example, but play it today and set the wayback machine for 1968, Sherman.) It’s not that the album sounds decades-ahead-of-its-time in a Velvet Underground way. It’s that the broad musical swath it cuts–jazz, folk, classical strings, Spanish guitar and horns–sounds just as un-1967 now as it probably did in 1967. Forever Changes ends with Arthur Lee repeating “time, time, time, time, time…” but it’s an album completely unmoored from time.

Last week, fully 6% of our traffic came from www.kenjennings.com. This Ken Jennings is a Florida computer programmer with a pretty minimal all-text website, but he owned all the good kenjennings.* domains and wasn’t selling. (On the bright side, he did also refuse to sell to some guy trying to set up some “Ken Jennings Sucks!” squatter site back in 2004.) Hence the irritating hyphen in Ken-Jennings.com.

A couple months ago, Ken II was kind enough to put a link to this blog at the very top of his site (considering how rarely his site is updated, I assume people looking for “the other Ken Jennings” make up a big chunk of his traffic) and all was well. But I just navigated accidentally to his site and the Ken-Jennings.com link is now way down on the page. Now you have to scroll through a huge plug for trailing-badly, recently-subpoenaed Florida Senatorial candidate Katherine Harris before you get there. Sigh. No wonder everyone thinks I was serious with that “effete, left-coast” thing.

My brother is always making fun of the clueless music coverage in Slate, but I think this voice-of-a-generation elegy to Sleater-Kinney is pretty good.

Reader Eric Williams recently sent me a suggestion for a new movie-connection game, since we have somehow become the Internet’s clearinghouse for Goofy Movie Connection Games. Eric writes:

Hey, since you’re a fan of pop-culture puzzlers, a few years ago at a video store, I overheard a customer asking if they had Eraserhead. The clerk checked their inventory, told him they didn’t stock Eraserhead…but they did have Eraser! It occurred to me that, if one rented Ahnold’s Eraser and the Monkees’ Head, that Eraser/Head double-feature might be nearly as disorienting as watching Eraserhead.

Are there other such combinations, he asks? He suggested another good double-feature: Collateral/Damage. I’ve been thinking about it for a couple days, and I think it’s a pretty rare distinction. I came up with a few, but I had to use some pretty lousy movies to do so:

• Red / Heat
• Bugsy / Malone
• Ghost / Dad
• The Rose / Tattoo
• M / Alice (clever? cheating? both?)

Are there any others? If you realize that video stores also stock TV shows, that broadens the possibilities a bit. (Lost/In America, Blue/CHiPs, etc.) Remember, the two titles must mesh perfectly. You can’t combine Tarzan and Manhattan to make Tarzan in Manhattan; you’re missing an “in.” You can’t combine The Paper and The Chase to make The Paper Chase because of that pesky extra “The.”

After blogging about The Ultimate Alphabet last week, I shot an e-mail to its author, Mike Wilks, asking if he’d mind being interviewed briefly for the site. I was confident I’d never hear back from him. (You know these sensitive artist types.)

Instead, he responded immediately to my questions. Some of the responses were a bit sketchy–”Forgive me if my answers seem incomplete but this was all twenty years ago!” he apologized–but there were still some interesting tidbits in his replies. Wilks had already discussed his painting techniques and artistic aims in introductions to The Ultimate Alphabet and The Annotated Ultimate Alphabet, so I focused more on the book’s puzzle elements than its aesthetic ones.

So here you go: A Brief Interview with Mike Wilks.

Ken: How did the Ultimate Alphabet contest come about? Was it always integral to your concept of the book, or was it a sales gimmick dreamed up after the fact by the publisher?

Mike Wilks: The idea of a contest was mine and in from the start. The publisher liked this idea and commissioned the book on the strength of it. It seems a natural and created interest in an otherwise “difficult” book for an author to sell. Everyone involved hoped it would go on to become an “evergreen” title and remain in print for a long time.

K: The book was quite successful, especially in Britain. What about the contest? Do you know how many entries were actually received?

MW: I can’t quote the exact number of entries. I do remember that one week before the closing date the publisher had received less than 100 entries and on each successive day until the contest finished the mail deliveries got larger with several bulging mailbags arriving on the final day.

K: Do you know who won and/or how many of the advertised 7,777 words they found?

MW: Again, I can’t recall who won. Interestingly the winner was the one who identified the least number of false words. I think there was some scoring system where an incorrectly identified word attracted a minus penalty. I seem to remember that the contest was expanded with the paperback edition to include extra prizes for a younger age group.

K: This book must have been a research nightmare. Do you recall any of the specific books that you found most useful for finding definitions and visual reference?

MW: I remember reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Shorter Oxford Dictionary (two volumes), Webster’s Dictionary and an Australian dictionary to represent the breadth of English worldwide. This provided me with my long-list of words for possible inclusion. Subsequently I consulted hundreds of specialist books to research the appearance of the items. Inevitably the final choice of words reflected how interesting they would be for me to paint. The criterion was always artistic rather than inclusiveness.

K: Are there any hidden items in the book that you’re particularly proud of, ones that you though were especially devious and designed to trip up solvers?

MW: My favourite is that I built up the dots representing the Braille letters with acrylic medium. A blind person can actually identify these with their fingertips. Naturally, you can’t tell this from the printed image. Another amusing story is that my spelling has always been on the creative side. In the painting for the letter ‘H’ I wrote my name (phonetically) in Hindi and, of course, misspelt it.

K: To facilitate the original contest, the book came with a 12,000-word workbook. Did you personally choose the workbook’s 4,000+ “incorrect” words as well?

MW: The words in the workbook included all of the things I actually depicted. The false words were selected from those words in my long-list that I didn’t get around to including.

K: In 1986, as a teenager, I never got very far at solving the contest. Recently, with the help of the Internet, I took another stab at it. I had a lot of fun, but found that I would have been quickly disqualified from the contest for all the “false positives” I thought I had found…solving each painting involved a surprising amount of tricky judgment calls and semantic hair-splitting. (Does a cannon and stack of cannonballs truly count as an “arsenal”? Should the secondary definition of “aureole” count or not? Et cetera.) Was this intentional? Did it lead to problems in judging the contest?

MW: In fact, contestants found even more words than those I consciously put in. I published a revised edition in 1992 that recognised this. I suspect that there are even more words.

K: Do you have a personal favorite among the book’s 26 paintings, and why that one?

MW: Several of the paintings are more successful than others. From an artistic point of view I like the letter ‘P’ – the perspective was done the hard way. (Note: ‘P’ is on the book’s cover, above.) From a sense of achievement point of view , the letter ‘S’.

K: The Ultimate Alphabet looks to be out-of-print in both the US and the UK at the moment, judging by Amazon.com. Is this in fact the case? Are there any plans to bring the book back into print?

MW: Sadly, all of my picture books are out of print. I have long wanted to issue a digitally updated edition with, for instance, up to date flags of nations. Also, computers barely existed in the everyday world in 1982 when I began the paintings. I would love to include such recent items in a new version. However, there is no enthusiasm in the publishing world of today for this kind of book as they are costly to publish and a lot more bother than the staple diet of today’s lists.

K: Since Ultimate Alphabet, you’ve also written and painted two follow-up books. Are there any other puzzle books in the pipeline among your future projects?

MW: My “Ultimate Trilogy” comprised The Ultimate Alphabet, The Ultimate Noah’s Ark and The Ultimate Spot-the-Difference Book. Because of the economic climate in publishing and because creating, originating and printing such books are so costly, it is unlikely there will be any more. I think the economics would preclude similar books by other authors too.

Recently my career has taken a new and intriguing direction. Last year I submitted a partial fantasy novel. To my surprise and delight no less than seven houses were interested in it and it went to a publishing auction. The winning publisher commissioned the book and another two in a three-book deal. The first will be published in 2007 with the others following in subsequent years. I have been told that I have achieved with words what I had hitherto with pictures. I hope others think so too. In an ideal world any success will revive interest in my back-catalogue.

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So there you have it. The day of the lushly painted puzzle book is apparently over, but look for Mike’s (so far untitled, as far as I can tell from his website) first fantasy novel next year. And I’d like to thank him for taking the time to answer these questions.

Some things:

The Quiz Blogger e-mailed me, asking that I clarify Monday’s blog entry. He wanted me to reassure everyone that, despite my EastEnders jokes, his next 501-question quiz, “The Colossus,” will be genuinely international, and that he may have even overcompensated away from Brit topics. So I urge anyone who wants to see how they stack up against a veritable United Nations of quizzers to head on over to TQB’s blog and sign up for the Colossus. (If you’re especially hungry, try the Double Colossus With Cheese.)

Edited to add: To sign up for the Colossus, e-mail thecolossusquiz (at) gmail (dot) com.

I was answering questions for a Random House press kit yesterday, and all was going smoothly until I hit the last one. “What are your five favorite trivia factoids?” That one took me about two hours, no lie. The problem is that any trivia fact, no matter how great, loses some of its lustre when you trumpet how wonderful it is. “‘James K. Polk was actually an absinthe drinker who once drunkenly declared statehood for his own sideburns’? Well…I don’t know…it’s pretty good, but…is it really Top Five?” Plus, you want them to be things nobody has heard before (it wouldn’t be good to be left unsurprised by the Top Five Trivia Facts Ever!) which ups the ante considerably. I’m still not happy with my answers, so feel free to suggest alternates.

Quote of the week: “So they’re like The Rock and Kid Rock?” –Mindy, helpfully, as I was introducing Dylan to comic book super-hero the Flash and his sidekick Kid Flash.

I thought last week’s Tuesday Trivia was pretty damn hard. Before writing it, I would have gone 5/7, answering “Betsy Ross” for the stamp question and “Moscow” for the northernmost Olympics question. But ten players scored full points: Lorin Burte, Raj Dhuwalia, Tom Hannigan, Robert K S, Andy Kravis, Bonnie Mitchell, Steve Perry, Rael007, Brian Rostron, and Jonathan Wilson. Well done! That perfect score lifts Raj into the overall lead (his archenemy, Ney Rios, knew the Uber-Tough Seventh Question but had “macaw” instead of “dodo” for question 2). Raj and Ney, along with Jeremy Horwitz, are the only players to have answered all four Question Sevens so far (Robert K S has three).

Last week’s Question Seven asked what ten TV shows–Brotherhood, Dynasty, Eight is Enough, Family Ties, Hawaii Five-O, Judging Amy, Matlock, Medium, One Day at a Time, and The Practice–had in common. Many, many players responded that all were based on actual people, but I think that’s truer of, say, Medium, than it is of Dynasty. No, all ten shows are unusual in that they’re set in U.S. state capitals (Providence, Denver, Sacramento, Columbus, Honolulu, Hartford, Atlanta, Phoenix, Indianapolis, and Boston, respectively). I thought I had pretty much exhausted the list of state capitals with their own TV shows (Carson City? Montpelier? Anyone?) until someone pointed out that I’d missed Salt Lake’s own Big Love. Oops!

I thought that was pretty obscure, but 24 respondents came up with the right answer. I think this week’s quiz is a lot easier, and Question Seven is no exception. (It was a last-minute replacement for a question about people with airports named after them, which I couldn’t make un-Google-able no matter what I did.) So enjoy the slightly easier quiz. Think of it as a soft landing for our post-Trebektrongate influx of five thousand new players. There goes the neighborhood!