Blog 9/22 (Seattle appearance)

[Scarequotes]

Hey Ken -- I saw your event at Town Hall Seattle last week. Don't tell anyone, but I think they might have stacked the deck a little in favor of the home team. I'm a contributor to Seattlest, and I've got a short recap up on the site.

I'm the guy who mentioned I write trivia questions for a local pub, so appreciated that chapter. Which I still do. I hadn't yet gotten to your Stevens Point trivia chapter, which hit very close to home for me because I went to Lawrence University, also in Wisconsin, and home to the Great Midwest Trivia Contest. Which, upon reading about UWSP, doesn't sound like quite the madhouse you experienced, but for a 1200-student school, we did what we could.

And you're right -- the question-song montage was the high point of the evening.

[Ken Jennings]

Hey, I remember you. Thanks for stopping by the signing and the site.

Those are some nice hard questions on your site, btw. How do those go over?

[Scarequotes]

Attendance at our quiz has been 13+ teams since we started hosting it a few months ago. Apparently, then, the questions aren't so hard they scare people off.

On the other hand, I have a tendency to write difficult questions -- not because I want to stump people, but because I want to write interesting questions. Three of us from Seattlest* rotate the writing/hosting; my next quiz is next Tuesday, and I'm deliberately trying to make my quiz a bit easier. Ideally, to me, the top few teams would end up with scores in the 50s, not the 40s like they were that week. (Except for the superteam that won by 17 points. I'd like to avoid that kind of runaway, too.)

In sum, it's tricky to write questions that are a) interesting, b) worth asking, and c) not too hard. But you knew that.

*One of whom, Seth, interviewed you for Seattle Metropolitan. Small world, smaller city.