Knowing the Meaningless

(From the Janesville Messenger, 3-16-08)

I can remember a lot of useless information.
For example, I can tell you that William the Conqueror and the Normans defeated the Saxons in 1066 in the Battle of Hastings, an event captured on the Bayeux Tapestry.
I cannot tell you what I had for lunch yesterday.
I can remember that Packers coach Dan Devine broke his leg during his first game with the team, a 42-40 loss to the Giants in 1971. I can’t remember why I just went down to the basement.
I can’t remember why I just went down to the basement.
It seems a ridiculous dichotomy, being able to remember trivial details but unable to recall what a co-worker said to you ten minutes ago. When I’m in a particularly paranoid mood, I wonder whether it’s the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s Disease. When I’m not, I theorize that I just have a lot more on my mind these days than I used to. Perhaps my brain is full, and like Professor Dumbledore in the "Harry Potter" series, I need my own pensieve - an external storage receptacle for memories – so I can unclutter my mind.
Regardless, it is this pseudo-Rain Man quality that led to my participation in the Janesville Literacy Council’s recent trivia contest fundraiser. I was asked to join the Lab Safety Supply team, led by their human resources director Tim Markus. (Tim and I share a guilty pleasure for really, really bad songs from the 1970’s, but that’s a topic for another column. In the meantime, don’t get us started on the merits of the group Paper Lace.)
Being asked to join their team was an honor, since last year they had taken second place in this event, losing out to a scholarly group from Blackhawk Technical College. The mission this year...revenge.
Twenty teams participated in this year’s trivia contest. Some wore matching clothing or, in the case of a team from Sanford Business-to-Business, gigantic hats. Many had cute team names. Our highly original name? Team LSS. Hey, we’re serious about our trivia.
The format of the contest consists of three rounds. In each of the first two, you are given a sheet with 100 questions and a time limit in which to complete it. After the first two rounds, the top two scoring teams go head-to-head in a game-show-style format to determine the champion.
For the first two rounds, our team saved time by doing the sheets assembly-line style, dividing the questions among the four of us so we were each working on 25 simultaneously. When we were all finished, we checked answers, discussed and put a final hand-in sheet together before time was up.
Coming in to a team with such a formidable group of trivia players, my main goal was to contribute. As it turned out, we were a pretty well-matched team. Several times, only one of us knew the answer to a question that stumped the other three.
The first round questions ranged from ones I considered pretty easy (“Who painted the ‘Mona Lisa’”?) to the interesting (“Quien es el rey de Espana?”) to the challenging (“In what biological genus would you find the Yorkshire Terrier, the Silverbacked Jackal and the Grey Wolf?”). Besides the type of questions you might find in Trivial Pursuit, there were several Wisconsin history questions and even some Janesville questions (“In what profession was Janesville’s Henry Tallman trained?”).
We ended the first round with 85 correct, putting us in third place behind our arch nemesis BTC (87) and another bunch of academics from UW-Rock County (88). We kicked ourselves a little because there were a couple of questions we clunked that we thought we should have known.
But still, we felt confident going into round two, where the questions were more difficult and the points for each correct answer doubled. Confidence, alas, was not enough.
Though our 76 correct in round two was enough to pass BTC, UW-Rock County bagged a jaw-dropping 91 out of 100 questions. We were denied a spot in the top two when a group from Mercy Clinic South leaped ahead of us with an impressive 86. So we had to be content to take our third-place finish and watch Mercy and UW-Rock County duke it out on stage.
In retrospect, it turned out to be a good thing we didn’t have to go up there. UW-Rock County spanked the team from Mercy. The match was never close, and I shudder to think how we might have fared against the mighty educators. To use an overused idiom, UW-Rock County was a well-oiled machine, firing on all cylinders and obliterating anything in its path.
So our challenge is clear. We will need to start a rugged training regimen of lifting books and taking HBH (human brain hormones). And as Chicago Cubs managers have been saying for the past 100 years, “Wait ‘til next year.”