(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Went to a trivia night last night, a reunion of camp friends. Got off to a bad start and we were playing catchup the whole way, but we put together a few strong later rounds to end up in a surprisingly strong fourth place at the end. If we hadn't tanked that initial movie round, we would've been right in the mix. I like trivia. I love turning a question around in your head again and again, looking at it from different angles, until finally you twist it the right way and it clicks for you.

We mulled this question over for a couple of minutes before I finally made sense out of it. "This 2005 movie had the tagline 'The longer you wait, the harder it gets.'" We went at this from several angles. I thought it might be one of those action movies with a gimmicky timer, the tagline representing a threat from the villain that if the heroes fail to act fast enough bad things will happen. So we ran through possibles from the era- was it a Diehard sequel? But we couldn't figure out something compelling enough. Then someone thought it might be a romantic comedy, I guess because of the pith, and we ran through a few traditional romantic comedies before I finally hit on the answer, which is incredibly obvious as soon as you hear it. That a-ha moment is everything I crave out of trivia.


Ken Jennings's book Brainiac spends a lot of time dissecting the question of what makes a good trivia question. He ultimately concludes that there are different kinds of trivia that exercise different impulses and thus appeal to different kinds of people, but one type of trivia that he particularly seems to like, and which I also enjoy, is the trivia extracted from unexpected linkages between seemingly unrelated things. And he discusses in some detail his thought process as he attempts to answer such questions, the kinds of mental leaps and intuitions his mind is rapidly making as he goes from clues to solution. Every question is a little miniature puzzle to detangle.


Today is the twenty third day of the Omer

Comments

[ambyr]

40 Year Old Virgin?

[morbane]

Apparently so! :)

[(Anonymous)]

Not sure what it says about me that I figured it out immediately, despite never having seen the film and hating the genre generally. I guess I have a mind for innuendo.

[seekingferret]

That's one theory. My real point was that this kind of trivia connection processes itself through odd and unpredictable parts of the brain. When a person tries to describe their thought process of figuring it out, there are inevitably blind leaps and intuitions that defy explanation. And I love seeing how my brain handles those things.

It's not a hard question, and I wasn't trotting it out as an example of such. I'm not surprised that some people figured it out quicker than I did. It's a question that requires an interesting intuitive leap.

My experience says that I am often better at taking such leaps that other people while doing trivia. In high school quiz bowl, I was the second best player on our team, but I was the person we turned to when we needed a wild ass guess, because my wild guesses were right more often than anyone else's. Most of my WAGs were still wrong, because they were WAGs, of course.