July 23, 2011

The rock-star curse of 27

I don't have much to add about Amy Winehouse–I was not a particular fan, though damn, that girl had some pipes. Also, "Rehab" was a stand-by of my absolute favorite BQT audio round, "Slooow Songs." The chorus of the song, played at half speed and completely hilarious: I must have used that in a couple thousand BQT private quizzes, last Thursday among them.

In the BQT's history, I've asked only one verbal question relating to Ms. Winehouse—"What name does Amy Winehouse have tattooed above her left breast?
"—which is nothing to write home about. But in the crush of Winehousian coverage the past few hours, I've stumbled upon this fact: She was 27 years old. The same age as a startling number of rock & roll legends at their own deaths. Such as…

Shocking how young he was; I always found his music to have a certain aged wisdom to it. Plus, he was kind of a good guitarist.

Janis Joplin
Never a favorite of mine, but her story is a potently sad one.

Jim Morrison
I'm sorry, but the Doors were awful, and Morrison's mushy-headed pretension was a major factor. He is the most overrated figure in the history of rock & roll (or was; the cult seems to have tapered off). If he had lived, he'd be selling insurance or something now. (Oh, come on, you didn't know him personally.)

Kurt Cobain
"Voice of his generation" is such a cliché, but I think it fit for him. I didn't appreciate Nirvana till after he died, I'm sorry to say, but his perspective is still with us.

Brian Jones
Original guitarist for the Rolling Stones; the archetype of a proper bad-boy rock star, in that he loved sex (had six kids) and drugs (that's what killed him), but the music was of primal importance.

Robert Johnson
A near-mythic figure in the early days of American blues; supposedly sold his soul to the devil to gain his talent. Why no one has made a movie about this guy is beyond me.

Pete Ham
Frontman of Badfinger, who gave us more than a couple of wonderful songs in the '70s. "Baby Blue" absolutely wrecks me every time.

Chris Bell
Best known as one of the founders of Big Star, though he didn't stick around for long. His solo hit (well, among power-pop aficionados), "I Am the Cosmos," is pure magic.

D. Boon
Leader of the Minutemen; not my favorite postpunkers, but a truly unique band. Also, anytime you want to piss off a hipster rock geek, tell them Double Nickels on the Dime sucks.

Wikipedia has a nerdily comprehensive list, of course. So why 27? What is it about that age? Is that the year when the hard living of popular music catches up with the hardest-living? Let's discuss. In the meantime, pray for your favorite early-twenties rock star.

July 19, 2011

Game show chronicles: Name That Video

Someone recently asked me, you know, since I'm such a game-show guy, had I been on a lot of TV game shows. "Not a lot," I said. Which is true…technically. Because while I have physically appeared on a mere two TV game shows, I have experienced close encounters with several more. The tale of the tape:

—I was on Name That Video, a short-lived VH1 show
—I was someone's Phone-a-Friend on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
—I made it to a callback for Don't Forget the Lyrics
—I was nearly on Cash Cab (interesting story, that)
—And oh yeah, I lost on Jeopardy!, baby

So while "not a lot" is true, it's a fairly misleading answer, at least compared with the experiences of 99.999% of all human beings who have ever lived.

And because these are stories I'm asked about with some extreme degree of frequency, starting today, I'm going to chronicle them in this space, one by one. Starting with…


It's early 2001, and the Big Quiz Thing is a dim future dream buried deep behind my current ambition, stand-up comedy. I was working hard at it—performing sets multiple times a week, for no pay, though I had a fair amount of…eh, let's say potential, if not empirical talent. I was also working full-time at a day job, for a website that was a hybrid publishing magazine/bookstore and very ambitiously planned on taking away 10 percent of Amazon.com's sales. Basically, the kind of thing that would have no business existing in the world of two years later.

Much of the stand-up comedy life involves hanging around with other comics, waiting for your set, politely checking out the competition, fishing for praise after a successful set. You run out of things to talk about, so you talk trivia, and I imagine I became better admired in the NYC-comedian community for my impressive stash of trivial knowledge than for my stand-up ability. I was particularly adept at music trivia, having spent most of my life as a grade-A rock nerd. My book of Billboard Top 40 statistics was shredded from overreading by the time I finished high school; I'd moved to NYC specifically to be a music critic. Even earlier, as a rather unique seven-year-old, I would wander from room to room on Sunday mornings, trying to get good reception of American Top 40 on my radio-only Walkman. Once I could master the technology, I set the VCR every Friday night and would spend the next morning in my pajamas watching Friday Night Videos (we didn't get MTV in my town). Remember this?



I always wondered about the appropriateness of the firing-squad imagery. What's the idea there? Music videos would set you free? Gary Gilmore is an idol to teenagers? Video abolished the radio capital-punishment star?

So one night on the stand-up scene, a certain comic—whose name you just may be familiar with—told me of an opportunity: VH1 was working on a new game show, Name That Video, and they were desperate for good contestants. He himself had aced it—he won a car!—and he passed along an e-mail address. A week later, I skipped out of the day job for a few hours to sit in a TV production room and watch and identify videos, as part of the audition. The only one that even remotely stumped me (though I ended up guessing right):



"We'll let you know in the next couple weeks," the contestant coordinator told me. "In the meantime, the show debuts tomorrow—you should watch it!"

And I did. Many times (it was on, like, four times a day). Round 1 was your typical three-people-with-buzzers shebang, but kicked out as a a big multimedia quiz on music-video-related trivia. Round 2 pitted the top players from Round 1 head-to-head in a classic, bullshit-drama-milking "Name That Tune" format ("I can name that video in three seconds…"). Round 3 was the lone survivor, tasked to name the ten videos on the screen in 60 seconds; he gets $500 for each one correct. Get all ten, it's a Toyota Forerunner SUV and every disc in VH1's recent list of the 100 Greatest Albums of All Time. Back when CDs were still awesome.

So I watched the show several times. Reliably, in the final round, playing along at home, I aced about eight of the videos, and was clueless on two others (I recall a Savage Garden number that completely escaped my memory). "All right," I thought. "If I make it to the final, I'll take home $4,000. Not bad for an afternoon."

But as I waited for the call, my life changed. The following happened to me in a 48-hour period: (a) my girlfriend of six months dumped me (she was also my neighbor; that was fun); (b) one of my closest friends had a nervous breakdown and talked my ear off on the phone for three hours at a time, before suddenly picking up and leaving NYC; (c) I was laid off from my dot-com job. The noble website experiment was failing, it was time for the first round of layoffs, and they figured they could do without me. (The only copy editor. On a website about reading and publishing. Yeah.)

Immediately after I got the (c) news, one of my bosses took me out for a drink. Commiserating was in full swing (he knew his job was next on the chopping block) when my phone rang: "Hey, it's Sarah from VH1! You wanna be on Name That Video?"

"Sure," I said. Money! (Though if I came in third place, I think I would take home a VH1 beach towel.)

"Can you come to the studio on Tuesday at 1pm?" Of course—as of today, I had nothing better to do on a Tuesday afternoon.

Despite my relative confidence/excitement about this event, I didn't mention it to anyone, and I don't exactly recall why. Fear of failure? (Perhaps; that fear would have served me a little better during my later Jeopardy! experience.) It didn't seem necessary. I got up that morning, ate some cereal, waited till 12:15 and rode the subway to the midtown studio.

My opponents were a fellow male nerd and a personality-free young woman (neither of whom had followed the instruction to bring two changes of clothing, so when we were all wearing black, I was the one who had to change out of my preferred lucky shirt. So I followed the rules, and I'm the one who had to accommodate others: this is why I hate the world). The bulk of the game was rather unremarkable; I discovered that being able to name videos was a lot less important than being able to identify songs. For example, in Round 2, I had two seconds to name this video:



Which I had no memory of having ever seen before. But I'd heard the song, oh, a couple billion times, and two seconds of its distinctive guitar strains were all I needed. I could've done it blindfolded, honestly.

So indeed, I made it to the finals. Why don't you watch for yourself? (We used this clip at a BQT edition several years ago—players had to name the videos I named. Fun, right?)



Man, I was a young punk. Also, that hostess was kind of not my favorite person. She was really cold and distant to me before the round, then was my best buddy once I won. (We're celebrating our tenth anniversary next month.)

It was a truly surreal experience, in that despite whatever confidence I felt for my skills, in reality, I was not at all expecting to win. Emotionally, I was completely unprepared, and the mixture of surprise and delight was potent. I personally find that few things in life really, truly, unambiguously feel good—nearly every positive feeling or victory is attended to by some degree of regret, some slight misgiving. But hot damn, this felt nothing but good.

Twenty minutes later, I left the studio and found myself walking back toward the 1 train, back home. I'd just won a car, on TV, but I had nowhere to be, no one to see, nothing on my agenda. I got home, called a couple friends, called my parents (who finally began to believe that maybe they didn't throw all their money away letting me study pop culture in college). And I started living in my new jobless, womanless, but victory-full new reality.
So what about the car? Well, I lived (and still live) in Manhattan, so fuck knows what I'd do with an SUV. But the dealer (in Jersey City) offered to buy it back from me for $23,000. The car's blue-book value was $34,000, and for $11k, I figured I should get to take it for a weekend or something, but no dice. This is the dark secret they don't tell you about TV game shows: You have to somehow deal with that crazy crap you win. (No room in your apartment for a dinette set, Price Is Right champion? Tough shit.) They also don't tell you, but you can guess, that Uncle Sam gets his piece—my accountant told me about some special form for "sweepstakes winnings." All told, I cleared about $20,000. Good enough.

I tried to use the experience to make hay on the stand-up circuit; I figured the money meant I didn't need to freak out about finding a new day job, I could hustle the odd freelance gig and focus on comedy for a while. Meanwhile, simply the notoriety of having won a car on a VH1 show was good for a few impressed noticings and bookings, though that didn't last long. There's no guarantee that the musical polymath is actually funny, you know. (I was reminded of this recently, when I ran into a comedian I knew from those days who had clearly never found me amusing. He told me he thought it was great I was still doing the Big Quiz Thing—"It's so good to see someone do something that's so perfect for them." Actually, I rather liked the compliment.)

And oh yeah, the CDs: Two months later, I received a big, dented cardboard box full of 100 compact discs, still covered in price tags from the Virgin Megastore. Half the jewel cases were cracked, and the intern (I'd imagine) who picked them out gave me the soundtrack to the short-lived Saturday Night Fever Broadway musical soundtrack, rather than the kazillion-selling movie soundtrack. I sold that one and a few others (sorry, I cannot stomach Madonna's Like a Prayer) and gave away ones I already owned to friends, but I kept most, even ones I wasn't particularly interested in listening to. These were widely considered some of the greatest albums of all time, so it could only help me to build up my library. I was preparing for some kind of trivial-knowledge revolution in my life, and it was only a couple years away.

July 18, 2011

The pros and cons of multiple-choice questions

So tell me: The multiple-choice question format is (a) a perfectly fine tool in the quizmaster's arsenal, or (b) a regrettable but handy structure for certain quiz games and questions that demand it, or (c) totally lame and a sign of a waste of quizzing time. You wonder why almost all smartphone trivia apps suck? It's because technology hasn't advanced to the level where you can properly answer a real question on a tiny phone. (Plus, they remind me of standardized tests.)

My answer used to be (c), but lately, I'm not so sure. If you're familiar with the Big Quiz Thing, you may know that I very occasionally utilize the multiple-choice format for my questions. There was an example at our most recent quiz spectacular, to wit: "What’s greater: (a) the number of billions in Mayor Bloomberg’s net worth, or (b) the number of Americans richer than he is?" I dug this question: It took an interesting but basic fact (Bloomberg is crazy rich) and made something more creative out of it than just "How crazy rich is he?"
Some people really like multiple choice; on the surface, it seems to make questions easier, and the challenge-averse are legion. But as a general rule, I very rarely use it. In fact, I've long considered myself to have a bias against multiple choice. Some reasons:

They take too long to ask. An ideal question is an economic one. That's not a hard-and-fast rule, but basically, the more you have to say to ask the question, the worse off you are. Listing the correct answer and two or three others has the habit of slowing the whole process down to a crawl.

They're very easy to mess up. An unseasoned trivia writer often falls into uniquely regrettable traps when working in multiple choice (unlike the pitfalls that a seasoned quiz writer falls into). One thing that particular chaps my hide is stupid multiple-choice questions that flat-out give away the correct answer. I can't find the example, but I once read an explicitly labeled "food and drink" quiz, with a question that included four possible answers: (a) and (c) had nothing to do with food or drink, and (d) was clearly a joke answer. Um…which ever one could it possibly be?

They're less fun. The whole mental journey of getting from question to answer, of discovering the correct response, seems less interesting and enjoyable when your options are so clearly narrowed down. If the question is figureoutable, in some respects, it's already been figured out for you. Or, if you're confident of the answer and proud of your own knowledge, you may feel cheated that you don't have the opportunity to pluck it from your mental foam without any extra assistance. Which leads me to the most important point…

Multiple-choice questions give away the answer. Really. Not that they necessarily tell you which answer is correct (though see that food-and-drink example above), but they do indeed state the answer right off the bat. Even if it's among other, incorrect ones, it's been put out there, so there's no real "a-ha!" surprise moment of interest when the quizmaster reveals which response is the right one, let alone when you manage to figure it out on your own. Multiple choice sucks some of that juicy drama from a great quiz game.
But recently, my thinking has changed a bit. Not long ago, I was hired for a quiz writing/consulting job, and the client asked me to provide 50 trivia questions. No problem; I sent them some of my best. To which I got an e-mailed reply (paraphrasing):

"Oops, sorry! Maybe I forgot to tell you, but I needed multiple choice questions!" (Actually, reviewing my notes, I was told this, but several months earlier when we'd first made contact, and neither party had reiterated the point in subsequent discussions. So blame is shared.)

Being the awesome quiz problem-solver I am, I was able to modify most of the questions to accommodate the format, no sweat. But part of me kept thinking they'd ultimately be happier if we'd left them as is, multiple-choice-free. In modifying them, I felt like more than a few of the questions lost some of their zip.

However, as I entered the next phase of this particular project (sorry, have to be vague on details; I signed a nondisclosure agreement), I realized that I was wrong: For this particular project (an excellent one, I might add), multiple choice was likely the way to go, or at the very least, a valid avenue well worth pursuing. And I started seeing the particular advantages, such as:
Sometimes slowing things down is good. What TV game show comes to mind when you think of multiple-choice trivia? Right, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? And that show is all about slowing things down, to extend the nail-biting drama. Sure, like the rest of the world, I'm completely sick of that damn show by now, but man, no denying that back in '99, that was some of the most compelling TV out there.

Sometimes easier is better. The best question is easily recalibrated for different levels of difficulty. Often, multiple choice is the way to do that: When taking a trip into new territory, it helps to have a map, even if it's a rough one. Yet at the same time…

They introduce a unique element of challenge. A canny multiple-choice question might give you two (or more) possible answers that seem equally valid. Take this one: "On the air from 1955 to 1975, what TV Western is the only American comedy or drama show to exceed 600 episodes? a. Gunsmoke; b. Bonanza; c. Rawhide." Perhaps your first impulse is to say Bonanza—I mean, how else did Michael Landon become such a big star?—but then wait, the quizmaster did say Gunsmoke, maybe your initial impulse was wrong. So Bonanza or Gunsmoke, which is it? Or perhaps it was Rawhide; I mean, all of these shows went off the air so long ago, they all sound plausible to anyone under the age of 45. Multiple choice can lead you to doubt and rethink your thinking in a way you might not with a simple fill-in-the-answer query, inspiring a whole new, often very enjoyable routine of mental gymnastics. You get to experience a different way of thinking through a trivia question.

They add a nice opportunity for comedy. Want to build a little laugh into an otherwise perfectly valid trivia question? Tack on a funny, obviously wrong (d) answer. That TV-Western one above? (d) The Lone Ranger/Howdy Doody Racial Stereotype Comedy Adventure Variety Hour (Fine, not the greatest joke, but the possibility is there.)
So what's my answer to the question stated at top? (a), (b), or (c)? Have I swung from (c)—multiple-choice hatred—to (a)—respect for it as a staple of the quizmaster's tool belt, granting multiple choice the status of perfectly reasonable trivia format? Eh, not quite. On balance, I think open-ended is more fun, more appropriately challenging, more creative. So let's call it (d): Multiple choice is a helpful tool, and it's a good thing for a quizmaster to have a strong understanding of. But if you want it to take center stage in a Big Quiz Thing project, you're going to have to be the one paying the bills.

July 5, 2011

Anatomy of bad trivia questions

Last week, I analyzed what I consider a nigh-perfect trivia question, discussing what I feel makes it such a sterling example of the quizmaster's art. Strutting my peacock feathers, sure. But to keep it fair and balanced, I promised to look at the opposite side of the coin: lousy trivia questions, and what makes them so bad.
I've written thousands of questions over the years, and some were just flat-out rotten. Perhaps the worst were the ones with which I failed due diligence; for whatever reason, on rare occasions, I just plain didn't do my homework, and ended up asking a question that is factually wrong. (Really? The first female U.S. senator was elected in 1986?!?) There are a million moving pieces to every Big Quiz Thing event, so it's inevitable that every now and again something slips through the subway grate. But the truth should never be one of those things, so it kills me when it's happened, as rare as it is.

But as soul-crushingly crappy as baldly wrong questions can be, that's not what I want to look at here, because I think their badness is self-evident. I want to dig a little deeper into what can make for a piss-poor trivia question. And rather than examine one shining example, as I did when looking at the perfect question, let's examine two that are varied in their suckitude. "Enjoy"…

Q: This is the essence of trivia: Within 50, how many dimples does a modern golf ball have?

I actually said that when I asked the question: "This is the essence of trivia." And I suppose I was right, if you adhere to the traditional definition of trivia, which is "useless knowledge." But over the years, I've come to prefer working with a different definition, which is "interesting information." (Plenty of trivia questions are about dumb bullshit, but just as many other deal with knowledge that's well worth having. There is literally no topic that can't produce a good trivia question, under the right circumstances.)

There are several major problems with this golf-ball question:

(1) It's not easy to verify. Search the Internet and you will find many answers to this question, none of them passing my reliability test. Moreover, I gather that there's no official number of dimples for regulation balls, so it's perhaps ultimately unverifiable.

(2) It's impossible. Not even remotely figureoutable (all right, fine, I suppose some incredible, ultraevolved physicist or mathematician might be able to take a stab at a designing a model that will give him an educated guess, but come on, we're trying to enjoy ourselves here). Also, I don't know what school you went to, but you were most likely not taught this as a youngster, so there's no digging-through-your-memory element here.

(3) It's cliché. This same question has been asked a million times in a million places, judging by ye olde Interwebs; my little "essence of trivia" disclaimer hints at it. I essentially ripped this question off from various anonymous sources. I mean, geez, if I'm going to be a thief, I should be more discerning, shouldn't I?

And perhaps most importantly, (4) it's just not very interesting. The answer is 360 (or at least that's what I declared it to be when I asked this at the BQT). Big fucking deal. An impossibly difficult question might be worth something if, at the very least, a player feels they've been enlightened once they hear the (verifiably) correct answer. (Really? The Mr. Men books were the U.K.'s best-selling kids' series of the '00s after Harry Potter? Hm.) But with something like this, the audience is left with nothing. This question provides neither fun nor victory nor knowledge, just a big pile of boring, obscure, squishy information. Terrible.

And this stinker:
Q: In the film This Is Spinal Tap, how did the band say their first drummer died?

This was actually the very first question asked at the very first Big Quiz Thing, and it's terrible. (Though in hindsight, a lot was terrible that night.) Spinal Tap is easily among my favorite films, and many others would agree, so it is definitely prime trivia-question fodder—it was an answer to a great four-parter about fictional rock bands (the Thamesmen!). But this query doesn't qualify. It relies on one's memory of a minute detail from the movie (a funny detail, but small)— not figureoutable. Moreover, it's a bit of a trick question, isn't it? Everyone remembers the drummer spontaneous combusting, and many others recall that another drummer "choked on vomit." But yes, the very first drummer (played in a cameo by Ed Begley Jr.) died in "a bizarre gardening accident." So it's a bit of a swerve to put this little-known aside front and center. And, perhaps most importantly, I asked this as the very first question of the night! Of the first BQT!

This gets at a very important yet overlooked element of quizcraft: Question order and placement is nearly as important as the content of the question itself. Sure, I could've asked about the bizarre gardening accident in a later round, perhaps at a movie-specific quiz. It would've been a toughie, but fair-enough game. But as my opening salvo of my quizmaster career, it was a bad move, indicating that perhaps I subscribed to the dicky you-have-to-know-everything-ever-to-succeed school of trivia, rather than the, you know, actually fun one.. Thankfully, the nerds there that night forgave me, I recovered, and went on to my glory as the greatest quizmaster who ever strode the face of this world.

What do you think? Are these questions really so bad? What do you consider the hallmark of a trivia clunker? Share your discerning voice!