Quiz Marathon strategy!

 

As I prepare for my massive undertaking of quizmastering for ten straight hours (dear God…), I'm fielding oodles of logistical questions about our Tenth Anniversary Quiz Marathon Spectacular: How does it work? Do I have to be there the whole time? How can I win the $1,000 grand prize?, etc. This FAQ should illuminate you, but let me break it down in terms of strategery, as a noted leader once didn't actually put it.

So the strategic question to ask yourself is: What kind of geek are you?

1. For the lazy geek—hang out for a few hours and have an awesome time: The show runs noon to 10pm total at 92YTribeca. A single ticket (available here, and cheaper in advance, mind you) grants you all-day, come-and-go access. Any given two or three hours will give you all the quizzing delights you expect from the BQT: world-class multimedia trivia, video and audio puzzles, a Text-Message Challenge or two, the odd Lightning Round, etc. Plus prizes: We're not limiting the goodies to the end of the show, so there's always a chance of scoring something nice to bring home to Mama. (This blog has already covered Lionel Trains and Birch Coffee, and we've got old favorites Geek Treats, Thumbs and On Location Tours will represent, and way more are on the way.) And check it: Guest performers will include magicians, jugglers, comedians, etc., scattered throughout the day. That said, prime time (8–10pm) might be your best bet, since that's when the live band will be doing its thing, and you'll be able to firsthand see the effects that a nonstop quiz marathon have on the body of a man in his mid-thirties. True, you'll probably not make it into the big Six-Way Finale, and thus claim the grand prize, but considering this will pretty much going to be the greatest quiz event since the sinking of Atlantis, I think you'll leave happy.

2. For the tireless geek—stay the whole damn ten hours: Make no mistake, a passel of nerds are seriously planning on doing this—arriving around noon, grabbing a piping hot coffee from Cafe 92YTribeca (which will basically be my life-support system that day), and settling in for ten hours of butt-numbing quiz joy. Naturally, playing the whole time will considerably up your odds of your team making into the finale, so this is also a good strategy for the excessively greedy geek. (And yes, the cost is the same as just swinging by for an hour or two.)

3. For the crafty geek—organize!: This might, strictly speaking, be the smartest strategy, but it's also the one that requires the most advance planning. Form a team as you would for any other BQT event, perhaps drafting in a few more ringers than usual, and divvy up the hours of the Marathon into shifts. If you spread out the brain talent wisely, you can make sure to cover every round of the quiz, and receive points throughout the day (as long as we receive an answer sheet with your squad's name on it for a given round of the quiz, you'll receive the points). If you relay like this, bringing in fresh players every couple hours, you'll just rack up the score and be primed for a top showing come Finale time, and possible glorious victory. (Indeed, this strategy is not mutually exclusive with the lazy one above, so long as you're lucky enough to glom onto a team with some of the smarties.)

But really, all strategies are welcome and valid; I guarantee a good time no matter what. Get your tickets now and start figuring out which kind of geek you are. See you there, if I retain the ability to see.

Video: Training for our Tenth Anniversary Quiz Show Marathon!

Just one month to go, and I'm hitting the bag pretty hard, prepping myself for ten solid hours of quiz show excitement. But how am I prepping? The answer is below.

Extra-mega-special thanks to director William K. Scurry Jr. and guest stars Erik Seims and Ron Palais. I think I need to start eating more salad.

Ten Years, Ten Hours, Ten Hundred Dollar Grand Prize. Get your tickets now!

Annoucing…our Tenth Anniversary Marathon Quiz Spectacular!

What, you thought we were kidding?

You should know by now, we never, ever, never joke about quiz excitement: In honor of a full decade in the quiz business (um…wow), we're doing what is unarguably the biggest Big Quiz Thing in history, on Sunday, June 3, at 92YTribeca. The tagline is "Ten Years! Ten Hours! Ten Hundred Dollar Grand Prize!," and it's all true: We'll be presenting a full day of BQT delights, noon to 10pm. It'll culminate in prime time, as a live band joins the BQT for the first time, and we expand the usual Three-Way Finale to a grand Six-Way Finale, to determine which team goes home with the big $1K jackpot.

Multiply this by two. Then multiply it by awesome.

Press-ready details here, but let me use this space and time to A some FAQs…

What's the format?
Pretty familiar to you BQT regulars: We'll be doing somewhere north of 20 rounds of the Big Quiz Thing, in teams, with pads and everything. Multimedia puzzles, of course, along with our fun grab bag of gimmicks: Four-Part Questions, the Text Message Challenge (probably four or five times), Either/Or (haven't done that one at a public show in a while), and more.

I love Google Image Search

Do I have to be there the whole ten hours?
This is the most F A Q, and the answer is absolutely not. Stay for one hour or all ten, whatever makes it a lovely Sunday for you. Your ticket buys you completed unfettered access; come and go as you please. Moreover, you don't need to be there the whole time to win. As long as we receive an answer sheet with your team's name on it, we'll count those points for your team. So if you want to get really organized, give everyone a shift to make sure all ten hours are covered (we won't enforce a team limit). Divvying up the prizes among 72 people is your problem, however.

Mmm…kosher!

Does this place have food and/or comfortable chairs?
Yes, 92YTribeca is an excellent venue (location of our long-ago Summer Fun Spectacular and my stint as Movieoke host). Perhaps its best feature: an A-double-plus meat-free café, which will be offering scrumptious specials all day.

What else you got for me?
Plenty. The world's greatest quiz show, of course, with our biggest prize haul ever (the grand prize of a grand is only a good start), plus original short films, DJs, live comedians, maybe a magician, etc. (Want to be a sponsor? E-mail allison@secondbolt.com and let's discuss.)

Watch the smirk gradually melt from my face…

Are you, Quizmaster Noah, really going to be up there the whole time?
Pretty much, yeah (part of the idea with the guest performers is to give me a chance to visit the boys' room). But I plan to persevere through the whole event as your, and the world's, quizmaster. I will be accepting sandwiches. Come for the quiz, stay for the freak show.

Any other questions? E-mail info@bigquizthing.com. Sold? Buy tickets now, and brace yourselves…

A consumer-product tour of Berlin

Guten tag! Actually, I haven't been in Germany in ten days (unless you count my airport layover in Munich six days ago, en route from Switzerland), but forgive me, your quizmaster is still in New Year's catch-up mode. 'Cause I rock just that hard, yo. (Also, I was busy listening to 2011's "best" music for the very first time.)

As I do every time I visit an exotic or semi-exotic place, I like to enter a supermarket and photographically take note of novel and/or bizarre products, from my Amero-Canadian POV. On this blog I've discussed shopping adventures in Puerto Rico, Switzerland, and London, and now we come to Berlin. A four-day post-Xmas visit with family was extremely historically educational; there was something exceedingly historically gratifying about lighting the Hanukkah candles and reading Superman comics in the heart of the former Third Reich (especially while my bedtime reading was The Man in the High Castle). I think I determined that the Germans aren't that bizarre, despite what porno-obsessed stand-up comics might tell you, But still, here's what I found (sorry for the lousy photos, but the grocer was eying me suspiciously)…
It seems appropriately German to me that the English names for these generic cereals are so clinically descriptive: "Cinnamon Flavored Squares" and "Fruit Rings." Maybe we should start calling Rice Krispies "Oblong Dun-Colored Pellets of Crisped Rice Grain."

I am almost literally the farthest thing from a beer expert, but I don't think I've ever seen this before: loose bottles of beer (and whatever that vodka drink is) on an unrefrigerated shelf. Something seems really, really low-rent about it; I mean, even a frat house finds room for a crappy fridge. Yet these are the Germans were talking about, the world's beer authorities, mandating the quality of the beverage by law. So who are we to question their shelving techniques?

Speaking of lack of refrigeration…

These are packages of German-farm-fresh eggs, just sitting out there on the shelf, ready to go rotten or worse. (I also saw what looked like frozen dinner entrées exposed to the temperate world.) This made me slightly queasy—don't eggs go, like, instantly bad if they're not treated with the utmost care? Aren't you courting digestive death via omelette? Yet when I mentioned this apparent anamoly to my sister (a Swiss resident), she looked at me like I was crazy. "Oh, sure," she said. "They never do that anywhere in this part of Europe. We've taken to not refrigerating our eggs at home; it makes a lot more sense." Great, one year as a European resident and she already hates our American way of life.

I'm convinced there's a huge vein of untapped humor in the topic of toothpaste. From the Cavity Creeps to Triple Protection Aqua Fresh, no general product category has inspired more hilariously overblown and bizarre TV commercials over the past 60 years. Thus, I really dig the names of these German brands: Odol-med 3, Aronal, Elmex. I'm guessing those were rejected names for members of the Three Musketeers.

This made my heart skip a beat (almost literally)…

The USA may be the greatest country ever in the history of all time since the beginning of the universe, but you know what we don't have enough of? Breakfast cereals adapted from candy bars. We have Reese's Puffs, but that's all that comes to mind. Yet in Germany, not only did I spot Nestlé Crunch cereal (I can't imagine the deliciousness), but this: Lion Cereal. For the uninitiated, Lion Bars are very popular and indescribably tasty candy bars found throughout Europe; I discovered them when I spent a teenage summer in the U.K. and ate them pretty much nonstop (you can find them in NYC if you put in a little effort). I'm fascinated by the concept of beginning my day consuming a variant on the product. Now you know what to get me for Valentine's Day.

Finally, German is an inherently funny language. So on a side trip to a department store, these gave me 20 minutes of serious amusement:
I was about to write that I really, really want to know what Don Corleone sounds like in German, but then I thought I also want to hear Luca Brasi. And Jack Woltz. And fuck it, Fredo too.

POTA is one of my absolute favorite movies ever, but the one logical flaw that has always stuck in my craw is the fact that the apes speak English. No, even that is fine: It's that they speak English and Taylor doesn't find that strange (though the twist ending provides a plausible enough explanation). But if the apes are speaking German…well, now we're playing a whole different ball game, aren't we?

I'm guessing that Dynasty, or its closest German equivalent, just doesn't fly in German as indicating jet-setting glamor and intrigue among the super-rich of the 1980s. But does Der Denver Clan ("the Denver clan") really solve the problem. I mean, Denver? Doesn't quite have the cachet of Dallas, does it?

"Murder is her h0bby." Oh, boy. There's that great stat that considering the small size of Cabot Cove, Maine, over the entire 12-year run of Murder, She Wrote, a full 2% of the residents were killed. And that maybe the secret behind the series is that Jessica Fletcher is a serial killer (with some powers of mind control, enabling her to hypnotize others into confessing to her crimes). I guarantee this all seems so much more believable in German.

Where to next? Australia…I'm hoping (by the time I'm 40, I've been saying). Care to join me?

BQT at Comic Con

As I've been crowing the past few days, the Big Quiz Thing's quiz at New York Comic Con last weekend was truly awesome. We had in excess of 50 teams trying their hand at the world's finest comics and movie (and a little video games and manga) trivia, with—surprise, surprise!—BQT regulars the Fantastic Fournicators claiming victory with a perfect score. Scoff if you want, but hey, it was Comic Con. They were like gods at that place. (Hell, I was in the 95th percentile for attractiveness, at least among men.)

Best of all, I didn't make any conspicuous mistakes, as I had feared. The questions covered all the requisite bases (about 45% comics, 45% movies, 10% other junk), and I don't think there were any factual errors. The closest I came was on this question:

"Within $5, what’s the total combined retail value of all 52 No. 1 issues in DC’s reboot (not including tax)?"

One audience member needed clarification: Right now? Apparently, as he informed me, some of those new No. 1's are already being resold for considerably more than cover price, a mere month later. (Good Lord…) Nope, cover price. Stunning.

So I declared success. Photos below, courtesy BQT assistant supreme Liv Swenson. As awesome as the show was, truthfully, it wasn't the ideal venue for us: We were on a great big stage, but in a large noisy room, and the light made the screen look a little washed out. Hoping we can come back next year, maybe after the sun sets.

Preshow. Thank you again to my guest assistants, Heather and Mike Young.

The Hasbro Stage. Had no idea till we got there that it was labeled "Kids," though no kids attended. Still, at the last minute, they asked us to keep it clean; we did our best. I think the worst thing was a video clip of Wolverine saying, "You're a dick."

Damn, that was a big crowd. But attentive. My people!

I was very proud of this question: "Put these Batman movie chest logos in order, earliest to most recent." Give it a shot, why don't you…

Behind the scenes: The BQT audio rounds

One of the standbys of the Big Quiz Thing format—and of many other live quiz games, for that matter—is the audio round. You know you love it:

I mean, who didn't love Name That Tune? Except for the millions of us who have no memory of the show, which hasn't been on the air since 1985?

I've never done a full public BQT without an audio round. Even the two times technical issues made the game impossible, I ended up singing the clips. (It got really tough/embarrassing when I got to the Katy Perry song. Thanks for the encouragement, BTW.) In its most basic form, we play clips from ten songs, very approximately 20 seconds each, and the teams identify the songs and the artists, boom boom boom. In the low-tech primordial-ooze days of the BQT, I essentially made a mixtape of the clips—literally, a cassette tape. Soon it was the magic of compact disc, now it's all iPod glory. Give me a couple years and I'll be downloading the clips directly into your brains via a neurotransmitting gun.

Very occasionally (usually when the video round has a musical theme), the audio round is nonmusical—clips of movie dialogue, speeches, audio of people playing sports (that was a fun one). But usually, it's musical, me being a music geek and all. And in the early days, the theme was typically a straightforward one: horses, mountains, guns, fruit. The very first Big Quiz Thing featured ten songs about one of your favorite topics, masturbation. The lineup:

1. “Pump It Up” – Elvis Costello and the Attractions
2. “Pictures of Lily” – The Who
3. “Orgasm Addict” – The Buzzcocks
4. “Muscle of Love” – Alice Cooper
5. “Why Bother?” – Weezer
6. “She Bop” – Cyndi Lauper
7. “Blister In the Sun” – Violent Femmes
8. “Darling Nikki” – Prince and the Revolution
9. “Longview” – Green Day
10. “Turning Japanese” – The Vapors

In case you never realized "She Bop" was about diddling yourself, the proof was on constant MTV rotation in 1984:

Some great songs on that list, back when I was opposed to including any tunes that I didn't personally love. Today I'd consider this to be on the tricky end of the spectrum (I have no memory of how well/poorly people did); I mean, that's a fairly deep Alice Cooper cut. But I think I went with this as my debut theme because I thought it had some of the cheekiness that I intended for the BQT. Jerking off! Ha!

Over time, my feelings about the audio-round themes have evolved, to the point where I try to avoid concepts that seem too straightforward. Something like "planets" usually doesn't cut it for me anymore, and I tend to go for more conceptual ideas. For those out of the loop, here are some recent favorites:

Yeah Yeah Yeah/No No No—Very brief clips of vocalists singing nothing but "yeah yeah yeah" or "no no no," alternating the two.

I Always Get Them Mixed Up—Presenting in couplets, with each pair performed by artists who people typical confuse with each other (e.g., Springsteen and Springfield)

A History of Musical Theater Via Bad Karaoke—I actually got together with a crew of drunken friends, and recorded everyone singing musical-theater favorites. Always great when I can break out of the pop-music ghetto.

And I'm excited about the October 3 round: Can I Ask You a Single Question? If you put together the titles of the ten songs, in order, they form a quiz question, answerable for bonus points. I like to have fun.

These join my list of favorite concepts that I regularly bring back and/or reuse for private parties and out of town: Slooow Songs (very familiar tunes at half speed), the Worst Songs Ever (that always annoys/amuses people), Three Degrees of Musical Separation (e.g., "R. Kelly/Kelly Clarkson/Sonny and Cher").

I'm always on the hunt for new ideas. Some concepts I've strongly considered but rejected: Once, listening to Del Shannon for the first time in a thousand years, I thought it would be interesting to do an entire round of artists who committed suicide, then concluded the cleverness (or lack thereof) justify the poor taste. (We did, however, once do an entire round of artists who OD'ed on drugs. Why is that so much less depressing?) And I've always hoped to do an entire round in which every song has the exact same title, but I've yet to stumble upon that magic common moniker. (Though a "Summer Songs" theme once included three separate tunes called "Summertime.") Perhaps I shouldn't encourage such unoriginality.

One of the many modern technological advances that makes this job easier than it would have been in times past is the rise of iTunes: I can purchase a single song for use in an audio round, as opposed to an entire album (which I did once in the early days, hence my slightly unlikely ownership of Metallica's Master of Puppets). The only thing that would make it even easier—or perhaps more economical—if there were some way to download these songs without paying for them. Oh, if only!

How about you? What are some of your favorites? Any old concepts you'd like to see…er, hear again? Ever designed your own quiz audio round? Share!

The challenges of the Comic Con quiz

Now that I have caught my post–Ladies' Night breath, I prepare to launch back into the quiz maelstrom. The BQT is coming into a busy season here: Boston this Monday, L.A. Thursday, parties for Google and other fine organizations, various top-secret projects, and we're back on the biweekly schedule in NYC. My life. But one particular event stands out: New York Comic Con.


On Saturday, October 15, the Big Quiz Thing is presenting a special one-hour event at Comic Con, at the Javits Center, all about the fun stuff that people go to Comic Con for. Comic books, certainly, but everything else that appeals to overgrown nerds like me (and quite possibly you).

This will be a challenge, despite my supposed expertise in all things geeky. In two respects:

Challenge No. 1: Fact checking, fact checking, fact checking…
You can say a lot of things about the kind of person who goes to Comic Con—a lot of things. But nonetheless, the past ten years have seen an evolution of the comic nerd, and most of the old-guard stereotypes just aren't true. I mean, I'd put serious money on most of the attendees at the Javits Center having known the touch of a woman (or a man). But one conception that ain't a mis is that they are among the nit-pickiest people on the planet.

Mostly false

Fine, okay, this is something I deal with routinely with the BQT, but I think I'm going to need an extra dollop of careful for this shindig. To wit: an incident at Ladies' Night, when we presented this entry in the Suffragette City four-parter.

In case you're completely confused here, that's a famous suffragette's head on the body of a comic-book superheroine, with the suffragette's name rendered as an anagram. Players had to guess both the suffragette and the superheroine. And I received a point-of-order question from the audience:

"Is part of the superheroine's costume not shown?"

I was confused. You mean her hair? Nope, that's not what she (yes, she) meant. It took genius Steve of the Fantastic Fournicators, approaching the stage with two fishnet-wearing superheroines' names written on a piece of paper, for me to realize the source of confusion:

There's a pleasant thought…

A-ha. How, how could I forget about Zatanna's fishnets? So I announced, "There is no hat involved. I did not eliminate a hat from the picture." (BTW, the suffragette was her.) Problem solved, but it was a close one. It's not that it's easier to make mistakes on comic-booky topics than other ones, but you know that if you do, the geeks will call you on it (as well they should, BTW). There's a reason the longest Wikipedia pages are about Star Wars characters and Marvel supervillains. I'm always pretty exacting about getting things right at the BQT, but I'm going to give these Comic Con questions an extra go-through, over, under, sideways and around.

Challenge No. 2: Covering all the bases. But what was most alarming about the Ladies' Night lapse is that this was on my supposed strongest Comic Con–related topic: superheroes. Not just superheroes, but DC superheroes—dude, I can basically give you a blow-by-blow rundown of the Crisis on Infinite Earths (I was never a Marvel Zombie). This should be a topic about which I never make mistakes, even in my sleep.

So what about the other topics? Not just other-than-DC comics, but all the multitude of non-comics mediums and genres represented by the ultimately misleadingly named Comic Con? You got science fiction, manga, comedy, gaming, LARPing, etc., etc. (indeed, etc.). I know a fair amount about…some of that, and I can research anything, often do. But what are the bases I have to cover. Do I really having to cover LARPing?.

Not for me. Though I get it.

This has not be so much of a challenge at past subject-specific Big Quiz Things: I know insane amounts about Presidents, Jews, and The Simpsons. And ladies, of course. That shit came easy to me.

Thus, to deal with both of these challenges, I've assembled what I call the Geek Council: eight or ten of my geekiest friends (including BQT videographer William Scurry), to advise me and help me fact-check the whole thing. We're meeting in a couple weeks to hash out ideas and topics, and eat pizza, after which I'll go out there and design the perfect nerd-satisfying game. Then, I will turn to them as an extra layer of fact-checking. I ain't getting nothing wrong here.

But what about you? What topics do you think I should cover? Or not cover? Personally, I haven't even been to a comic convention in 20 years, so any advice is useful. Let me know.