It's back! The BQT's Tenth Anniversary Quiz Show Marathon!

Really? No, seriously? Yes—we’re doing it again. After last June’s earth-shaking Ten Hour Quiz Show Marathon in NYC, to celebrate a decade of BQT action, we are just insane enough to be doing it again. Our ever-supreme Boston-area home, Harvard Square’s Oberon, is hosting the second performance of our Tenth Anniversary Marathon (this one closer to the actual ten-year mark), with another full day of scintillating live game show action, and another ten hours of Quizmaster Noah (that’s me) doing the nonstop-quizmastering thing at the expense of his health and sanity (now accepting 5-hour Energy donations). It's Sunday, December 2, noon–10pm, a little more than a month till I tempt fate once again.

First, the basics: It’s ten hours of the familiar BQT team-quiz formula, 25 rounds total of the game. The greatest hits from the BQT's decade of video and audio puzzles, naturally, plus the world’s greatest trivia questions, a passel of Lightning Rounds, a handful of Text Message Challenges, Smart-Ass Points galore. And no, you don't have to stay all day: For one low ticket price, guests can come and go as they please—as long as someone from your team submits an answer sheet for a given round, your team will receive points for that round. (Last May’s blog post about BQT Marathon strategy ought to come in handy.) Backing us up all the way will be the return of our erstwhile Boston music-meister, DJ Xdon RicklesX.

Plus, more fun, courtesy one of the show’s many premier sponsors: Improv Boston. New England's premier home for comedy will be making the scene throughout the day, presenting their top improv, sketch and stand-up acts for your multivalent entertainment. (Including an appearance from new Boston BQT sidekick, stand-up Wes Hazard.) The folks at Improv Boston are experts at "showcasing today’s best performers and training tomorrow’s stars," and we're thrilled to have them on board.

 And now, your most eager question: prizes. The winning team takes home more than double the haul of a typical BQT: a cool $500. Plus we’ll have tons more goodies from a rafter of Boston’s greatest stores and experiences: So far, we've got regular Boston prize sponsors The Harvard Museum of Natural History, the Modern Homebrew Emporium, and Follow the Honey, plus Harvard Square's lovably old-school Million Year Picnic comic-book store, Kendall Square's inspirationally wired Voltage Coffee and Art, the film nerd paradise of the Coolidge Corner Theatre, the wacky-gift wonderland that is Joie de Vivre, and more. Even Improv Boston will be tossing in prizes, and there are plenty more on the way.

It’s Sunday, December 2, noon to 10pm, and the ridiculously cheap advance tickets are already on sale right here. Form your team, organize your strategy, and do not sleep on this one…I certainly won’t.

The BQT: Straight outta Times Square!

The super-exclusive crowd at last Friday's NYC History Spectacular at the New-York Historical Society got a dose of this, but here's our latest video project: Quizmaster Noah (to use the third-person) finding some of NYC's most charactery characters and asking them some of New York's finest New York–specific quiz questions. Enjoy.

BTW, missing from this is that guy you always see in Times Square dressed in a Statue of Liberty costume and posing for photos. I actually asked him the Statue of Liberty question, gave him clues galore, and he still missed it. The irony was fun, but it turned out more sad than anything else—I don't think the dude's grasp of English was all it could be. It's the center of the universe, after all.

A Canadian BQT flashback

Happy Canada Day! This day has somewhat special significance for your beloved quizmaster, since I am —technically—Canadian. My father was born in the bustling metropolis of Windsor, Ontario,  best known as the city where 19- and 20-year-old Detroit kids go on Friday nights in order to drink legally. When I was 15 years old, he was transferred to the considerably more bustling metropolis of Montreal, Quebec, where I spent the last three of my high school years (and by virtue of my dad's heritage, acquired a Canadian passport, which is pathetically out of date at the moment). Montreal was awesome, but by the time I was 20, back in the States for good, this adventure had retreated into the nostalgic recesses of my mind, and I was boring old American again. But I will always bristle when my countrymen express their characteristic ignorance of their northern neighbor (as when, yes, right-wing idiots declared they were moving to Canada to escape Obamacare). And to answer your question, yes, it was damn cold, but that doesn't sound so bad considering what it's like in NYC right now (good thing global warming is a myth, huh?).

Today is Canada Day, the anniversary of Canuck independence (1869), and I'm honoring it by tweeting my favorite Canadi-factoids all day. But twice in the BQT's history—2003 and 2008—I commemorated the holiday with a special audio round: "Keep on Rockin’ in the Land of Socialized Health Insurance" (well, the first time I didn't call it that, since I wasn't as imaginative back then). Songs by Canadian artists, of which there are many, many, because Canadians are awesome (and there ain't much else to do in Winnipeg but form a band). Digging through the archives, here's what I deemed quizworthy back in the day…

2003
1. "These Eyes" -- The Guess Who
2. "Fat Lip" -- Sum 41
3. "Never Surrender" -- Corey Hart
4. "Puppy Love" -- Paul Anka
5. "All For Swinging You Around" -- The New Pornographers
6. "Suzanne" -- Leonard Cohen
7. "Sk8er Boi" -- Avril Lavigne
8. "Southern Man" -- Neil Young
9. "Informer" -- Snow
10. "Carey" -- Joni Mitchell

A nice mix there: legends and flashes in the pan, great tunes ("These Eyes" is immortal) and conscious garbage ("Puppy Love"). I remember that hardly any teams could ID the New Pornographers song, but hey, I wanted to seem current (Avril Lavigne wasn't enough for me; BTW, in those days before easy song downloading, I acquired that song by purchasing a bootleg CD on Canal Street in Chinatown). I also seriously considered upping the list to 11 tracks, since I felt the desperate need to squeeze in Toronto's pride of the '90s, Barenaked Ladies. Laugh, if you want, but I was way into that band in high school, when they had yet to break through in the States, and they were a terrifically dorky live act. Granted, everything they've done in the past 15 years sucks, but hey, how good is your band?

 Circa 1992, I could really relate

Then, five years later…

2008
1. "Man! I Feel Like A Woman" -- Shania Twain
2. "Heat Of The Night" -- Bryan Adams
3. "Signs" -- Five Man Electrical Band
4. "Turn Me Loose" -- Loverboy
5. "Building a Mystery" -- Sarah McLachlan
6. "Closer To The Heart" -- Rush
7. "Money City Maniacs" -- Sloan
8. "1234" -- Feist
9. "Welcome To My Life" -- A Simple Plan
10. "If You Could Read My Mind" -- Gordon Lightfoot

Only time ever A Simple Plan opened for Gordon Lightfoot. It's strange, but I have a much less vivid memory of this round than the one from five years earlier, though clearly I was over Barenaked Ladies by then. And it looks like I was conscious of not reusing anyone from the first edition. BTW, when you're a geeky teen boy in Canada in the early '90s, it is a legal requirement that you become a Rush fan. And when you're a geeky Canadian indie-rock snob in the mid-'90s, it is mandatory you become a Sloan fan (best band ever from Halifax, Nova Scotia). Listen:

So seriously, who should've been in there? And what if I did a new edition now? (Well, a year from now.) Is Bieber too obvious? Time to finally give Bachman-Turner Overdrive some love?

Live from the Quiz Marathon!

Courtesy my good, good buddies at Time Out New York, a video of prime time from last weekend's Tenth Anniversary Quiz Show Marathon Spectacular. If you were there, relive the magic; if you weren't, pretend.

Quiz recap: Ten frickin' hours!

Good afternoon. Good God. Just so you know, my original idea was to do a full 24-hour quiz marathon, which would've meant I'd have just gotten off the stage about five ago. And that I'd be dead now.

Okay, so yesterday—our Tenth Anniversary Quiz Show Marathon—was pretty fucking incredible, if I do say so. I was stunned—stunned, I tell you—that so many of you stayed for the full ten hours. And I was stunned that I felt as good as I did, staying onstage and quizzing all you all for the whole time. Actually, I felt great; there's very little I enjoy more than quizmastering, and it was an absolute delight to get to do it for so long, and under such exciting circumstances. I love you crazy people.

Now I'm playing serious catch-up with other BQT business. But partially for the benefit of those who missed out on this once (?) in-a-lifetime experience, here's what happened…

—Nearly 100 people stayed the whole time. The. Whole. Frickin'. Time. Luckily, 92Tribeca was the ideal venue for this, incredibly supportive and with an exceedingly tasty café. If only every venue could be that way, you know?

—We had guest DJs (including the return of the queen of the BQT, DJ GB), guest performers (thank you, 5 Hour Energy thief/comedian Liam McEneaney, rape-whistling comedy/producer of the NY Funny Songs Fest Jessica Delfino, top-spinning blockhead Keith Bindlestiff, and master of mystery the Great Dubini), and for the first time anywhere, EDP and the World's Most Trivial Band! The Big Quiz Thing: the only live quiz show that literally rocks.

—The prize haul was truly amazing, thanks to our production partners at Second Bolt. Huge thank you to all of our fabulous sponsors: Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, Silence! The Musical, Old Jews Telling Jokes, Second Stage Theatre, The Actors Fund, Geek Treats, Thumbs Bakery, On Location Tours, Annie's Blue Ribbon General Store (hooray for candy mustaches!), Birch Coffee, Lionel Trains (a massive $250 model as the Endurance Award!), The Artifice Group's "Strange Things," The Bubble Lounge, Museum of Sex, St. Mark's Bookshop, A Jew Grows in Brooklyn, My Sinatra, Voca People, Sistas, The Solo Nova Arts Fest, 92YTribeca itself, and sadly, possibly someone else my addled brain is overlooking. Oh yeah, and the BQT's bank account, which provided the grand $1,000 prize for the winning team. It's so great to reward smart people for being smart people.

—I did the math: I asked a total of 259 questions yesterday. Plus five audio rounds, plus five Text Message Challenges (AT&T tells me I have exceeded my texting limit for the month), plus two of those wacky stand-up/sit-down 50/50 rounds (I always forget how fun those are; they're perfect, BTW, for private events where we have no access to A/V). Included in the bonanza were all your favorite BQT gimmicks: Proofread-O-Rama, the Movie Quote/Pop Music Thesaurus, Presidential Limericks, Three Degrees of Musical Separation, Sports Logo-a-Go-Go, Crisp Game Arena (a.k.a. Recipe Anagrams), Let's Play Boggle, and, naturally, the Plinko of the BQT, the Bipolar Movie Challenge. Lots of fun flashbacks to classic BQT material, including a reprise of our very first audio round from ten years ago, Music for Playing with Yourself, which inspired one of the day's best tweets: "We did ok on the 'onanism songs' portion of the #quizmarathon. But I suspect this room is full of experts."

—In case you're really curious, physically. I felt great almost the whole time (the adrenaline even gave me a little case of insomnia, but the exhaustion hit around 5am, and continues). Being on my feet gave me a stiff back halfway through, but the second wind kicked in and I recovered. I had almost no caffeine (a cup and a half of tea at 9am), none of the 5 Hour Energy I brought, 2/3 of a tuna fish sandwich and two Cliff Bars. I peed once. Prepping the material for the show was far, far more arduous than actually performing it.

—The Six Way Finale was the only time I felt that our plans of mice and men failed: We simply didn't account for how crowded it would get with the band there, so it was dodgy, but it worked out ultimately. And naturally, Incontinental Congress—now easily one our winnigest teams ever—won on a question about You Can't Do That on Television. Of course.

The standings; I'm guessing here, I'm a little disorganized today. Just know that the bulk of members of all of these teams were there from start to finish, so if you popped in for just ten minutes, sorry.

1. Incontinental Congress: For the first third, they had only three people. Three neeeeeeerds!
2. Cash Cab for Cutie: Won the Spider-Man tix, plus much more
3. Fat Kids Have Their Cake, and Your Cake, and His Cake…Starship: A supergroup that well earned the Team Spirit Award
4. The Fantastic Fournicators
5. Gerard Depardouche
6. Strippers for Stephen Hawking: Gave me a lovely tenth anniversary card. I am blesssed.
7. Taking the Mulligan
8. Money for Nothing and Quips for Free: Came down from Boston!
9. Monstrous Humanoids: Ditto!
10. I can't remember, let me check later.

Next: Summer is private party season, a.k.a. make money season. But you can catch us back at Littlefield in Brooklyn on July 17 and August 14; in Boston June 11, July 30 and August 27; and our satellite operation in L.A. June 17 and July 15. And hopefully, another Manhattan show soon. Get some rest, please; we're doing 11 hours next year.

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!