The Ohio Players became the third team to run the contest from off of Williams' campus. They were in Cincinnati, and the contest went out over the airwaves of commercial radio station WMKV. The DJ was extremly professional. As with the contest from Northwestern, there were frequent PSAs.
Trivia has now been broadcast from Minnesota, Illinois, and Ohio.
All agreed this was an excellent contest.
Second-place stars is a team of Williams students, so the contest will be going home to the Purple Valley in January 2012.
The Ohio Players were:
A few contributions from the Trivia mailing list, following the contest:
I heard enough to realize this was a terrific contest; I wish I'd been able to do the whole 8 hours. (This is my very first contest out of 33 that was a partial.) Many questions had that special quality to them, even some of the news of the weird were clever. My favorites included the Palin/Sheen presidential poll, the band with perfect SATs, Major League/California Penal System, the Israeli raid ruined by a Facebook post by a soldier, Alex Levinsky and his lights out goal, the guy who ate in the Eiffel Tower restaurant so he did not have to look at it, the M*A*S*H* sign, the lucky boy in Animal House, the twin Supreme Court questions (their numbers over the years and the last question from Clarence Thomas) and the X-rated Oscar question, Vicki Lawrence's quite forgettable The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.
On the songs, well, clearly the 50+ crowd (all, um, six or seven of us?) should be happy. Plenty of golden hits, featuring Johnny Cash, Carly Simon, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Rod Stewart, Dolly Parton, Ringo Starr, Joe Cocker, The Who. And thats just from Qs 34-64! Plus a few real one hit wonder types that used to be the hallmark of Trivia, including two bastions of Trivia lore, a credit to any playlist: Build Me Up Buttercup by the Foundations, and one of my three favorite all-time favorite trivia songs, Red Rubber Ball by Cyrkle. When BOMO ran the December, 1976 contest, that was our first song, at my insistence.
Speaking of BOMO, I was absolutely delighted to see my old BOMO partner and classmate, Mitch Katz, resurface after 20 years with a bunch of aptly named Geezers to make a run at the title. Mitch and I won or ran four contests with the other BOMOs in our time on campus, and he won even more in the 80s when alums first started coming back to play. Like me, he took twenty years off, and I sincerely hope he is back to stay. And Mitch, anytime you want to play with BOMO...come back, Shane!
I IM'd the freshmen at one point, when they were in sixth, and told them to keep pushing, the mighty would fall, out of either fatigue or Already Ran Too Many Contests Syndrome. I dont think Samuel quite believed me, but he does now.
The celebrity high school pictures was a great and original idea, and worked fabulously well, I thought--practically every solved answer induced giggles. Band names, too, was a lot of fun, particularly earlier in the contest when one still has something like critical thinking skills. I left Jotto and National Parks to other folks while I worked on Baseball (which, old-skewing as it was, I enjoyed immensely, with the possible exception of the section on the All-Star game--the manager and stadium pictures were good ideas). Broadway has, I think, been somewhat overdone of late (though the bonus was fine).
Sorry about the PSAs ... the radio station did want to use the Williams Trivia as an advertising vehicle of sorts (well, underwriting ... they don't do true advertising), and maybe turn some people onto their own trivia show and their big bands/standards format. A wee bit of overkill, I must admit.
I'm glad that everyone seems to have enjoyed the music selection. We did skew a bit to older stuff - mostly because we're pretty old ourselves! ;) Plus, isn't this contest about nostalgia? In the same way that trivia is separated from minutia by some personal connection from the past, so too the music should harken back a bit, right? :)