A spontaneous yet synthetic discourse that will hopefully be pre-recorded.
START READING HERE: For the next eight hours the studios and offices of WCFM, as well as your radios, will be held captive by a slimy band of triviaphiles only known collectively as "I DON'T HAVE TO ANSWER THAT QUESTION." The news has been filled with reactions to this semester's BRAWL TO WIN IT ALL!, including:
"I hope it's a nice fair fight"-- Jimmy Carter
"Screw 'em!"-- Gary Hart
"That sounds like a good idea"-- Bruce Babbitt
"That sounds like a good idea"-- Joe Biden
"Did you hear what Biden said?"-- Michael Dukakis
Yes, it's HERE! Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, Freds and Bettys, Jacks and Jills:
Welcome to the 39th Semi-Annual Williams College All-Night Championship Trivia Contest (1), a result of the blood, sweat and tears of everyone's favorite trivia conglomerate, the only team to win Williams Trivia playing out of Mission Park, "I DON'T HAVE TO ANSWER THAT QUESTION!"
Now for the reading of the rules. We will read a question and then play a song over the air. You, in turn, will call us during the song under some utterly ridiculous team name. You earn one point for correctly answering the question, and another point for identifying both the song's title, and artist. Occasionally there will be three-point plays, in which the question will have a multiple-part answer. In this case, the complete answer will earn you two points, plus one point for the music, equalling three points. (Hence the name, "three-point play.") Sometimes the song and the answer will be related to one another in some remarkably tenuous manner.
Every hour there will be an Hour Bonus worth 10 points for a perfect score. Be forewarned that several of the Hour Boni will be read over the air! Thus it would be advisable to have a blank cassette ready at all times to tape the next bonus. At eight hours, the contest is relatively short compared to the lifespan of some shrubbery (2), thus it will be impossible for us to repeat an Hour Bonus. SO BE PREPARED!
There will also be two Super Bonuses, each worth 25 points for a perfect score. They will be due after exactly four hours.
As if that's enough, and by golly it should be, there will be periodic Action Trivia, each worth 3 points for a solid, well-informed performance; with an Oscar/Emmy-winning performance garnering 4 points, and the "Pete Dahling-Level" willingness to permanently injure oneself getting the virtually-extinct 5 points. If you wish to impress us, props, accuracy and spirit are essential.
But wait, there's more! There will be one Ultra Bonus question that will span the entire length of the contest. The details of this grueling enterprise will be revealed a bit later.
You might be asking yourself, "What's the object of this crazy thing?!?" Very simply put, in deference to Ed Wiggers, if you get more points overall than anybody else, YOU WIN!!!!!!!!! Then you get to run the next contest, and be just like us! In the event of a tie, the better looking team will win......THIS TIME! (3)
If your team is using one or two phones tonight, you are a small, that's S-M-ALL, team, regardless of the number of people you have. Big teams are any team with three or more phones. Small teams can call in answers over any lines, BUT BIG TEAMS MAY NOT USE SMALL TEAM NUMBERS.
Phone "jamming" will result in substantial point penalties-- if you clog up the phones after or during your answer calls, we will not be at all pleased, and will take punitive action. Don't forget: We're running this contest. We can do anything we want to your score, including dividing it by TWO!!! (4)
Finally, there is a two-hour deadline for scoring complaints; that is, we will not track down score discrepancies more than two hours old.
The numbers to call are:
Any Teams: 597-2317, 597-2150, 597-2898, 597-2680, 597-2555, and 597-3150 (Again, that's.....)
Small Teams ONLY may also call: 597-2052, and 597-2096. (Again....)
Hour Bonus Numbers: 597-2373, and 597-2360. (Again.....)
Hour Bonus lines will open two minutes after the bonus has been presented. The Hour Bonus lines are for HINTS ONLY! Answers must be run into Baxter by messenger. No answers given over the Hour Bonus lines will count.
In case of an extreme emergency, the Pus Line is 597-2197. Answers given over the Pus Line will not be counted either.
You will know you've reached us when the phone is answered by a harried reporter, loudly proclaiming, "Miami Herald! (5)"
The first Super Bonus, due at 4 AM sharp, is now available here in the basement of Baxter Hall. So, by way of the back door, please come in and pick up the first Super Bonus, and get your tape recorders ready for the first Hour Bonus.
Without further delay, we shall begin the trivialities.
And now, for the first question.......
FOOTNOTES:
(1) It was actually the 43rd contest. Oddly, the same team would run the contest three semesters later, and claim it was the 50th contest instead of the 47th.
(2) This is very likely a reference to an Action Trivia from the Winter 1986 contest, in which teams were asked, a la "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," to "bring us a shrubbery!" A very amusing idea whose unfortunate practical result was that players simply ran over to Baxter Hall and, just before going inside, yanked out a large hunk of greenery nearby. This might have been enough of an eyesore had one person done it, but with several teams adopting the same strategy, let's just say that Buildings and Grounds were not as amused when the sun came up.
(3) This is an exceedingly poorly-veiled reference to the Spring 1987 contest, which ended in a tie. All The Sugar, Twice The Caffeine lost the tiebreaker by 1/15th of a point by mistakenly giving "Tonga" as one-third of an answer. They won the following Spring 1987 contest as "I Don't Have To Answer That Question!" They then took this opportunity to insult the physical appearance of the team that beat them. (As a member of that no-Tonga winning team, I hesitate to suggest that they were wrong.)
(4) "Phone jamming" was something that happened quite a bit in the 1970s, somewhat in the 1980s, and not too much anymore. In theory, phone jamming could happen as soon as there was a ninth team seeking one of the eight phone lines. But in practice, all the larger teams would employ 4, 8, or more telephones at once, which ensured that phone line competition would be fierce.
As the name suggests, jamming occurred when a team took up more than their fair share of the phone lines. This could happen innocently, such as when a team got through simultaneously on two lines. The nice teams would pick one line, and hang up on the other. The more malevolent teams would take the opportunity to double up on hints, all the while reducing their opponents' chances of getting through. And the truly loathsome teams would adopt the practice as an active strategy, calling after they'd gotten the points already, creating false names to keep the operators off-balance, etc.
Naturally, the smaller teams would complain, duplicate points slips would turn up, or operators would recognize voices, and the controversy would erupt. It was common form to threaten teams with the "score division of two" gambit. However, this draconian punishment was never actually used in any contest ever, which pretty much sucked the menace right out of the warning. Really all it did was to put teams on alert that if they intentionally jammed phones, they were being creepy and uncool.
(5) The origin of "I Don't Have To Answer That Question!" is available in Question #1. Gary Hart's political troubles began when he challenged the press to follow him around and see for themselves what a boringly clean life he led; the Miami Herald took him up on it, and almost immediately uncovered his affair with Donna Rice.