Too Much Trivia in the Pants

#GMTC52 Is Almost Here!

§ Friday, January 27, 2017 @ 8:04 PM

The start of the contest is now less than two hours away, the team is registered, and we’re starting to gather. As some of you may have heard, this is year twenty for Too Much Trivia in the Pants, and we’ll be celebrating that fact all weekend long.

Too Much Trivia in the Pants would like to thank our sponsors Dr. Jekyll’s and Marley’s Smoke Shop, without whose generous support we would be unable to achieve our goal of Making Trivia Great Again. Thank you!

For those who are joining us this year, feel free to drop in at any point and claim your spot in the War Room.

To all the other teams, best of luck this year… but not too much luck.

k!

Three Days until #GMTC52

§ Tuesday, January 24, 2017 @ 12:12 PM

Hola Los Pantalones and Friends of The Pants!

Trivia is only three short days away, so of course that means it’s time for LarryU’s official trivia press release to drop. For your reading please I have quoted it below:

Lawrence’s Great Midwest Trivia Contest offers 52nd test of cerebral fitness


It seems a no brainer that Ridley Tankersley would eventually hold the exalted title of Trivia Headmaster of Lawrence University’s ultimate test of cerebral fitness.

Heck, he almost was named a trivia master before he was even a Lawrence student.

As 2017’s Trivia Headmaster, Tankersley, a senior studio art major from Phoenix, Ariz., will oversee 50 straight hours of outrageous competition all in the name of fun during the 52nd edition of Lawrence University’s Great Midwest Trivia Contest.

Older than the Super Bowl and liberally sprinkled with questions that make explaining the Higgs Boson look easy, the Lawrence trivia contest is the nation’s longest-running salute to all things obscure.

The contest returns in all its inconsequential glory Friday, Jan. 27 at its customary 10:00.37 p.m. start time and runs until midnight Sunday. The contest, just as it has for the past 11 years, will be webcast worldwide from the control room of wlfmradio.

Nearly 400 questions will be asked over the course of the contest, with hundreds, if not thousands of trivia addicts playing for on-campus and off-campus teams, calling in answers to the WLFM studios. Last year, 86 teams battled it out for the off-campus title, which was won by Hobgoblins of Little Minds, a team based in North Carolina. Among on-campus combatants, David and the Bucky’s Batallion Diabolically Antagonizing Tortured Brood-Makers, Basically Building Batteries, Bungee Jumping Blindfolded, Bizarrely Bludgeoning Bells and Definitely Ascending toward Brilliance By Dastardly Battling Together outlasted 18 challengers for its second straight title.

Tankersley, who went from playing as a freshman to serving as a trivia master the past two contests, tried to pull a fast one in 2012. As a visiting prospective student, Tankersley conspired with a current student to apply as a trivia master.

“We thought it would be funny if we both auditioned to be trivia masters,” said Tankersley, who was a member of the winning on-campus team his freshman year. “I pretended to be a Lawrence student. My visit roommate gave me a fake Lawrence ID number and his room number. I went through the whole process, including an interview. I heard I came close to being picked. I think people were quite surprised when they realized I was back in Arizona finishing high school.”

As he gets ready to settle in to the big chair for the weekend, Tankersley hopes to remind players of the contest’s credo: Trivia is meant to be entertainment and should be perceived solely in that light.

“I’ve seen the focus put on competitiveness, not the enjoyment of playing and I want to see it go back to that,” said Tankersley, who figures he’ll only manage to sneak in eight hours of sleep during the course of the 50-hour contest. “I want it to be on the front of everyone’s mind that people are playing because it’s fun and trivia masters are doing what they do because it’s fun.”

While technology has perhaps eroded some of the contest’s original, simple charm, its core spirit — a weird, yet at the same time weirdly logical experience — remains untarnished.

“You’re in a room with waxing and waning numbers of other teammates, but you’re all there doing the same thing,” said Tankersley, whose dad played as the one-man team “Square Root of All Evil” from Arizona last year. “People take it seriously and it’s inspiring that they do, finding the fun in this weird thing.

“It’s really all about the community of playing,“ he added. “It’s about spending time with your friends on the weekend, and maybe coming out of it with a bad prize. It’s all about the experience.”

Appleton native Kim Stahl knows all about trivia’s “community of playing.” She began playing the trivia contest when she was in elementary school and started a team in sixth grade. Today, she and her best friend Heidi Delorey are co-ring leaders of a team that numbers around four dozen multiple-generation players from as many as 10 states who annually converge on her home — in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Stahl, who has approximately 35 years of notches in her trivia belt, and her merry band of “Hobgoblins,” have benefited from the contest’s switch from an over-the-air broadcast to its current webcast, allowing her to maintain a beloved, decades-old tradition.

“We just love playing. We love the contest. It’s a lot of fun and it makes for a wonderful reunion,” said Stahl, a 1991 graduate of Appleton West High School. “And we love the fact that all of these Lawrence students have kept it going all these years. It’s such a unique college tradition.”

Despite her long history with the contest, Stahl first cued the DJ to play “We are the Champions” in 2015, the contest’s 50th anniversary. They successfully defended their title last year and now are gunning for a coveted “threepeat.”

“We are firmly intending to hit the hat trick this year,” said Stahl, whose own personal trivia tradition involves filling her front yard with pink flamingos the weekend of the contest. “After never expecting to win for the first 30-some years, that would be a crowning jewel.”

Following trivia tradition, Lawrence President Mark Burstein, will start the fun by asking the contest’s first question, which, also by tradition, is always the final — and virtually unanswerable 100-point “Super Garruda” — from the previous year’s contest.

For one of the few times in the contest’s history, last year’s Super Garruda was correctly answered by the Trivia Pirates…Aaarrrggh. They somehow managed to come up Earwigs Rule to the question: In 1964, a band pretended to play Beatles songs at a battle of the bands called the Letterman Show. What is written in the top right corner of the page that features the band in a KWSS DJ’s copy of the lead singer’s 1965 high school yearbook?

Here are a few “softballs” to help everyone get warmed up for this year’s contest.


  1. In 1988, students at the University College in Dublin broke a record by debating, for 503 hours and 45 minutes, what statement?

  2. At this toy themed amusement park in San Diego, what guards the entrance to the ride immediately south of the easternmost green roller coaster?

  3. The leader of a one-man comedy synth punk band also has a website dedicated to images of a certain household object. What is BigJerk’s lamp thinking?

(1. “Every Dog Should Have Its Day” 2. A 16-foot tall LEGO pharaoh 3. “I hate the zoo.”)

On a side note related to the press release, we are very excited to read the quote above where “Headmaster” Ridley says, “I’ve seen the focus put on competitiveness, not the enjoyment of playing and I want to see it go back to that.” We Pantsians would love to see the emphasis of the contest return once again to fun and tradition. In the last few years the contest has been highly sterilized and stripped of all fun and tradition in favor of a focus on competitiveness and cramming as many questions as possible into the weekend. We look forward to seeing what The Joker has up his sleeve!

k!

» Lawrence’s Great Midwest Trivia Contest offers 52nd test of cerebral fitness [Lawrence University News]

Too Much Trivia Finally Score!

§ Thursday, January 19, 2017 @ 10:42 AM

Or, erm, we’ve been around for a score (of contests)? Yeah, that’s probably more appropriate. Anyhoo…

Hello, Pantsians and Friends of the Pants!

It’s true what you’ve heard (or maybe not heard): Los Pantalones are back for year twenty.

Year TWENTY?! Yes, it really has been that long—we (the team) really are older than many Lawrence students. While we are, indeed, a little older and a little grayer, I can guarantee you that we are in no way wiser. If we were wiser we wouldn’t be spending a weekend participating in a fifty-hour-long trivia contest, amiright?

If you’ve played with us at any point dating back to 2012 you already know where to find us once again this year down on West College Avenue. If it has been a little longer since we last saw your bright, smiling face on trivia weekend we definitely encourage you to join us again this year. Don’t know where to find us? Send me an email at toomuchtrivia@yahoo.com and I can give you all the gory details.

I hope to see you all eight days from now!

k!

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