So begins the groggy recovery time. The body doesn't rebound quite as effectively from the sleeplessness, drinking, gluttonous food consumption and all around nonstop revelry as it used to. Right now, I'm creaky and worn.

Our team finished in 15th place, incidentally.

We head into the final hour with our chances for a trophy win pretty well dashed. While we managed to claw our way back up as high as fourteenth place, we were 600 points away from tenth as of 6:00 p.m. on Sunday, six hours away from the conclusion of the contest. If the third Music Question (a collection of eight song fragments that need to be identified in a certain amount of time) had earned us some bigger points, we might have a fighting chance.

That's the smallest part of the weekend, actually. It's more about camaraderie and laughter and general mayhem. On that front we've succeeded admirably.

I had grand ambitions of writing regularly about the Trivia weekend experience with greater regularity. Clearly that didn't pan out. That's partially due to the fact that the weekend is more hectic and consuming than I recalled. It was a little foolhardy for me to think I could find the time (or energy) to pull this off.

At this point, we're around 30th place. Impressive given that there are over 400 teams participating in this thing, but below the much higher placement we've become accustomed to the past few years. We just nailed the second of the three Music Questions and have been picking up a little bit, so there's still hope.

The first hour was somewhat atypically rough for us, which means 5 correct answers out of the 8 questions. In the past, Jim and John have tried to keep a decent amount of easy questions in the first hour, but they're apparently pushing into the harder stuff right away.

Dang.

It's 6:00 p.m. on Friday. The big, ridiculously gushing intro to the 90fm trivia contest is wafting out of the speaker. In just a few minutes, we'll call in the first answer, which is always "Robert Redford."

This is what we spend a ridiculous amount of time prepping for. The Cakers are more prepared than we've ever been. We'll see what the next 54 hours bring.

Leaving for the airport any minute. As an update, my Trivia team is up to 20 of 24 pictures correctly identified, most of them with rock solid information. Usually Friday is when you start to get a sense of how well other teams have done on the New Trivia Times pictures (players are wandering all over little Stevens Point and sharing how the week has gone on that front) so we may very well find out that it's an unusually easy year and everyone has identified those same pictures.

Still...this is far better than we've ever done in this facet of the contest.

Still spending today working on pictures for this weekend's trivia contest, while constantly pushing myself to take care of the bill pile of work that needs to be completed before I fly away on Thursday morning. Today was effectively my last day for both as tomorrow is "Work Day" at Warren Wilson, meaning they cancel classes for the day allowing students to spend some extra time with their work crews and then spend the afternoon pitching in on major campus projects like big landscaping and construction efforts. This is a pretty direct and drastic contrast to the college I worked at last year, which just today celebrated Fox Day which also involves canceled classes, but for essentially the opposite purpose.

As for the Trivia research, we now have 15 of the 24 photos figured out. I can't definitively contrast this with prior years but it seems to me like we've never been this strong on the pictures. In one stretch today there was an especially impressive team effort as a wild flurry of speculation and detailed expertise got us an answer. I'm barely going to be able to check on in progress tomorrow, which will be very tough.

It's very strange to think that I'm around 36 hours away from being in Wisconsin.

Usually I try to reserve my commentary on Trivia and The Cakers^TM to glancing blows. This year, I'm revving up to try something quite different. So why not start with that now.

The annual staging of the World's Largest Trivia Contest takes place this weekend at my broadcasting alma mater. For the nineteenth year, the team I belong to will take part.

In many respects, the contest begins in earnest today with the release of "The New Trivia Times". Along with the contest rules and a wagonload of ads, the "Times" contains twenty-three pictures that teams will be asked to identify during the course of the contest's 54 hours. That means huge stretches of time (including time at work that really should have been, you know, productive) are given over to endless trolling of all the photographic detritus out there on the Interweb. My eyes are weary and I'm having an especially difficult time extricating a corner of an unidentifiable board game out of my whirring mind long enough to get some overdue sleep.

By my count, we're currently certain on 11 of the 23, which seems like a strong start. We'll see what the next few days brings.

While indulging in some evening Interweb perusing, I found a message suggesting a quick check of Wikipedia, particularly the entry for a certain 1980's song.



In the section detailing "References in popular culture," following notices of how the song is utilized in the British television series "Spaced" and in the film This in England, this curious bullet point appears:



I can't express how happy this made me.

We'll see how long the Wikipedia chieftains let this bit of tomfoolery stand.

Bravo, caker_66.

Several years ago a two-person film crew followed around a band of boisterous cohorts with whom I have a yearly engagement. Once that footage was diced up and added to the footage collected by similar tandems across a certain modest central Wisconsin community, it became a 90-minute documentary. It played in a film festival or two, and I even got a chance to see it. Now there is this:



Maybe it's not exactly being released by Criterion (many of the films that the documentary has as labelmates are, um, let's say look to be of questionable quality) and it's still not likely to reach an audience much beyond the built-in one that filters through my alma mater radio station every April, but it is still out there readily available for purchase. It's all a little strange.

It also features approximately 20 minutes of previous unused footage. Let's hope those extra scenes mostly focus on other Trivia teams. I'm comfortable with the way my crew comes off. We don't need any new, potentially embarrassing tidbits to leak out.