Relay: Trivia Today: So, How’d You Do?
It would be going too far to say that my husband and I are cutthroat when it comes to the online challenge called Trivia Today. Intense would be more like it.
Okay, maybe just a little . . . bloodthirsty.
Every morning and afternoon we check our computers for the day’s two questions. Before the sun goes down, one of us is sure to ask the other — always off-handedly, though a smirk or a scowl is riding on the answer — “So, how’d you do on Trivia Today?”
We’ve been competing in this maddening game — which is sort of like “Jeopardy,” only you get four possible answers to choose from — for about two years now. The enigmatic scoring chart, with 100 tops, has had us since January at 62 and 65, which is better than it sounds; the average score out there in virtual gameland is 49. Sidney had a long string of right answers recently, but it takes forever to gain a point and his number never budged, which has not improved dinnertime. “I don’t understand it,” he grouses. “Why aren’t I moving up?”
Most of the relationships of the long-married couples I know, and we are talking golden anniversary-plus here, seem to me to tilt almost soppily solicitous or — not so much. I met one woman in Florida this winter who was playing this same trivia game with her husband and confided that she was deliberately giving the wrong dumb answers to make him happy, and another who cuts the Times crossword puzzle out of the paper every morning and makes a copy of it for her husband before he wakes up. Then they have a battle over coffee to see who finishes first. They’ve been keeping score forever.
“Who’s ahead?” I asked her.
“Oh, I am. And you can tell him I told you.”
The best thing about Trivia Today is that you learn a lot of stuff that seems useless at the moment but that might come in handy sometime. The first job I ever had, as assistant humor editor of a long-defunct magazine called Coronet, was like that. Coronet was the Avis of the day to the Reader’s Digest’s Hertz. We ran a column like the Digest’s “Life in These United States” where people would write in with funny things that had really happened, only we paid $25 and they paid $100.
Nine out of 10 submissions were handwritten, often in pencil. My job was mainly to decipher the chicken scratches, but also to pick out candidates for publication, and then the humor editor (a beyond-crabby woman who never cracked a smile) would decide who’d win.
Within a few months of starting work, it occurred to me that I didn’t need to plow through the whole letter, just skip to the punchline at the end. “No, 40 children are enough.” Yup, we’ve run that one already. It was as if there were only a finite number of comical things happening in America. By 11 a.m. the day’s work was done.
Pretty soon I had hundreds of funny stories by heart, and oh boy, what that job did for me. “That reminds me of a joke,” I’d say. All of a sudden I was the life of the party.
But I digress. You know what I’ve really learned from playing Trivia Today? That a lot of us never listened to anything we were told in school.
How else could you miss a question like the one we had on March 15: “Who was famously killed on the Ides of March?”
Remember, you get four choices. Seventy percent of respondents got Julius Caesar. Four percent guessed John F. Kennedy. Thirteen percent picked Joan of Arc.
Trumpists.
Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large.