www.montereycountyweekly.com march 2-8, 2023 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 19 with the weekly writing of the questions. Malokas gets ideas from trivia books (he’s got stacks and stacks of them), and also from the internet. Wikipedia’s sortable list pages are an especially good resource, he says. Still, like any writing, quiz questions are about more than just the content. “It’s very easy to make ambiguous trivia questions,” Malokas says. That won’t do—contestants have been known to argue for more points if they’re marked as getting a question wrong but feel confusing wording contributed to that. A good trivia question, according to Malokas, is one that some people know and some people don’t. That might sound a bit tautological, but it also gets to the heart of something important about the genre—trivia is by definition random, but it shouldn’t be so out there that no one has a chance at answering. That can be a trickier line to walk than one might expect. To make things simple, Malokas conceives of his questions in categories and writes them according to a loose formula. There’s geography (“very age- and gender-neutral”), history, sports (divisive), pop culture/current events (pop culture is very balkanized these days, Malokas reflects, so this category especially rewards a diverse team) and science. Science questions are difficult to write, but always popular, Malokas says—sometimes, when enough time has passed, he’ll will dip back into his own archives. Reduce, reuse, recycle: Brass is an alloy of what two chemical elements? Phobos and Deimos are moons of what planet? The quiz tends to frontload easier questions (so as not to scare away any newcomers right off the bat) and balance the difficulty level. But Malokas’ perspective is that “it’s OK to have really hard questions, as long as there are only a couple of them.” Overall, the London Bridge quiz isn’t exactly easy—nor should it be. It caters to a longtime crowd of regulars, with 75 to 80 percent of the 70 to 90 people who fill this bar coming back week after week, Malokas says. It’s trivia by and for trivia lovers. “There’s a subset of people in the world who are curious about everything—and they love to show off what they know,” Malokas says. Here, they can. And anyway, “what else are you going to do on a Tuesday night in Monterey?” Q: In the 1950s, a bunch of popular TV game shows were taken off the air after it was revealed that they were rigged. Who is credited as the primary whistleblower in this debacle? Trivia’s history is full of good trivia questions. The word “trivia” is derived from the Latin “trivialis” (found everywhere, commonplace) and “trivium” (crossroads). In medieval times, Trivium referred to a tri-fold educational pursuit—grammar, logic and rhetoric—that preceded Quadrivium, where students learned arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. In these roots, one can see the beginnings of what “trivia” has come to mean today—it involves facts and knowledge, yes, but pretty random facts and knowledge. Histories seem to agree that it was the 1902 book Trivialities: Bits of Information of Little Consequence, written by British aphorist Logan Pearsall Smith, that firmly established the modern understanding and definition of the word trivia. Trivia as a game first rose to prominence in the 1950s with a rush of TV game shows like The $64,000 Question, Twenty-One and Dotto. These shows enjoyed high ratings until it was revealed—thanks in part to disgruntled former Twenty-One contestant Herb Stempel—that producers were coaching contestants to fix the outcomes. In an October 1959 story for The New Yorker, John Updike wrote about the cultural impact of the deception: Trivia is by definition random, but it shouldn’t be so out there that no one has a chance at answering. At right and below: Hosting a trivia night can help bring in customers on a slow midweek night. At Other Brother, trivia has transformed Tuesdays into one of the busier nights of the week—on par with an average Friday. On busy nights, teams fill tables on both levels of the bar.
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