It’s a regular Monday night at Bill’s Blues, and the crowd is gathering. But this Evanston venue, known for its live music, is strangely quiet as groups of patrons order drinks and gather their paper and pencils in the dim lighting. Those in attendance give themselves barely coherent (and often inappropriate) team names while poring over a list of tonight’s categories. That’s right – it’s 9 p.m., the bands are done for the evening, and it’s time for Pub Trivia.
The team known as Shea Dustin is smarting from the fact that there’s no sports category this week – one of their strongest areas. Another team, whose name changes every week but is almost always unprintable in a family newspaper, takes an early lead with a strong showing in the “Gangster Nicknames” category. Teams Clark Gate and You Are Everybody follow with perfect scores in “Lights, Camera, Author,” not fooled for a minute by the second consecutive appearance of Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.”
The general knowledge questions at the end include the structure crashed into by an American bomber in 1945 (the Empire State Building), Beethoven’s only opera (Fidelio) and the king in Greek mythology doomed to push a boulder up a hill for all eternity (Sisyphus). Clark Gate nearly takes the win, but is denied after a dispute over multiple acceptable nicknames for mobster Antonino Accardo (“Joe Batters” or, as it turns out, “Big Tuna”).
I’ve always had a strange affinity for trivia, but I’ve only attended the festivities at Bill’s Blues since last fall – it’s a great chance to unwind on a Monday night, see friends and inflict vengeance on other teams for past losses. According to owner Bill Gilmore, who is also the moderator and question-writer for the event, Pub Trivia began spontaneously when a scheduled musical act had to cancel at the last minute. Gilmore had participated in Pub Trivia contests when he lived near Columbia University and thought it might be a good “gimmick.” Three years and hundreds of questions later, Monday nights are attracting old pros and newcomers alike as each attempts to prove his or her (well, mostly just “his”) mastery of this thoroughly trivial pursuit.
But does knowledge of this idiosyncratic array of facts really correspond to any meaningful measure of intelligence? While Gilmore admits that some of his questions are very difficult, he doesn’t think that true erudition consists merely of the memorization of obscure names and dates. Instead, he tries to construct questions which synthesize facts of varying degrees of difficulty. To him, it is less important to be able to list every U.S. Secretary of Energy than to make connections between diverse bodies of knowledge – the type of intelligence required in the real world (or so our professors would have us believe). Gilmore issues a blanket challenge to all who think they have what it takes to be a snooty academic – come try your knowledge against the seasoned veterans at Pub Trivia. And even if you fall short of the first place cash prize, Bill’s offers the perfect consolation prize – $20 in Bill’s Bucks, redeemable directly at the bar.
Music senior Braxton Boren can be reached at [email protected].
