By Jenny Neyman
Photo courtesy of Chris Jenness. Team Redoubt Reporter did some mental and physical heavy lifting in winning Friday’s Triviapalooza challenge at the Kenai Visitors and Cultural Center. Pictured are, from left, David Wartinbee, Matt Tunseth, Mike Morgan, Jenny Neyman, Jamie Nelson and Joe Kashi. Other ringers were Clark Fair and Allen Auxier.
Redoubt Reporter
I am the proud owner of a phenomenally ugly pool trophy.
How it came to be enshrined in a place of honor in my office is validation of the adage that it’s not what you know, but who you know, that’s important.
Even more important: What the people you know, know.
All that is by way of announcing that a team representing The Redoubt Reporter won the Triviapalooza challenge held as a joint fundraiser for the Kenai Convention and Visitors Bureau and Triumvirate Theatre on Friday.
Ordinarily, modesty, social graces and fear of the air being let out of my tires would prevent me from crowing about this too much. Certainly not in print with the ridiculous adjoining photograph of me hoisting the aforementioned plastic abomination while my teammates hoist me.
But in this situation I feel able to brag without it being indicative of a terminal case of inflated ego, because I can state with complete honesty that I had absolutely nothing to do with my team’s victory.
Zip. Nada. I was as useless as running shoes on a garden slug. Ineffectual. Noncontributing. Dead weight. Redundant as half the verbiage in this paragraph.
Of the 90 trivia questions asked, there were precious few I was able to answer. Of those I did know, there wasn’t one where my 2 cents counted for anything. Others at my table had deposited the correct response on the answer sheet long before my mental hamster could be bothered to even haul itself off the couch, much less lumber onto its wheel and cough up a fuzzy nugget of knowledge.
“This famous Tarzan actor was formerly famous as an Olympic swimmer?”
No clue.
“How long is the lifespan of a taste bud?”
I dunno, but probably less when eating hot sauce.
“Name all 10 Canadian provinces?”
Ummm… Alberta. Quebec, B.C., the two named after dogs, the one that sounds like Sasquatch, something about Price Edward in a can … .
“What singer got shot at while flying over Jamaica in a plane with U2’s Bono and then wrote a song about it?”
Jimmy Buffett? Huh. That’s news to me.
Luckily, it wasn’t news to my team, which bested some stiff competition. Everyone participating did so admirably, especially with how bordering on bizarre many of the questions were.
Second place was The Cabin Fever Club, and third place was the Law Dawgz, representing the Alaska Public Defenders. The room was filled with pillars of intelligence. Just being willing to show up and pay an entry fee in order to be voluntarily pop-quizzed for two-plus hours showed impressive personal commitment to the value of knowledge and education.
Our team just so happened to luck into the right mix of interests, experiences and fields of expertise to pull off a win.
Actually, there was no luck about it. I knew they’d know these things, just as surely as I knew I wouldn’t. They were ringers, every last one of them.
Biology professor, geology enthusiast and all-around science guy Dr. David Wartinbee, who happens to also be a pilot and hold a law degree. Joe Kashi, attorney, pilot, technology and photography expert with writing credits from The New York Times. Clark Fair, journalist and former high school teacher, current college professor, lifelong peninsula resident and historian. Professor Mike Morgan, a musician and concert promoter with a master’s degree, wicked sense of humor and affinity for paying attention to the political shenanigans around him. Matt Tunseth, sports reporter and lifelong Alaskan, equally as interested in discussing the Vikings’ chances at the Super Bowl as he is local, world or national affairs. Jamie Nelson, whose knowledge of current movies, TV, music and pop culture is oddly disproportionate to the relatively small amount of time he spends actually watching, listening and paying attention to such things. And Allen Auxier, station manager for KDLL. He’s in public radio, for crying out loud. Enough said.
As a rival team member pointed out, there were more PhDs, MAs and various other extraneous letters floating around our table than in a can of vegetable soup. More IQ points than there are calories in a whole tray of Cinnabon rolls. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, I was asked, for so blatantly stacking the deck?
There are many things I’m ashamed of in life: That I once owned an album by “New Kids on the Block” (it was a gift! I swear!). That I couldn’t answer more of the trivia questions. My fashion choices during the whole of the 1990s.
But this? Heck no.
That’s the beauty of being a reporter. You don’t have to know anything. You just have to know people who know things and get them to tell you.
Friday evening was not my finest performance in terms of demonstrating personal mental acuity. My pants — not so smart.
But I counted the evening as a fine testament to my ability to recognize the braininess of other peoples’ britches and get them to sit at the same table as me, in spite of starting the day in Anchorage, a previously scheduled poker game, a 5 a.m. fishing trip the next day, a karate class cut short, and a million other, better uses they all had for their time. It was like school lunch period all over again, except the smart people were the cool people and I was perfectly happy to carry their trays and clean up their crumbs.
To my esteemed teammates, thank you for lending your time, intelligence and cavernous repositories of random information to the cause. I may not have known that I longed to own a truly hideous example of plastic billiards statuary until it was handed to me, but thanks for making the dream a reality, nonetheless.
More importantly, thank you for lending your time, intelligence and considerable, diverse talents to the paper. Clark and Matt are freelance writers, David and Joe are columnists and Jamie does ad sales. While Mike and Allen aren’t technically involved, other than indulging my interview requests on occasion, I was equally proud to stamp them as representatives for the night.
You all are worth your weight in gold — the fake flaky kind coating the plastic laurels and cue stick on my trophy, and the real kind, which you could probably tell me the specific gravity, molecular structure and Alaska mining history of.
Geeks, the whole lot of ya. And I hope you never change.
Jenny Neyman is the editor/publisher of The Redoubt Reporter.
