By Keith Blincoe, Staff Writer

How is your Pub Trivia knowledge? I’m not talking about your command of assorted obscurities; I mean your knowledge of Thunderbird’s Pub Trivia event. I learned a lot when I sat down with the event’s co-founder Jeff Karlick (MBA ‘16). Take the following Trivia trivia challenge to see how much you know.

 

1. Where and when does Trivia happen?

(a) At the Pub every Tuesday at 9:15 PM

(b) In the basement of the Tower Building at midnight every full moon

(c) During the busiest time of the day—dead hour

(d) Whenever Jeff damn well feels like it, stop asking this.

(e)  It’s anywhere you are, whenever you are ready for it. You just have to open your heart.

 

2. Who, along with Jeff, is the other co-founder of Pub Trivia?

(a) Jeff Karlick’s mirror image

(b) Carlos Melendez (MA ’15)

(c) It used to be Carlos Melendez, but now it’s Trevor Noah. Not sure how that’s going to work out.

 

3. What does the winning team get?

(a) They get the satisfaction of having done their best. Everyone else gets a free drink and an interview at the company of their choice.

(b) They get to go home that night. Everyone else goes back into the closet and waits for the next game.

(c) They get a $50 Visa gift card, the right to hold the championship belt until the next game, and everlasting glory that lasts a week.

(d) They get to eat the last-place team.

 

4. How did the event get started?

(a) Jeff lost his memory and wandered around campus asking people random questions. To get him out of their hair, people plopped him down in the pub and he’s been asking questions from his seat there ever since.

(b) Jeff owes $1500 to other students, and he created (and rigs) the game to ensure his creditors win their money back over the course of 30 games.

(c) Carlos came up to Jeff and asked him to lead a trivia club.

 

5. What was Jeff’s first job after he graduated from college?

(a) He hosted pub trivia in Virginia for eight months.

(b) He built personal computers in his garage with his friend Steve.

(c) He tried to grow his investments by planting them in the ground and regularly liquidating them.

(d) He wrote the celebrated mystery-memoir crossover novel What I Did after College.

 

6. How does Jeff come up with questions?

(a) He uses Wikipedia after editing it himself.

(b) He and Carlos make them up out of whole cloth and hope no one notices.

(c) He slams his keyboard randomly and picks out anything that’s not gibberish.

(d) He picks them up from his regular Web browsing, and also uses news aggregators and tags for topics of interest.

 

7. What problems have arisen in the course of running the game?

(a) Jeff used the club’s remaining TSG money to purchase billions of Visa gift cards in an elaborate scam, causing a global financial catastrophe. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about this.

(b) Players have sometimes quibbled about the wording of questions or about the acceptability of answers.

(c) In the great blizzard of ’15, the winning team got lost in a snowdrift and was never heard from again.

(d) In the great blizzard of ’15, the losing team took control of the jukebox and blasted disco and funked the snow away. As a side effect, the winning team got lost in a snowdrift and was never heard from again.

 

8. How has the ASU acquisition changed the event?

(a) It’s no longer an official club because clubs have to go through too much red tape. The prizes will be funded by donations.

(b) The event must now be held before the 8 PM curfew and feature questions in every living language. No alcohol, caffeine, tobacco, gluten, peanuts, may be present in the event venue. Ten weeks prior to each trivia night, Jeff must submit a 150-page event proposal with financial projections and the names and signatures of all mammals within a two-mile radius.

(c) The answer to every question is now “We might not like everything about the deal, but at least this way Thunderbird will still survive in some form, so overall I’m positive about it.”

(d) We might not like everything about the deal, but at least this way Thunderbird will still survive in some form, so overall I’m positive about it.

 

9. What’s the future of the club?

(a) Jeff and Carlos will abscond to Madagascar with the donated funds.

(b) Jeff expects it to continue in a similar form, as several new students have expressed their interest in heading up the event.

(c) The club will be disbanded and replaced with ThunderBumper, a new competitive bumper-car club.

(d) The format will change somewhat: instead of Jeff and Carlos hosting, there won’t be an official host; instead of taking place on the Thunderbird campus, it will take place at Castles N’ Coasters; instead of people sitting in teams at tables, they will sit individually at bumper cars; and instead of answering questions about current events and little-known facts, people will ram cars into each other.

 

Final question:

10.  How should this quiz be scored?

(a) For each a award yourself 3 points; for each b award yourself 2 points; for each c deduct 2 points for each b and 3 for each a; for each d give yourself 1 point if the number of ds is odd, otherwise award zero; for each e, give yourself whatever number of points you feel is fair.

(b) Life isn’t about keeping score. Just enjoy the quiz and move on. That’s my approach to in-class quizzes, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t work here.

(c) It depends on multiple key factors, each of which interacts in trillions of unpredictable key ways, but if we take a step back we’ll see that our performance will be determined by big data, our proficiency in leveraging certain key things, our proficiency in utilizing other key things, and the frequency with which we use the word “key.”

(d) If it’s not obvious which answers are correct, please send complaints to the author.