PART TWO

Well, I have finally gotten around to writing Part Two of my Adventures last weekend thingamajig. This is the crazy cool exciting part! Well, here goes...

After his concert, Brent and I went back to his dorm, where I was staying for the night. Staying, but not sleeping. Oh, no, never sleeping.

You see, that day, Friday, was the last day of classes at Williams College for the semester. There is a peculiar tradition that has grown up around that last day. The night after - well, really, the morning after, from 12 midnight until 8AM, is the biannual Williams Trivia contest. I have provided a link at the bottom to further explain for those of you who want to know more, and it also includes information on this winter's actual contest, but I'll explain to the best of my ability a bit later.

I was to play on my brother's team - Holy Sack and the Resident Vomit Specialist. He had checked the Official rules, and anyone can play that wants. alums come hundreds, thousands of miles to play. It's all prrtty crazy. My brother's team - he was one of the captains - was a frosh team. The forsh team that gets the highest score get's the Freshman Cup, which our team was going for, but we had no aspirations of winning outright. The team that wins has to, by the way, run the next Trivia contest.

At 11:00, we all met in the 2nd floor Common Room of Sage F (each freshman dorm is split into parts, Sage has A-F, 4 floors each. My brother is in F) to go over basics and get ready to play. The parts of Trivia, as explained then...

OnAir Questions - The contest is run mostly over the college radio station. OnAir questions occur pretty much continuously all night. A question is asked - a really random trivia question - and then a song, usually obscure, but not always, is played that has something to do with either the question or the answer. It mgiht be a clue, but then again, it might not. You have until the song is over to call in with the answer. If you have an idea, but aren't sure, and actually, if you have no idea at all, as long as you're nice and try to guess, the phone people will give you hints. you get a point (sometimes 2, depending on the difficulty) for getting the answer right, and a point for naming the song and artist.
Example: Q: The Iditarod, a 1000+ mile dogsled race through rural Alaska, is an event so grueling that simply finishing is considered a great accomplishment. In fact, the person who comes in last gets a prize. What is it?
A: The Red Lantern.
S: "The Distance" by Cake

Ultra Bonus - Every hour, all night, 3 words are read over the air. All of the eventual 24 words fit into one category. As soon as you figure it out, you call or email in and tell them your answer. You can guess as many times as you like with no penalty, but the amount of points goes down every hour. This year, they were all names of Williams professors.

Super Boni - Boni=plural of bonus. i'll be using the word Boni several times in the duration of this post. Each Super Bonus takes place over 4 hours. At 12 and at 4, a member of your team (henceforth, a runner) is sent to the station to pick that Super Bonus up. It's a thick packet of questions on various and sundry topics, but all somewhat under a common theme. This year, the themes were "Survivor-MacGyver" (consisting of questions about (1) really surviving in the wilderness (2) surviving in fictional sci-fi worlds (3) MacGyver and (4) survivor, the TV show, as well as actually building a Small mammal trap) and "Booty" (identifying pieces of nude art, Pirate Booty, Djibouti, etc.). These have to be turned in by 4 and 8.

Hourly Boni - There was also a bonus every hour. 2 of these were Audio Boni - a long mish-mash of about 2-second, if not less, clips from songs were put together, and all songs and artists had to be named. The other 6 were paper Boni, picked up by a runner at the top of each hour and returned at the end. They were "Williams" (rando trivia about people named William, and Willaims College), "Rituals" (of all sorts), "doonesbonus" (all about Doonesbury), "Apocolypse" (traditions, quotes, etc. surrounding the end of the world), "Letters" (now THIS one was crazy. There were 36 sheets of paper. On each was reproduced a page from a book or short story. However, a block letter - the first letter of the author's last name - was superimposed over each page so that only the words inside the letter could be seen. It was HARD), and "Album Covers" (pieces of album covers, whether the whole picture, or part of it, or a letter.....).

Action Boni - Every hour on the half hour, an action boni was announced. This took the form of a skit. Members of your team had until the next half hour to get down to the station and perform. You got up to 3 points for creativity, and up to 3 for accuracy. The Action Boni were as follows...
Show us the 2000 election in puppet theatre or your choice of dance form.
-Show us an episode of Battlebots
-Play Quiddich for us
-Perform one of these musical numbers from the Blues Brothers: ... (i don't know what the numbers were, but they gave some...)
-Hollywood trailer for "Goodnight Moon" or Are you there God, it's me Margaret"
-Star Wars 1-6 in 6 minutes OR David Lynch's Return of the Jedi
-Williamstown Elementary does Rent/Stomp/Wagner's Ring Cycle

4:00 challenge - at 4, everyone gets a bit of a break, and the running team asks for one person with a certain quality (this year it was the person who takes the longest to get up). One girl went down from our team, and i went with her, cause she didn't know where to go, but i didn't participate (phew). The running team had put all kinds of random condiments and bathroom suplpies in the two bathrooms, and each person was given 30 seconds, and then, on a second round, a minute to go into the bathroom and change their appearance as much as possible. It was pretty crazy. On a random note, while there I saw one of the guys running... he was wearing a sluggy Freelance shirt, with Aylee on it. I commented =)

So. Those are the parts of Williams Trivia. At our meeting at 11, there must have been, gosh, 30-some, if not more, people there. It was insane. A few alums showed up at the beginning, but left soon afterwards. Two who had just graduated the year before stuck around for most of the night. For the first hour or so, there were really too many people to work efficiently, but after not too long, the people who really weren't going to stay up the whole night had pretty much left, and there were about 20 left, which was a perfect number. We got a great system running. The Sage E 2nd floor common room became our Paper Boni Central - we had 4 laptops in there looking for info, as well as various and sundry reference books. One room in Sage F was for phoning in On-Air Answers. That was probably the most impressive thing - ONE guy did the calling ALL NIGHT. There were two guys in there with him on the computers, looking up information as soon as the question was given, and modifying their searches as Adam (the guy on the phones) relayed the clues given to him. The entire night, out of 96 questions - and that's twice that many answers, including the songs/artists, we missed FOUR POINTS. First cloor common room in Sage E was Action Boni central, and another Sage F room was used for Audio Boni.

The entire night we were doing well, never lower than 4th place. towards 6:00, it entered our heads that we might win. We talked abuot sortof quitting for the last hour to sabotage it, but we decided hey, we're doing so well, we might as well keep going.

We Kicked Some Major Butt. Holy Sack was the FIRST Freshman team to win since 1981, which is before just about everyone on the team had been BORN! we won by 15 points, i think, although the official standing says 12 - but they forgot to include our last 3 points... but that's okay, because WE WON ANYWAY! when they finally officially announced at about 8:45, none of us could really truly pay attention, we were so out of it... but We went to the "Awards ceremony" at 9, at which we were given a trophy (passed down through the years *sniff*) and a lemon (because we have to run the spring contest!), as well as the freshman cup award, which was a "Growing Brain" thingy... don't ask me.

The rest of that day rather blurs. we went to breakfast. I went to Brent's dress rehearsal for the Lessons And Carols service he was in and fell asleep. I took a nap. My mommy drove me to the airport and I came home.

Oh yeah, I ent to a party when U got home. Talk about OUT of it.

Anyway, I'm going to fly up for the spring contest to help run, and I'm collecting random trivia... Hey, if you know any, send it to the email address my name links to above! So. That was my last weekend. No WONDER I'm sick!

Ki"HOLY SACK FOREVER!!!"ki