A not-so-trivial pursuit: Come for the random facts, stay for the greater curiosity at Lookout Trivia Nights

Stipulated: Trivia is trivial. I mean, duh. It’s right there in the word. 

But those of us with a mind for trivia, and a love for trivia contests, secretly think otherwise. We secretly think that trivia is life. 

After all, one person’s trivia is another person’s occupation, or abiding passion, or Ph.D. thesis. Think of one subject that is near and dear to your heart, one subject you could talk about with an interested party for hours — surfboard construction, the novels of Virginia Woolf, NFL pass defenses. To someone else — the vast majority of people, in fact — that knowledge is “trivial.” Can you feel the value judgment in that word? Doesn’t sit well, does it? 

On Wednesday, I will again be hosting Lookout Trivia Night for what is the fourth summer season, free for all comers, at Abbott Square in downtown Santa Cruz. We’ll do one the first Wednesday of each month, through September. 

It feels weird to say it, but in a way I consider it one of the most important things I do as a journalist at Lookout. In a way, it’s a throwaway evening of easy entertainment over a few drinks in a great outdoor public space. And there’s great value in that. But, if you’ll indulge me, in another way, it’s about cultivating and nurturing curiosity. And curiosity is not just the first step toward intelligence, it’s a signature trait of a well-rounded healthy human mind. 

I’ll be the first to admit that when the apocalypse comes, I will lament not finding room within my vast mental storehouse of 1980s new-wave music knowledge for “How to drill a well.” There is no conceivable way that what I know about Universal monster movies of the 1930s is ever going to “come in handy.” 

Sure, you can live a perfectly productive and happy life without having to ever think about the following: In what year did Major League Baseball field an entire team of non-white players in a game for the first time? But doesn’t knowing it was the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates add just a little dot in the grand mosaic of what you might understand about American history and the civil rights movement? 

That’s part of my job as a trivia host: Not just to posit a question that you might not know, but to convince you somehow that it’s worth knowing. That means, of course, that there are things not worth knowing. I would never ask, for example, what was Alfred Hitchcock’s shoe size? Knowing that perhaps the world’s greatest movie director had perfectly ordinary feet leads you nowhere. It’s a curiosity cul-de-sac. 

Good trivia questions make you want more trivia questions. They open your world a bit. They give you a small pulse of dopamine, a momentary desire to travel to Brazil, or to rewatch “Thunderball,” or to finally figure out what the deal was with John Quincy Adams. To give you a sense of our Trivia Night contest — you can still register here — I’ve included some questions from recent years. If they don’t stimulate you to want to learn more, if they don’t lead to other conversations, if they don’t compel you to share them with friends, then maybe our contest is not for you. Try them on for size, then come out and try your hand at the real thing:

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