Big minds relish trivial thoughts at annual fundraiser

By Mary Carey
Staff Writer

Published on October 26, 2007

Another year, another chance for glory at the annual Trivia Bee, a local institution, now in 13th year, sponsored by the Amherst Education Foundation.

The Daily Hampshire Gazette team (Nick Grabbe, Noah Hoffenberg, Scott Merzbach and me, Mary Carey) came this close to reclaiming the winners' plaque that was ours a few years ago.

"Name the Seven Dwarfs" was the challenge that stumped the team and clinched the championship for the Amherst Area Chamber of Commerce team, dubbed the Academic Ambassadors, and made up of Adam Seigel, Joan Temkin, Patty Brandts and Donna Slocumbe.

The Gazette and the Wanderers, consisting of Hill Boss, Bryan Harvey, Leo Sartori and Jennifer Webb, tied for second.

"Both Patty and Donna knew them," Temkin said of those maddening dwarfs. Brandts and her coworkers at a previous job had dressed up for Halloween as the dwarfs. Brandts, Temkin and Slocumbe are now colleagues at the Chamber. Seigel is the president of Academic Ambassadors, a service providing discounted hotel and car rental rates for academic and nonprofit travelers, and the team sponsor.

Seigel was the team's sports expert, "but he knew a lot more than sports," said Temkin, who is also the Town Meeting moderator in Pelham.

"We are ridiculously excited, especially me, because I was the only returning trivia team member," Temkin said. "We will be defending champions next year, you can count on it."

So be it. The Gazette team will be back too. Count on that, ambassadors.

Question writer Tom Porter will also be back, he assured About Amherst. It was his first year writing questions with the help of Joe Lastowski, a fellow member of the Questions Committee. The previous question writers, who had been doing the honors for 10 years, passed the torch.

"You have to have a curious mind," Porter, who owns Elite Health Care, a senior home health care company, explained about what it takes to be a Trivia Bee question writer. "You see things, and you say, 'Oh, I wonder how many people actually know that?'"

For instance, Porter was reaching into his pocket for change to buy coffee at Cumberland Farms the other day. "I drink cheap coffee," he said. "If you bring your own cup, it's only a dollar vs. designer coffee, which is $3 and doesn't really taste any better."

He started wondering which coins he should try to get rid of to lighten the load of change in his pocket. Thus was created the question of which weighs more - a penny or a dime?

If you guessed the penny, you're right, although it only weighs more than a dime by a few hundredths of a gram, according to Porter.

He wrote a follow-up question asking whether five dimes or two quarters weighs more, but it wasn't asked. If you guessed they weigh the same, you're right again.

"Beyond the penny, all the denominations amounting to the same number of cents are equal," Porter said. "Five dimes equal two quarters. Four quarters equal the exact weight of a silver dollar."

As for the question of how many flowers there are on an Oreo cookie, his daughter was adding Oreos to a recipe, when she and Porter got to talking about why they are so crunchy. Porter suggested it was because the flower pattern on the cookie gave it lot of surface area. He looked up Oreo cookies online, of course, and discovered there are 12 flowers on the sandwich cookie.

It was a tough cookie of a question, but Porter thinks it's good to have some hard ones. The standard-issue geography, history and science questions, "virtually every team got those correct," he observed. "The question about the current longest-sitting Supreme Court justice," John Paul Stevens, "every team got it correct and I wouldn't have guessed that would happen. I thought half to three-quarters would get those right," Porter said. "Very intelligent groups come to the Trivia Bee."

In Porter's view, the best questions are the ones that separate the typical triviameister from the specialists. For instance, what was Babe Ruth's lifetime batting average? (.342) "There would be specialized people who would know that and others would not have a clue," Porter said.

He suggested this trick for remembering how many dwarfs befriended Snow White: Two S's, two D's, three emotions. Sleepy, Sneezy, Doc, Dopey, Happy, Bashful and Grumpy.

Bah, Humbug!

Meetings

MONDAY: Select Board, 6:30 p.m., Town Room, Town Hall, joint meeting with the Jones Library Board of Trustees.

TUESDAY: Kanegasaki Sister City Committee, 6:30 p.m., Senior Center, Bangs Center.

WEDNESDAY: Joint Capital Planning Committee, 8 a.m., Town Room, Town Hall; Budget Coordinating Group, 1:30 p.m., Town Room, Town Hall; Select Board, Town Commercial Relations Committee Zoning Subcommittee, 5 p.m., Town Room, Town Hall.

THURSDAY: Jones Library Board of Trustees, 7 p.m., North Amherst Library; Open Space and Recreation Plan meeting, 7 p.m., Munson Library.

Contact Mary Carey at mary.carey@att.net with ideas for Around Amherst.