Happy Birthday Trebek: An Ode to Trivia
Posted July 23, 2015 by Alexandra Bernson
Wednesday, July 22nd was a very important day because it concerns a very important man… at least for me. It is the day that Alex Trebek, host of Jeopardy, turned 75 years old. The first person I knew who was also named Alex, I grew up watching him host Jeopardy. To this day, I love that show and become glued to the TV if I stumble upon it. I have been tempted to buy cable solely so that I could watch Jeopardy every night at 7:30pm. Alex Trebek and Jeopardy are most likely the reason for my love of knowledge and trivia, which itself is most likely the reason why I am pursuing library science. A general knowledge of everything tends to come in handy in this line of work!
And doesn’t Mr. Trebek look amazing for 75?
But to return to the subject at hand: trivia. Now, when I say I love trivia, I don’t think you really understand. I LOVE trivia. It makes me so excited. If I know I’m going to trivia that night, I look forward to it all day. I start bouncing on my bar stool. Give me that little pad of paper and the nub of a golf pencil and I am ready to go. I’m terrible at coming up with clever, punny names for my team, but man am I good at trivia. Best subjects: literature, history, Latin.
Sometimes I go through trivia withdrawal and start Googling random things because I haven’t collected any seriously useless knowledge. My friends roll their eyes after they ask what seems to be an unanswerable or rhetorical question and I respond, “Actually…” I never used to read non-fiction and now I’m picking up books like “Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World,” eager to discover new random information that my friends will beg me to stop reciting to them.
I have an insatiable need to know how everything is made, what it is made out of, how it was made before, who made it, who thought about it, and what thoughts lead to that thought… I want to know dates, names, and places and the little quirky stories about each date, name, and place… I want to know why “ghost” is spelled with an “h” (Flemish printers) and what pigeons did before humans built cities (the jury’s still out on that one). I love meeting people in strange or archaic or completely foreign careers and jobs because I want to know all about what they do and how they do it. I will go on any walking tour every conceived by a human mind.
Thankfully, Boston is the perfect place to be a trivia nerd. According to a 2012 article, Stump Trivia hosts 150 team trivia competitions every week in this city. It seems like any and every bar in Boston, Cambridge, or the area’s surrounding towns probably has a trivia night of some kind. Personally, I frequent the Joshua Tree on Davis Square every Wednesday night at 8PM sharp. So if you’re in the Boston area and you don’t already have a trivia bar night of choice yourself, use this map to find a good place on the night of your choice. As if cold beer on a hot summer night couldn’t get any better.
Thank you, Alex Trebek! And Happy Birthday!