Contest
The contest begins at 10:00:37 p.m. on the Friday of last weekend in January. It ends at around midnight on Sunday for a total of approximately 50 consecutive hours. Students are appointed "trivia masters" and they administer the contest. Every year, a new head trivia master, called the "Grand Master," is appointed by the previous Grand Master. The Grand Master has the final say on any disputes.
Trivia masters make up the questions, and teams are given 3 minutes to answer each question. All teams that answer the question received its points. Most questions are worth 5 points each. In the early years of the contest, teams researched using massive numbers of books; now teams find answers using computers on the internet. At the end of the contest, several difficult questions called garrudas are asked. Teams are given 10 minutes for the first few garrudas. The final, most difficult question – dubbed the "Super Garruda" – is worth 100 points and teams are given 20 minutes. The endeavor is governed by the Trivia Credo: "Trivia is meant to be entertainment and should be perceived solely in that light." The teams with the highest scores are declared the winners in on-campus and off-campus categories, receiving prizes such as pink plastic flamingos and stainless-steel bedpans. The Great Midwest Trivia Contest is known as the "World's Longest Running Trivia Contest" because of its custom of asking the previous year's garruda as the first question of the next year's contest.
Questions used include "What was Holden Caulfield's middle name?" and "In 2004, which nation drank the most coffee per capita?" (The answers are "Morrisey" and "Finland," respectively.) The 2009 Super Garruda was "Who was going to be married next to what was the "World's Largest Cedar Bucket" in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in June 2005, before it mysteriously burned down the week before the wedding date?" (answer: James Walters and Jaki Neubauer). On-campus teams are occasionally asked to do special action questions such as composing a love song or doing a dance routine based on a theme.
Read more about this topic: Great Midwest Trivia Contest
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“Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things, that are decisive. The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale. Military and economic power is necessarily wielded by people.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
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—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
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—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)