News You Can Bruise for 2004 December 17

Last year I told you about a Japanese anti-quiz show where panelists register how much they are surprised by particular facts. Well, it's made it across the ocean in the form of Spike TV's Hey! Spring of Trivia, which has been dubbed in often-facetious Spike TV manner but is otherwise fun. I recommend it, even though they keep driving the point home again and again in a way that doesn't translate well, and so it takes half an hour for them to get through five pieces of trivia. That's what Tivo is for.

Once I watched an episode, I figured out where the element of competition comes in. It's not a competition between the panelists but between the pieces of trivia themselves (and, implicitly, between the viewers who send in the trivia). There's also a fun bit called "seed of trivia" where the show takes viewer questions and does experiments to find the answers, thus giving birth to new pieces of trivia.

There is here a life-cycle metaphor for trivia, a competition between pieces of trivia, the idea of rating their fitness by how surprising they are. Why not go all the way and, Dog Bites Dog-style, breed champion pieces of trivia from each week's winners? Surely these would be the most unbelievable pieces of trivia ever to pass human lips.

PS: On the Japanese channel in SF there is a show called Hey! Hey! Hey! which I took to be the original version of Hey! Spring of Trivia, but it is some sort of variety show spin-off, or maybe it just has a similar name and the animation is done by the same production company. Also, they stopped showing Project X, which sucks.