All the news that's fit to broadcast...

You've got to be alert at all times for stuff you can use when you're on a quiz show. Once you get into that habit of mind, you start doing it automatically. I can have the news on and be only minimally engaged with it, multitasking right along and reading, writing, practicing a dance move, playing with my son, then all of a sudden--pow!--I get hit with a factoid. I've learned to filter out all the commentary and grab onto those cold, hard facts that make for good trivia fodder. And here's one from last night:

Chris Matthews (of whom I've become very fond, despite his weird pronunciation of "Amurrica"...) on MSNBC was talking about President Obama's trip to Europe for the G-20 conference. Chris mentioned that Britain's Queen Elizabeth II has met 11 U.S. presidents, all of them except Lyndon Johnson. Now, I give professional courtesy to MSNBC's fact-checking department, so I won't bother to verify it further--that's good enough for me.

And in it, you've got several ways to cook up a question. You might get asked, oh, for about $100K on Millionaire, or in the $1,000 slot on Jeopardy!, which U.S. president was the only one not to meet Queen Elizabeth II (of course, Jeop! being Jeop! would have some other descriptor in the question as a clue...). Or for a really wild and woolly high-level Millionaire question, you might get asked who was the first U.S. president to meet her. I calculate that as Harry Truman, though Chris didn't mention it. Thus: If she's met 11 of them, all of the most recent but Johnson, it stands to reason that there have been 12 of them she could have met. She just met Obama, so working backwards that gives us: GW Bush, Clinton, GHW Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, (skip Johnson), Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman. Truman turned over the office to Eisenhower in 1953, so you have to calculate carefully and not assume he met her. (I just verified that I'm right by checking the USA Today story about her meeting with Obama, which mentioned that she'd met Truman when she was still a princess.) 

Btw, the queen was in my $100K Millionaire question, so I'll always be fond of her...not to mention that Helen Mirren did a bang-up job portraying her... :)

Every time you watch the news, be listening for just this kind of thing and file it away. Newspapers like USA Today are fantastic for inserting little factoids in to liven up their stories--read it regularly and you'll pick up a lot. Be reading popular newspapers and magazines written for the adult general reader. Pay special attention to what we in media call sidebars (those little boxes that contain more information); often they're filled with interesting trivia. And pay attention to the captions on the illustrations, which are often written with an interesting fact in them.

Every time a big news event happens, such as Obama's trip to Europe, news outlets are pouring forth copy describing it. While your aim as a human being is to be well-informed, your aim as a potential trivia maven is to think like a quiz show writer and be hyper-vigilant for those wonderful little bits of flotsam and jetsam that could turn themselves into questions...and remember, one little bit of flotsam can twist itself into multiple lengths of jetsam in the hands of a Millionaire or Jeop! writer...