Conference Report: 2002 LISA Quiz Show

At last, the culmination of two days of my efforts (as well as a lot of time from Rob, Dan, our volunteer testers, our production staff, and so on): The Quiz Show. We went through the usual 3-contestants-per-round, 3-rounds-plus-finals again. Categories included Batman, Celebrity Geeks, Famous Lovers, Hosts (famous hosts), Name That Daemon, News Anchors (fill in the missing half of the name or the partner), Parse This (anagrams for "parse"), Showbiz, and Unix Files.

All three initial rounds were close-fought matches with the winner decided only in the last few questions. The inidividual round winners were Cory Bosley, Doug Hughes, and Paul Sand. The grand prize winner was Paul Sand, beating Doug Hughes by a narrow margin of 600 points (or the last 2 questions).

Three funny moments from the show are worth mentioning:

• One of the movie-songs audio categories had "Name the movie" as the question. The audio clue was "Hot Pattootie" from Rocky Horror Picture Show (in the original, not in the Rocky Horror Muppet Show version). The three on-stage contestants were flummoxed (hey, it's hard with 800+ of your peers staring at you and bright lights in your face!). The audience was virtually all seat-dancing, waving in unison and in time to the music.
  
  
• In the "Kiddie songs" category, the question was "What did the protagonist try to accomplish" to the "High Hopes" song, and the timer buzzed out-of-time, the audience began singing — and kept singing up through the chorus. Completely unexpected.
  
  
• In the "Bible" category, contestants were to name the other half of a pair (like "________ and Goliath"). The contestant got it right, then got the bonus question: "What made this event noteworthy or unusual?" His answer was "He's even bigger than YOU, Rob!" We gave him the points.
  
  

Grand fun.

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