Fresno Famous

Ed Stewart is a trivia guy.
He's not hardcore about it, but he has taken the Jeopardy test on-line a few times. His friends used to watch the show and play for drinks. “Drinking Jeopardy” they called it, and Stewart killed it every time. They had to convince him to wait until the question was done before answering.
He'd probably beat you at Trivial Pursuit.

So it might be good he's not competing in Fresno Pub Quiz, the trivia night he runs with his friend Adam Wall each Wednesday at The Landmark. Entry is $5 per person and registration starts at 7:30 p.m.
Actually, both Stewart and Wall are trivia guys, they'd seen pub quizzes work in other cities, and were usually at the Landmark every Wednesday anyway.
So they figured, why not?
“We liked it. We thought we'd try it,” Stewart says.

Already, people have latched on to the idea. In it's fifth week, the quiz has good Internet buzz. Last week there were 100-plus and 19 teams.

For the uninitiated, the game works like this: There are four rounds of 10 questions each, with the first question each round being a snippet of a song. They want to know the artist, the title of the song and the track length — to be used in the case of a tie. Winners are announced for each round and the team with the most right answers at the end of the night is the winner. As a bonus, the third-round winners get free drinks for the table and the bar offers drink and appetizer specials throughout the night.

Pub quizzes aren't particularly new and this isn't the first time it's been tried in town. The Fresno State History Graduate Student Association has the original trivia night, at least according to the flier. Hooters also hosted a quiz night apparently, but people were totally cheating, Wall says.
And where's the fun in that?

You should know there's no cell-phone Goggling at this pub quiz. In fact, you can't have any outside help.

“You can't Sarah Palin it,” Wall says, which is the type of reference you might need to get if you want to do well at the quiz. There's a huge cache of questions that they continually update with stuff like that. One week it was Gilbert Arenas. They search through Internet aggregators to find out what's hip with the kids — even if they don't have a clue.
“I have no idea what ‘Jersey Shore' is all about,” Wall says. But it's been a question on several nights.

There are nerdy questions (a “Star Wars” quote was a particular crowd favorite), sports, politics, and the requisite local stuff so the Fresnophiles don't get up in arms.
Do you know the elevation of Fresno?

“If it happens in the world, it's fair game,” Wall says.
But it would do you well to remember the guys are never wrong.
So, while several bands may have recorded the hit song “Blah, blah, blah,” the correct answer is Keisha (with a dollar sign S), because that's what the guys had in mind when they wrote the question.