Lawrence gears up for 47th annual trivia contest

APPLETON - It’s almost trivia time once again at Lawrence University.

The university’s annual Great Midwest Trivia Contest begins its 47th year on Friday. For 50 straight hours, questions will be broadcast over the Internet, with teams competing from all over the world.

The contest includes questions of varying point values centered around rotating themes that last for an hour.

University president Jill Beck will open the contest with the traditional reading of last year’s “Super Garruda,” a 100-point question organizers claim to be “virtually unanswerable.”

In 2011, 69 teams competed, including a team from Japan. Fifteen of the teams came from the Lawrence campus. Trivia Pirates ARGH!! beat out the Trivialeaks 1,275-1,260 for the off-campus championship. Morgan Freeman’s Plus Plantz’s Pecorous Pastures Propose Presenting Persnickety Penguins with Ponchos won in the on-campus division.

Broadcast on student radio station WLFM until 2005, the annual contest began in 1966.