What is Composition?

"Somebody writes trivia. It doesn't just come forth, ex nihilo, fully formed, from a Parker Brothers printing press, from the lips of Alex Trebek, or from a flashing, whirring supercomputer of the kind that Captain Kirk could handily overload with illogical contradictions. Somebody has to sit down and physically write the questions."

-I'm not a huge Star Trek fan, but I definitely appreciate these little references.

"[Martin Brown's] career took an odd left turn while he was doing some work for John Gray, the author who, in 1993, shocked astronomers and anthropologists when he discovered that men and women, instead of being from Earth as long believed, were in fact from Mars and Venus, respectively."

"He loves trivia. We met only minutes ago, and he's already told me that 'Calcium ions are what make lobster antennae oscillate.' I normally save that kind of thing for the second or third date."

-I don't. I'm very free with my trivia--something of a trivia-floosy, if you will.

"[Martin] answers his own question. 'To me, the benefit is knowing that the sky that I look up and see and the stars that I see are not the stars that the dinosaurs saw. And the stars that people living on this planet three million years from now, that they see, will not be the stars that I saw...it matters because you understand that the universe is not a constant. It only seems like a constant, my friend because your life is a'--he snaps his fingers--'in time. So when you realize that, you connect to it something bigger. It's the same thing that spirituality gets people. It connects them to something bigger.' The spiritual power of trivia. Somehow, as we stand silently considering the ageless coast redwoods, it almost makes sense."

"Millionaire wasn't Ben [Gruber]'s first game show experience--he started out as a production assistant on the kids' geographic quiz Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, so you might recognize him from his on-air appearances as a space alien, a chicken, a shark (recurring), and a giant piece of cake."


"I took apart trivia questions and interviewed trivia writers hoping to find the 'quintessence,' the life-giving force, that makes trivia tick. I wanted to hold in my hand the mysterious Element X that differentiates a humdrum run-of-the-mill fact from the kind of sparkling, brilliant, memorable fact that spawns trivia questions, the hidden factor that separates trivia from minutiae.
Well, defining 'good trivia' turned out to be elusive, but the more trivia I look at, the more I realize that, like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about porn, I know it when I see it. And at least you don't need to hide trivia under your mattress so your mom doesn't find out."

-Unfortunately, some smart people these days do have to hide it so their parents/peers don't find out. A lot of folks seem to be threatened by others' intelligence and creativity and so they try to stifle it rather than encourage it. Each of us has our own special gifts to give and we should encourage each other to use what we have (whatever it is) for the betterment of the world.