I am not as good at Trivial Pursuit as you think

Posted at 22:58 on 15 May 2007

I've been humbled. We played Trivial Pursuit at our church life group this evening. Guys versus gals. Everyone expected my team to win simply by virtue of the fact that I was on it, but unfortunately, we lost. :(

Contrary to popular belief, it turns out that I don't know everything. Some people seem to think of me as a bit of a walking Wikipedia, and to be sure, maybe I have accumulated a bit too much useless information in my head from browsing said Wikipedia, but there is still a heck of a lot that I know absolutely nothing about. Such as celebrities, for instance.

The fact of the matter is that the latest version of Trivial Pursuit seems very celebrity oriented. I got the impression that the majority of the questions were about characters such as Britney Spears. Even some of the geeky questions were about Britney Spears. And I know nothing whatsoever about Britney Spears, other than that she's a pop singer or something like that. I've never really followed the celebrity scene in any depth -- I simply don't tend to find it all that interesting.

I think this is probably why the ladies' team won in the end though. Celebrities and the like tend to attract more interest from women. Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has published a book that goes into quite some detail about this kind of thing: he says that men's brains are hard-wired for understanding and building systems, such as cars, computers and the offside rule in football, whereas women's brains tend to focus more on empathising: subjects such as people, soap operas and Celebrity Big Brother. Make of that whatever you like (if you don't like it, just put it down to the fact that he's the cousin of the man behind Ali G and Borat) -- I'm just making it my excuse for not sweeping the board with useless trivia about pop stars.