You know, if enough of us do this, the amount of background noise will render us all anonymous again.

I especially like this assumption on the part of the FBI:

Elahi [...] believes the only thing that saved him was a common culture - the ability to quote the lyrics of country songs, or talk about college football, the sort of things a terrorist would find very hard to fake.

Because "inculcated in American pop culture" and "terrorist" are mutually exclusive categories. If only Timothy McVeigh had watched more football, the federal building in Oklahoma City would still be standing.

2. No this is like the WWII movies where they ask the captured spy "Who won the World Series in 1938?" As a kid I always worried that i would be shot because I didn't know the answer. Way before google, obviously.

You know, if enough of us do this, the amount of background noise will render us all anonymous again.

I doubt it; the enormous amounts of data that people are now able to plow through are unreal. Imagine if everyone did this and Google indexed it; maybe we'd find out that free will really is a fiction.

Because "inculcated in American pop culture" and "terrorist" are mutually exclusive categories.

Reminds me of the old story about determining citizenship by asking people, during WWII (I think), who won the World Series.

Certainly an interesting shibboleth, college football.

Man, these days it'd be questions about music, and I'd get shot so quickly. "Blink-182? I've heard of that, really. No, I don't know the name of the lead sing--" [falls on the floor, shot by the guard]

Elahi’s life for the next few months involved dozens of interviews with the FBI, finally culminating in nine back to back polygraphs, which finally ‘cleared’ him.

Uh, isn't it widely known everywhere outside the FBI and CIA that polygraph tests are a crock?

6. Deprnds on the unit. You could be asked about country, rap, or techno. Dead each time.

Yeah, see, I got nothing. Unless they asked for Elvis Costello's real name, and even then I didn't know the middle name.

Fascinating. Why does this dude travel so much? To look at his page, you would think he lived in hotels and airports. Do all famous conceptual artists travel this much? Is that why they feel so alienated all the time? I know I’d feel the urge to make strange assemblages out of neon tubing if I was on an airplane once a week.

If they asked me about television, sports or current movies I'd be shot stone dead as not only a evildoer, but as a culturally illiterate evildoer.

Elvis Costello's real name is Bob McManus.

That would explain a lot.

I think that they just shot Emerson.

9,11: Possibly mine was not the only family in which Arts and Entertainment was the best bet for getting an unanswerable Trivial Pursuit question (followed by Sports and Leisure).

Oh dude, I *hate* the sports questions. Give me A&E any time, they're mostly just old Beatles questions anyway.

My parents recently got a new Trivial Pursuits set to replace the 20-year-old one they had before, and the sports and A&E questions are sort of impossible for people like us who don't follow sports or read celebrity magazines. Also the history questions contained massive overrepresentation of the past ten years. It made it a lot harder and less fun.

16: For us, there were more bits of sports stuff that had stuck somewhere along the way. Plenty that we didn't know, but some that we did. A&E was just all this TV and movie and music stuff that we had no clue about.

17: That's depressing. I was half thinking it might be fun to play that game again (haven't in years).

What was the original brown category? Something and literature? Just literature? That was absolutely the easiest one, and then I think they turned it into something else altogether.

It was literature, but they turned it into "miscellaneous" or something.

Fuckers.

I played the set from 1981 (the year I was born) last week, I don't know why anyone plays anything newer.

The all-time classic was when my cousin from LA showed up to visit with his girlfriend. After a quick visit to the mall--"Do you have a mall around here?" was about the second thing out of her mouth when she walked in the door--she expressed interest in playing Trivial Pursuit. She'd even brought the game along with her. The Young Players' Edition.

So did you play?

Yeah. The problem was that everyone at the table but her knew the answer to pretty much every question, so it wasn't a lot of fun.

And wouldn't you know it...DaveL's cousin was.......James Woods.

And now you know the rest of the story.

Yeah, I only have a clue in the old Edition (besides A&E). I especially like the questions where the answer is "The USSR."

I bought the 1986 edition of Trivial Pursuit at a garage sale a few years ago, and I swear to god, the answer to every second question was "Max Headroom."

I have the honor of appearing in a Trivial Pursuit question from the original edition:

"Who mated with the devil and gave birth to Andrew John?"

I always answer sports questions "Baltimore Orioles". I'm seldom right. But I do know the name of the only major league ballplayer to be born in Rybnik, Czechoslovakia.

And do you answer questions pertaining to his name with his name? (Is his name "Baltimore Orioles"?)

I always get into trouble because I never know what sport a sports team plays. So when everyone was all HOORAH THE MIAMI HEAT a month or two ago, I thought the Heat was a baseball team, because I thought basketball ended early in the spring so it was obviously baseball time. Apparently basketball is now all year long or something.

Then I was boggled that North Carolina has a hockey team and they won the Stanley Cup, which I gather is a good thing to win, if you play hockey. I didn't even think there were any places it got cold enough for ice skating in NC, unless you go up to Boone.

I cannot be trusted to know anything about Sports and Leisure.

32: Pro basketball's just getting going again. So it's overlapping with the end of the baseball season.

Apparently Auerbach died today; he was 89.