HEADLINE: Trivial pursuits no small matter; Brain-teaser buffs stayed up all weekend answering questions posed by KVSC-FM in St. Cloud, and all in pursuit of the holy grail: the Traveling Trivia Urn.

BYLINE: John Windrow; Staff Writer

OK, quick, for 130 points: Name the 13 moons of Uranus that share names with Shakespearean characters.

Fat chance you'd have in the KVSC-FM trivia marathon.

We're talking 50-plus hours - from about 5 p.m. Friday until about 7 p.m. Sunday (the precise time down to the very second is rather trivial) - with 57 teams of detail-oriented people tackling nine questions an hour (that's 450 total) in a quest for the Traveling Trivia Urn.

Sunday evening, the team known as Those Meddling Kids was crowned 1998 champion. Second place went to Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women. Both teams are from the St. Cloud area.

At the KVSC-FM (Voice of St. Cloud) studio, nestled deep in the heart of the St. Cloud State University campus on the banks of the mighty Mississippi River (2,348 miles from its Minnesota headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico), volunteers worked the phones, compiled scores, slept under desks and chowed down as the marathon moved from hour 21 to hour 22. They were short on sleep, but not on snacks.

"A lot of people are doing it for the food," said volunteer Jim Gray, an alumnus who now works in Fargo, N.D. The trivia bout is a homecoming of sorts for St. Cloud State graduates. One came all the way from Utah.

Gray, a former KVSC programming director, stood in a sea of subs, chips, pop, cookies and corn dogs Saturday afternoon. The chow supremo is donated by area businesses.

"Usually, the nights are filled with pizzas," he said, knowingly.

Food for 30 arrived nearly every two hours for the duration of the marathon, Gray said. With about 30 people on hand at any given time, this made for quite a buffet bonanza. A crew of about 100 volunteers worked throughout the weekend.

"What else you gonna do in February?" Gray asked, knowingly. "This is the first year I can remember that it was above zero for trivia." (Note that fact for next year's contest, trivia mavens.)

Hungry for answers

"One of the reasons I do this is for all the free food," said volunteer Ron Johnson, a senior at St. Cloud State. But volunteers aren't the only ones getting fed. The station dishes out questions to the trivia-hungry teams, who phone in their answers. Many of the questions are written by sisters Emy and Maria Richardson, "on-and-off students" who say they research the questions all year. Like this:

Name the license-plate number on the car that Jan Berry from Jan and Dean was driving in his near-fatal crash in 1996.

Oh, come on, who would know that it was RIJ-775?

"That's something that someone can look up in general trivia books," Emy said.

And teams with such names as Voodoo Dolls, E.T. Corporate Panty Raiders, Animal House, Trivia Newton John, Rich Corinthian Leather, Pigs 'R Us, Bunnies That Hate and Tim Allen's Favorite Tool were out there in radioland doing just that all weekend.

Station Manager Jo McMullen said teams will go to great lengths to track down answers. Some have three or four phone lines, a computer and stacks of reference books. One year, she said, listeners were asked to name the board spaces on a Monopoly game with a "Star Wars" theme. (For example, Baltic Avenue might become Yoda's Hut.) It was deep into the night, and all the local toy stores were closed. One team called Hawaii, where stores were still open, ordered a game and talked the staff into opening it and reading them the names of the spaces on the board.

The defending champs this year were members of Animal House - a family affair at the home of Brian and Terry Hurd in Sartell, a suburb of St. Cloud. There were about 15 people at the house Saturday. The Hurds maintain a permanent trivia reference library with about 500 books, stacks of newspapers and videos. Proudly displayed in the living room was the Traveling Trivia Urn, an ugly gold-and-red knickknack that looked remarkably like someone had dropped and stepped on it.

"If it hadn't been reserved for a trophy, it'd be in some landfill," said Brian Hurd, a bit giddy from lack of sleep. "I just get a kick out of staying up all weekend doing something silly."

That's it? That's the appeal? Everyone started laughing.

"Things that weren't funny yesterday are getting funnier and funnier today," he said.

By the way, the 13 Shakespearean characters who share names with moons of Uranus are: Bianca ("The Taming of the Shrew"); Cordelia ("King Lear"); Cressida ("Troillus and Cressida"); Desdemona ("Othello"); Juliet ("Romeo and Juliet"); Ophelia ("Hamlet"); Portia ("The Merchant of Venice"); Rosalind ("As You Like It"); Ariel and Miranda ("The Tempest"), and Puck, Oberon and Titania ("A Midsummer Night's Dream").

February 9, 1998, Metro Edition