Trivial pursuits pay off for Massachusetts Rotarian

Question: How many lawyers does it take to write 300 trivia questions?

Answer: One, when it’s Simon J. Brighenti Jr., a member of the Rotary Club of West Springfield, Mass., USA.

Brighenti has parlayed a lifelong passion for trivia into an unusual avocation: writing questions and answers for trivia games. He coauthored the electronic version of NBC’s popular TV quiz show 1 vs. 100, writing approximately 300 questions – along with 900 possible answers – for the tabletop game.

Question: What kind of quiz questions come from the pen of this full-time lawyer, active Rotarian, longtime Jeopardy fan, avid Connect Four player, sometimes poet, and volunteer coach for his children’s baseball teams?

Answer: Brighenti is equally adept at crafting questions on topics as varied as ancient Rome, contemporary athletics, and pop culture.

“I’m pretty much a generalist, though I have a special interest in sports and history,” Brighenti says. “I’ve also been a movie buff since childhood, and I minored in Latin and classical studies in college.”

Question: How does he do it?

Answer: Writing trivia questions is, well, anything but a trivial pursuit.

It takes a certain skill to turn a nugget of information into an interesting question of 20 words or less. “If a fact is too obscure or has no entertainment value, no one will care about the question, and the answer possibilities have to be crafted to sound reasonable,” Brighenti says.

“Although writing quiz questions is a sideline,” he adds, “it’s nice to have a use for a lifetime of trivia knowledge.”