My wife and I just finished watching a tape of last night's episode of Hey! Spring of Trivia. Hey is a Japanese variety show where short documentaries are shown about various items of trivia (as sent in by viewers). Following each mini-documentary, a celebrity panel evaluates each bit of trivia by pressing a button that says "hey" (in English it would mean, "really?" or "wow.") The item of trivia that scores the most "Hey"s is the daily winner.
During the final segment of each show, the production staff goes to pretty great lengths to answer a viewer's question. (My favorite one of those was when someone asked how much the contents of a train station news stand would cost. Some of the crewmembers took a camera to a station in the morning, and then told the lady working there that they'd take everything. They did! Everything added up to about $9000.)
Today's trivia was: 1) There is a smelly shoe contest in Vermont. 2) There is a restaurant in Japan where fried sea anemonies are served. 3) Racing bicycles can be pedaled backward. (They even tried a backward race!) and 4) There was a marathon runner who stopped during a race to take a crap, but he still won the race.
The "Seed of Trivia" (Toribia no Tane) segment asked how many spins it would take to make a professional figure skater dizzy. They got this one professional skater from Nagoya, and put her in a spinning machine. After spinning her around and around, they had her walk a straight line. In the end, the lady (Miki Ando--very charming!) was able to withstand 1000 rotations without getting dizzy. That was a really fun segment!
The sad thing about the show is that Spike TV keeps changing the time that they broadcast the show (not a good sign!) It used to be on Thursdays at 8:30 and Saturdays at 9:30. Now it is buried on Sunday night/ Monday morning at midnight. I hope that they keep the show once Spike goes through its retooling later this year! Otherwise we will just have to rent episodes of it in Japanese from the local Japanese video store.