pigpencil

About Us

We are Sandy Wood and Kara Kovalchik, a happily-married couple living in the beautiful Detroit suburb of Birmigham, Michigan. Kara is originally from nearby Warren, Michigan, while Sandy was born and raised in tiny Danielsville, Georgia. After years of skating by as underachievers, we finally discovered our niche. We began providing trivia for various sources in 1993, and developed America Online’s Pop Culture Trivia game, which we hosted weekly for more than seven years. We researched and wrote nearly 18,000 pop culture trivia questions during this time, and several thousand others in various categories.

In 2002, we became research editors for mental_floss magazine, supplemented in 2003 by positions as editorial directors of the Tidbits newspaper. Four million readers enjoy our content each week in Tidbits, and hundreds of thousands more in mental_floss magazine and on mentalfloss.com. We’ve composed material for CNN-Headline News, Reader’s Digest, and dozens of public and private organizations.

Our trivia has been featured in three page-a-day calendars, two card games, and a board game. In 2005, we served as judges for World Trivia Night in Ottawa, Canada. Our first two trivia books, The Snapple Aptitude Test and The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Not So Useless Facts, were published in 2006. The latter, an Alpha Books gift hardcover, proved so popular that readers requested a sequel, which was published the following year. Later in 2007, we completed our fourth book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fun FAQs, released in May 2008. While we’ve yet to personally appear on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, we’ve served as phone-a-friend for three of the show’s contestants. (And no, none of them gave us a cent.)

We’d love to explain what we did in our spare time, and will let you know if and when we ever have any. In those few moments we do have to relax, we enjoy classic rock, vintage TV, bad movies, and pop culture collectibles. We have an obnoxious cat named Tweak and an ever-growing collection of Mr. Pibb and Yellow Submarine memorabilia.

Feel free to contact us at sandy@pigpencil.com