Ramblin' with Roger

JEOPARDY! Part 8

Given that mental and emotional breakdown in the JEOPARDY! round, I’m not that far off the lead, only $800. While they set up the Double JEOPARDY! board, more water, more powder for the forehead.

The categories are Brahmins, The Untouchables, Television, Put ‘Em In Order, This Is Your Life: Woodrow Wilson, and Literary Crosswords M. Well, television should be OK, and maybe Wilson, but this is not looking great.

I start with Television for $200, get Frasier.

Television for $400- the first of the two Daily Doubles! And it’s a Video.

Score Tom $2100, Roger $2200, Amy $2800.

OK, if I bet enough, and get it right, I can take the lead for the first time! I can say, “I held the lead once!” I bet $1200. (If I get it WRONG, I’ll still have the value of the highest clue on the board.)

Jason Alexander (from Seinfeld) says on screen: “This actor co-starred with me on a sitcom called “E/R” before starring in the medical series “E.R.”

So what do YOU think?

I actually watched the earlier show, which starred Elliot Gould, and I also read about it in People magazine after the latter show began.

“Who was George Clooney?”
“You guessed right,” Alex said. It wasn’t a guess.

Then Amy started taking off, getting several responses. I managed to get a couple in Crosswords (including Mohicans), and three under Wilson: his wife Edith ($200), his general John Pershing ($400), and his socialist nemesis Eugene Debs ($800) – that answer somehow came right out of high school social studies.

I put some Popes in order for $400.
Then I pick the $600 clue in that category. It’s the OTHER Daily Double!
With the furious back and forth, I was genuinely surprised to find that I was leading: Tom $4100, Roger $7400, Amy $7000. Put ‘Em in Order: the category made me nervous. It could be ANYTHING. If it were Chinese dynasties, I’m sunk. I bet a conservative $1000.

“Oklahoma statehood, California statehood, Nebraska statehood.”

What’s your guess?

There was this map in my Social Studies class in 5th or 7th grade. It showed the country sometime before the Civil War. All the states were in green, the territories in brown. Incongruously, past this vast expanse of territories starting in the Midwest, California was also in green.

So one thing I knew: California became a state in 1850, the year after the Gold Rush. Oklahoma became a state in the 20th Century; if you’ve seen or heard the musical, you probably know that- actually 1907.
When did Nebraska become a state? Suddenly the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 flashed in my mind; I had no idea what it meant. In any case, I said, “California statehood, Nebraska statehood, Oklahoma statehood.” That was correct. Nebraska didn’t become a state until 1867, but no matter.

I only get a couple more right, but one was pivotal to the game.

Brahmins for $800 was asking for the first prime minister of India. Amy said Gandhi, which was incorrect. I rang in, and suddenly thought, “Oh, no, I’m wrong.” My first idea was that it was Nehru, but then I recalled, no, no, he was in the 1960s. Remember the Nehru jacket? But, having nothing better to say, I replied: “Who was Nehru?” and it was correct. ( Nehru was a long-time leader. )

That was a $1600 swing late in the game. If she had gotten it right, I would have had $8800 and Amy, $9200. But instead, at the end of Double JEOPARDY!, it’s Tom $5100, Roger $9600, Amy $8400. The Final JEOPARDY! category is World Capitals. What should I bet and what will they ask?

Continued on Saturday, July 23

Rove Must Go 2

The RNC says that the “extreme left is attempting to define the modern Democrat[ic] party by rabid partisan attacks, character assassination and endless negativity.” Actually those last three phrases seem to describe Karl Rove!

It Appears That Karl Rove Is In Serious Trouble, by John W. Dean, who knows something of Presidential scandals.

Rove Leak is Just Part of Larger Scandal By Daniel Schorr, who covered that Presidential scandal Dean knows so well. (The Christian Science Monitor)

What W REALLY calls Rove

At the Movies w/ Carol and Roger

I had this old girlfriend to whom I used to say, “She’s tidied up and I can’t FIND anything!” This used to bug her. A LOT. I don’t know if it was because I said it a lot, because I referred to her in the third person, or because she didn’t like Thomas Dolby.

So, I don’t say that to my wife Carol. I may THINK it, but I don’t SPEAK it. In the past month, I realized that I have been missing my baseball glove, my binoculars, and this great pair of sandals that I bought in Barbados in 1999. I knew where all of them WERE, but not their current whereabouts, and I made sure to let her know that. Then, last week, I looked in my armoire, and there were my baseball glove and my binoculars! When Carol wanted to clear out the guest room, she asked me to find another place for them, and I must have forgotten? Oops. (Anyway, they’re BACK in the guest room, where I can find them NEXT time. Don’t tell her.)

Carol and I saw TWO movies in two days this week! Maybe that’s not such an event in YOUR household, and two years ago, it wouldn’t have been such an event in OUR household, but it sure the heck is now. We opted against seeing Fantastic Four since Carol is unfamiliar with the characters; Johnny Storm is the name of the character, not the actor. (But to get links to more FF reviews than you’re ever likely to read, go see “ol’ reliable Fred” – July 13).

Cinderella Man

I took a day off work on Monday after the reunion. Lydia went to daycare. We went to see a matinee of Cinderella Man, the story of boxer James J. Braddock. I think it’s very hard telling a story like this where the outcome is already known, at least by me. When I was a kid, I could name probably every heavyweight champion from John L. Sullivan to Muhammad Ali. Of course, that was in the day when there was but one sanctioning body, not three or four.

If I say that Ron Howard is a competent filmmaker, it sounds like being damned with faint praise, but I don’t mean it to be so. Cinderella Man is more a story about a man who happens to box for a living because we see the man behind the boxer as well. If it is not The Best Boxing Movie Ever Made (that would be Raging Bull), it is a well-made film about a very good man and his family. That it doesn’t descend to a maudlin weepie is undoubtedly a function of the direction, the script, and the acting of Russell Crowe, teamed up with Howard again after the award-winning A Beautiful Mind. Some of the fight scenes were realistically bloody, and Carol (and, OK, I) did turn away for a moment or two. I think the mediocre box office has been a function of 1) the subject matter (which doesn’t grab either a lot of teens or a lot of women, I understand), and 2) the title, which makes sense if you see the movie or are 75, but is confusing otherwise. Too bad.

Mad Hot Ballroom

My wife is a teacher of English as a Second Language. If you’re a teacher, or work with children, or are a parent, or are thinking about becoming a parent, or are a citizen concerned about the welfare of children, you should see Mad Hot Ballroom, as we did Tuesday night, thanks to our marvelous new babysitter. (This means you, Mrs. Lefty.) For about a decade, there has been a 10-week curriculum in ballroom dancing in the schools of New York City. Last year, I saw a segment on CBS Sunday Morning about P.S. 144 in Queens, which participated in (and won) a citywide competition of 5th graders in the tango, foxtrot, merengue, et al.

The movie is based on the same competition a year later, but it focuses on three schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The kids are from a wide range of cultures. I enjoyed listening to some of the preternaturally wise girls, especially Emma, and watching the boys, who find that touching girls isn’t THAT awful. Many of the teachers are men, and it shows how important those male role models are to the boys. It’s a film of hope and inspiration in the midst of poverty.

All in all, a pretty good way to start to celebrate Carol’s birthday week. Today is THE day. BTW, over the past weekend, she went up to the attic and found the sandals (which SHE buried up there, so you know.) And we’re going to celebrate by going to see Arena Football? Really. We got free tickets, and the regular season ends this weekend, and the Albany team isn’t going to get into the playoffs, and I’ve always wanted to go…

Happy birthday, Carol. I love you.

USA News

I’ve been musing over the London bombing fall week. Not about why. One of my fellow bloggers, Greg Burgas has an interesting theory on that. He’s kidding. Sorta.

It’s more about what is the news and why do we respond the way we do. It was the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill that famously said: “All politics is local.” And in THIS country, it seems that almost all NEWS is local. Oh, yeah, there’s an international segment in the broadcast, but it’s so often about OUR soldier in Iraq or OUR local celebrity. When Ismail Merchant of the Merchant-Ivory films’ fame died, it was a LOCAL story in the local paper, because Merchant had a farm in nearby Columbia County. (Two mentions of Columbia County in three days. Gads.) Of course, it does not always have to be positive. The Houston trucker who transported illegal immigrants in his vehicle, several of whom died, is a local story because he used to live in Schenectady.

Bombings

Some guy I read was complaining, and this is a heavy-duty paraphrase, “London was bombed. Why is the second lead, ‘Is America next?’ Why is it always about us?”

If someone conducted a poll, and the responses were honest, I’m betting that the 7/7 bombing in London was more palpable to most Americans than…let’s take a comparable example, the 3/11 bombing in Madrid last year. Both attacks likely the work of the same organization, and twice as many people died in Spain than in Great Britain. So why IS that? Is it because the Brits speak our language? (Actually, we speak THEIR language, but let’s not complicate things here.) Is it because of our common heritage? (They’re more like US.)

Who’s she?

I remember seeing a story on ABC News about a young black woman of 22 who disappeared in Illinois, and her mother, who was NOT well-spoken, trying to get the media involved in her disappearance. Her mother was told, “No, she’s 22. NO one would be interested.” Then Dru Sjodin, a 22-year old blonde student from North Dakota goes missing, and it’s national news. Indeed, now there’s Dru’s Law, the National Sex Offender Public Database Act of 2005 being offered up in Congress. Meanwhile, I don’t even remember the name of that young black woman or know whether she was ever found. Was it that Dru Sjodin looked more like US (well, not me specifically…)

Why Laci Peterson and not other victims of violent crimes have something to do, I’m told, with identification with Laci – heck, we call her by her first name, as though we KNEW her.

Their disasters

Bam, Iran was destroyed by an earthquake on December 26, 2003. The initial reports said that 30,000 were killed, later upped to 43,000. It barely made two news cycles. I had initially thought that the reason that the Christmastime tsunami of 2004 was so newsworthy, long before anyone knew the death toll, was because there were so many people with video cameras showing the devastation, and that may be true. But inevitably, there were those stories about how Americans and people like US lost their lives because we can RELATE to them.

Indeed, there have been floods in Bangladesh and China over the past 40 years that have taken more lives than the tsunami, but that barely hit our consciousness, if at all. Maybe it was also the novelty of the tsunami. Or maybe it’s that news people like to say “tsunami” and hope that the graphics department spells it correctly.

When I’m close to the border with Canada and watch the CBC news, it seemed to be more…balanced. When I watched the news in Barbados in 1999, the same thing- a greater awareness of the whole world picture.

How is it that the Great Melting Pot can be so xenophobic? I ask, not out of anger, but out of concern.

(I always hate posing questions that I really can’t answer.)

RSE

I’m excited/nervous about the Discovery launch today. I didn’t sleep so well because my subconscious was thinking on that, because it’s hot again, and because I haven’t played racquetball all week. I have what’s known as “tennis elbow”. I have an ailment named after a sport I don’t even play. They should call it “racquet sport elbow”, or RSE, to also cover badminton and squash; I doubt most people will call it lateral epicondylitis, mostly because most of us can’t even pronounce it, let alone spell it.