JEOPARDY Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

The grumpy post

more alike

Every once in a while, I need to write a grumpy post. This is a piece about things that make me irritable. The parameters are not directly related to politics. However, I will argue that everything is politics.

ITEM: When there’s a health disaster of some sort, such as the E. coli outbreak in some McDonald’s in Colorado and surrounding areas, or Boeing having a series of mechanical difficulties, such as a door blowing off, there’s always that language. Lawyers probably wrote it. “We take safety seriously” or “Safety is our utmost concern.” I give McDonald’s a pass on their bad supply chain onions. But when Boeing says that, I laugh. Oh, please.

ITEM: I have heard the mantra, “We are more alike than we are different ” a lot this season, so much so that it has become a cliche. Nora O’Donnell says it frequently on the CBS Evening News. I suppose this saying is a dilution of a Maya Angelou quote: “We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unlike.”

The first version is a platitude that allows one to say we’re all the same under the skin while ignoring or denying the notion of racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like. The other says we can work at it; we must learn to see each other. These are not the same sentiments at all.

Related: James Baldwin noted, “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”

Not So Great

ITEM: A Facebook buddy wrote: “‘That’s a great question’ has become the de facto preamble to every response, in every interview, everywhere.” It’s not just interviews. It appears in a commercial for house gutter products in a faux Q&A situation.

Somebody told me a long time ago that when you say to one party, “That’s a great question,” and you don’t say that every single time, it suggests that those other people’s questions aren’t all that good. The truth is that generally speaking, almost none of these questions are all that particularly good, let alone great.

ITEM: My wife drove us through a grocery store parking lot in the proper lane. Somebody within a parking space started pulling out in front of us or into us, so my wife beeped her horn, ensuring we didn’t have a collision. The face of the other driver looked infuriated. After we went by, they came out behind us and lay on the horn. I don’t know why this bothers me, because bad drivers.

ITEM: I got this pin: “Young people are the solution, not the problem.” The former may be partly true, but it seems that the people who created the problem should help fix it.

When I went to Chautauqua in July 2024, environmentalist Bill McKibben talked about how old people can afford to get arrested more than young people because the consequences are less for them. They also have more money and political power.

This is JEOPARDY!

ITEM: In JEOPARDY! news: “The 2025 ToC will consist of 21 players, the top 20 champs from last April until December, and the winner of a 15-contestant Champions Wildcard. Also, like in past years, the ToC will immediately follow a Second Chance Competition for non-winners and a Wildcard for brief winners who didn’t make the cusp.”

Another Second-Chance thing? I got it when they did this during the writer’s strike. Now, it allows fewer people to get their chance on the Alex Trebek Stage.

ITEM: This sign is in front of 110 State St. in downtown Albany, NY, and I don’t see its purpose. If you carry many packages, does this mean you can’t use it because you’re not disabled? If I am using it, does this mean that I have to identify myself as disabled? It’s weird.

Academy Awards nominations et al.

baseball, The Daily Show, JEOPARDY!

As I’m sure I mentioned once upon a time, I pay attention to the Academy Awards nominations. In the early 1990s, I’d listen to the radio at work and jot down the major selections. Now I can wait ten minutes and find it online.

The issue of an awards snub currently seems particularly energized. Academy Award winner Whoopi Goldberg denies it happened this year but one of her The View costars says otherwise. A guy on my Facebook feed says no, and is accused of mansplaining.

THR writes: “One irony of the backlash to the Barbie snubs is that it has attempted to pit women against women. (Barbie Land would never!) One column has been excoriated for appearing to diminish the performances of the nominated actresses in defense of [Margot] Robbie.”

For me, it’s clear I need to see more performances. There are five women Best Actress in a Leading Role:

Annette Bening (Nyad)
Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon)
Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall)
Carey Mulligan (Maestro)
Emma Stone (Poor Things)

I’ve seen only Mulligan.

Likewise, these folks were nominated for Best Directing:

Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall)
Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon)
Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer)
Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things)
Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest)

I’ve seen only Oppy, so I can’t say of Greta Gerwig was snubbed or not.

Best pics

Ten films were selected as Best Picture nominees. The ones I’ve seen I’ve starred:

*American Fiction (Ben LeClair, Nikos Karamigios, Cord Jefferson and Jermaine Johnson, Producers)
Anatomy of a Fall (Marie-Ange Luciani and David Thion, Producers)
*Barbie (David Heyman, Margot Robbie, Tom Ackerley and Robbie Brenner, Producers)
*The Holdovers (Mark Johnson, Producer)
Killers of the Flower Moon (Dan Friedkin, Bradley Thomas, Martin Scorsese and Daniel Lupi, Producers)
*Maestro (Bradley Cooper, Steven Spielberg, Fred Berner, Amy Durning and Kristie Macosko Krieger, Producers)
*Oppenheimer (Emma Thomas, Charles Roven and Christopher Nolan, Producers)
*Past Lives (David Hinojosa, Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler, Producers)
Poor Things (Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone, Producers)
The Zone of Interest (James Wilson, Producer)

Time to get to the theater, where these films have either shown up for the first time or have made an Oscar nom return.

I won’t be seeing these films, though. Razzie Awards: ‘Expend4bles’ Leads Nominations. ‘Exorcist: Believer’ and ‘Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey’ also nabbed multiple mentions.

MLB HOF

I’m happy Adrián Beltré, Todd Helton, and Joe Mauer were selected for the Baseball Hall of Fame. But I’m sad that, in his 9th try out of ten chances, reliever Billy Wagner came up five votes short.

Gary Sheffield: HE was snubbed, falling off the ballot after receiving 63.9% of the vote, with 75% needed.

Next year’s ballot will include Ichiro Suzuki and CC Sabathia. Both should get in on the first ballot, with Ichiro, the only MLB player I know to have his first name on the back of his jersey, a mortal lock.

I’m sad to read that Chicago Cubs Hall of Fame infielder Ryne Sandberg has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and has begun treatment. Part of it is that my father died of the disease.

NFL playoffs

Go, Detroit Lions! General Motors is delaying a shift on Sunday so that their workers can see the Lions’ NFC title game completion against the San Francisco 49ers.

Like the return of Michael Jordan to the Bulls

I’m glad Jon Stewart is back on The Daily Show, even if it’s once a week on air, plus serving as executive producer, at least through the election. TDS veterans are thrilled. I liked the top-secret intrigue in luring him back.

J!

To my surprise, I found this season’s Celebrity JEOPARDY more interesting than the previous iteration. It’s also a lot more fun than the regular game’s interminable Champions Wildcard, where they bring back players from the past three seasons. That said, I’m rooting for Martha Bath, who won back in 1972 when Art Fleming was the host and then won again a couple of years ago.

Celebrity J! fans criticized ABC for revealing the winner ahead of the final tournament: ‘Thanks for the spoiler.’ An ad for Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night program featured the winner. (If you’ve recorded it without watching it, I’M not going to provide a spoiler.) Luckily for me, I watched it fast-forwarding through the commercials.

25 years since JEOPARDY!

WTEN-TV

25 years since JEOPARDY! Two and a half decades since the first of my two appearances on a syndicated game show. It is one of those things that people most identify with me.

I’m not going to rehash what happened. I wrote about that way back in 2005 and subsequently. Indeed, telling about it was one of the two reasons I started the blog in the first place. But I do want to reflect on why people keep bringing it up.

In June 2023, I was at the retirement party of some teachers, including a college friend of my wife. We were at a table of people I mostly did not know. Yet someone mentioned that they heard I was on the show. Then another person asked me about it, and a third gently chastised me for not bringing it up.

People in my area have won more games than I did. A woman from my town was on a show a month before my episodes did. But I had some unique advantages.

My shows were recorded in Boston, not in southern California. This meant that WTEN, Channel 10, the Albany affiliate station showed up at the tapings, much to my surprise. And TV folks from the Binghamton area (my hometown) and, inexplicably, Plattsburgh, way in upstate NY, interviewed me before the shows aired. The reporters covering the contestants got to play some mock games, which made the stations plug MY appearances more than a player who had gone to L.A.

Someone, usually people I didn’t know, mentioned to me being on the show for 270 days straight. Then not for a few days, followed by another streak of several weeks. It was weird and nice in about equal measure.

McGuire, not McGwire

Mark McGuire was the new person who covered the local television scene for the Albany Times Union in November 1998. When I won, he mentioned Linda Zusman, a foreign language teacher from Albany, NY, who had won $12,000 on the show that aired on October 6. After Sarah Gold took home $15,001 in a show from June 14, 1999, he mentioned Linda and me. And so on.

When Mark had tired of Ken Jennings after he won about 20 games, he called or emailed me for a pull quote.

This is true: I’m SO happy I played then rather than now. The picayune scrutiny players endure from social media is exhausting, everything from apparel to missing an “easy” Final JEOPARDY!

Second chance

A friend of mine asked me whether I had been invited to the Champions Wildcard that’s been taking place on JEOPARDY recently. No, all contestants are “winners who nabbed one, two, or three wins in Season 37 or Season 38.” I’m not jealous, but I do think it diminishes the game somewhat.

Yet I’m fine with those folks who never won being in the Second Chance tournament. They may have come up against a Mattea Roach, winner of 23 straight games, or 16-game winner Ryan Long.

Representative Roeder

One person I must thank publicly during my time on the show is Amy Roeder. She was the other challenger in my win. She played such a competitive game that I had to make a huge wager in FJ.

More importantly, she took my call the day before our episode aired. I was freaking out after having kept the results of the show secret for about seven weeks, and I needed to talk to someone. Because she was so personable, I got her number from directory assistance. She was very accommodating.

And now Amy is doing great things. She is “serving her second term in the Maine House of Representatives. She is the House chair of the Labor and Housing Committee.

“Rep. Roeder has worked in the arts for her entire adult life, both as an artist and administrator. She currently serves as an adjunct theater professor at the University of Maine. Additionally, she is a freelance business trainer and has worked with multiple local and national companies to address critical issues around communication, problem-solving, and organizational change management.

“Rep. Roeder is a strong advocate in Augusta for fair wages, safe working conditions, and expanded opportunities for all workers. She is particularly passionate about supporting small businesses and working to help Maine’s downtowns and Main Streets thrive.”

Oh, and she pointed out this intro to our episode.

Famous people I’ve met, posthumous edition

Springboks

Oddly, I found the exercise of noting 70 people in my life who have passed therapeutic. So, I figured I’d list some famous people I’ve met who have since died.

Rod Serling: When you grew up in Binghamton, NY, in the early 1960s, Serling, born in the Syracuse area but grew up on the West Side of the Parlor City, was a big deal. The Twilight Zone television series was chockful of Binghamtonian references, from a rundown bus station to a carousel, which looked much like Recreation Park’s merry-go-round.

In 1970, I, as president of the student government, was given the honor of introducing Serling at a schoolwide assembly. Rod had been the student government leader thirty years earlier.

His favorite teacher, Helen Foley, who was namechecked in a TZ episode, wrote me a too-long introduction that mentioned him being a paratrooper in World War II.

While briefly mortified then, I understood why he came out on stage during my introduction. After the assembly, he spoke to La Foley’s last-period public speaking class, which I got permission to attend. Rod smoked incessantly in the classroom. The coffin nails killed him five years later at 50; fame doesn’t immunize one from disease.

Earl Warren: My Constitutional hero., as recently noted. I never did figure out how my SUNY New Paltz professor, Ron Steinberg, managed to arrange for his class of about 15 students to meet a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

A former Weaver

Pete Seeger: Reading my diary, I noticed I had seen Pete sing at least thrice in the autumn of 1972, including twice in one day. I estimate that I’d seen him perform at least 30 times.

When the Springboks rugby team from apartheid South Africa was scheduled to play at Bleeker Stadium in Albany in September 1981, with the approval of long-time mayor Erastus Corning II, there was a call for protests. I was at the demonstration, along with over a thousand others.

There might have been an even larger response, except it was POURING. But Pete was there, and we were standing outside the stadium getting soaked, umbrellas notwithstanding, while discussing the moral necessity to respond to racism and other evils.

Ed Dague: My favorite newsperson in the Albany market. Somewhere in the attic, I have the transcript of an April 1994 11 p.m. news broadcast on WNYT-TV, Channel 13, that I got to watch being broadcast while near the set.

Back when he had a mustache

Alex Trebek: My sense of the JEOPARDY host was that he enjoyed the show’s rhythm in the Los Angeles area—two or three shows, a meal break, then three or two more episodes.

When I saw him at the Wang Theater in Boston in September 1998, I sensed he was uncomfortable doing a series of interviews with the Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, and other media outlets. I got to watch him a lot because there was a lot of waiting around.

He was explicitly annoyed with not getting into our hotel, the Boston Park Plaza Hotel, quickly that first evening because of a Bill Clinton fundraiser, which followed a massive demonstration both against Clinton and against special prosecutor Ken Starr, who had put out explicit information online regarding the President and Monica Lewinsky. I don’t know if his irritation was political/cultural – he tended to be rather conservative – or merely the inconvenience.

Regardless, I’m disappointed I don’t have a photo with him because he was doing the bunny-ears thing with his fingers behind my back, which I saw on a monitor.

What I bought recently

J Alum Tee Shirt

My old blogging buddy Greg Burgas, who I’ve been following since late 2005, writes about what he “bought, read, watched, or otherwise consumed.”

In that spirit, here’s what I bought recently. I mention this while, at the same time, I keep saying I’m not going to buy ANYTHING except consumables: food, dish detergent, et al. So if I purchase something, it should bring me joy, in the word of Maria Kondo.

Jeopardy Contestant Season 1-38 Alumni Tee Shirt. I was on Season 15. I recently went to an ’80s trivia night with several local Jeopardy alums. It was in honor of the birthday of Jay, who was wearing one of those T-shirts. As one customer who bought one from the Etsy site wrote, “It was the perfect example of ‘I didn’t know I needed that until I saw it.’” Incidentally, we led through the competition but lost when we muffed the final question about the first CD pressed in Japan in 1982.

PBS

Making Black America: Through the Grapevine. I recorded this on the DVR in the fall of 2022, but it remained unwatched. I waited for my wife to view it with me until July 2023. It’s “a four-part series hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that chronicles the vast social networks and organizations created by and for Black people.”

While it addressed discrimination issues, it also lifted the sources of “Black joy,” from art, music, and literature to HBCU Greek organizations, barbershops, and beauty shops. I was so taken by it that I bought the DVD so my wife and/or daughter could watch it at leisure.

African-Americans in the Wyoming Valley, 1778-1990 (paperback, 1992) by Emerson I Moss. I bought it solely because it mentioned my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Patterson, thrice, albeit briefly. He was a very impressive man, and I will write about him in due course. I’ve also purchased many other books, none of which I have read to date. I got the new Paul Simon album, Seven Psalms, which is very good.