Tag: JEOPARDY

Brian Wilson Raps!

Brian Wilson’s 68th birthday is today.

Back on the January 28, 2010 episode of JEOPARDY!, there was a whole category devoted to THE SONGS OF BRIAN WILSON:
$200: One of Wilson’s Beach Boys classics asks this girl to “help, help me” to get another girl “out of my heart”
$400: “I’m picking up” these, “she’s giving me excitations”
$600: Title that precedes “If we were older, then we wouldn’t have to wait so long”
$800: Wilson wrote, “I have watched you on the shore, standing by the ocean’s roar, do you love me, do you” this lass
$1000: “There’s a world where I can go and tell my secrets to”, it’s here

Answers below.
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I’ve been playing my Beach Boys and Brian Wilson albums for the past couple of weeks in anticipation of Brian’s 68th birthday, which was this past Sunday. I get to Sweet Insanity, a 1991 album that Brian’s record label, Sire, rejected as uncommercial. A friend of mine provided me with an “unauthorized copy.” I dunno; I like quite a few of the songs, several of which show up on later albums.

Then there’s Smart Girls, a rap song that features bits from Beach Boys songs. Musically, it’s strange and goofy but not awful – at first; but eventually, the snippets override the beats and it becomes a real mess. The lyrics indicate that he was once a sexist pig seeking out, and singing about none-too-smart females, but now he values intelligence in women; seems overwrought.

Here’s a clip, and if that doesn’t work, try this one.

Interestingly, the 1970 album that came to known as Sunflower, the first Beach Boys album on the Reprise label after the group left Capitol, was also initially rejected by the new company, with some of the purged pieces showing up on later collections, but others never showing up on any compilation.

When Brian was honored at the Kennedy Center Honors a few years back, there was a group named Libera who performed in his honor – here’s the YouTube of Love and Mercy (from Brian’s 1988 solo album).

Answers to the JEOPARDY! queries:

Rhonda; “Good Vibrations”; “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”; “Surfer Girl”; “In My Room” (all answered correctly by the contestants)

Spoilers QUESTION

I haven’t been watching LOST, but I have it on good authority that the island is really…

As usual, I was watching JEOPARDY! recently, and the show had a whole category devoted to spoilers! In an unJEOPARDYlike fashion, I’ll give you the questions, but NOT the answers, until the end. Planet of the Apes (2001), The Sixth Sense, Chinatown, The Usual Suspects, The Crying Game.

So when is the RIGHT amount of time to give away the “spoiler” ending of a TV show or movie? In early 2005, noted critic Roger Ebert wrote about this regarding Million Dollar Baby when critic Michael Medved and faux critic Rush Limbaugh revealed the crucial plot point because they didn’t LIKE the crucial plot point. (I STILL haven’t seen the movie but learned that plot point at the time. Now I’m feeling the need to rent it.)

With LOST coming to a close, how long can someone recording the program to watch later expect NOT to hear the details? Will it be in the newspaper the next morning? Will it have a spoiler warning, and will that matter? (I haven’t been watching LOST, but I have it on good authority that the island is really little Tommy from St. Elsewhere.)

On a NORMAL show – one that isn’t getting near Super Bowl money for its ads – I think a week is about all one can reasonably expect before its common knowledge. (How long did it take before the greatest ending in history, Newhart, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this month, become revealed?) Although I recall a critic being taken to task because the viewer was waiting to see the program when it was released on DVD. How does THAT work in the equation?

For movies it’s different. Films have two lives: in the theater, and then on DVD, et al. (There’s a third, on broadcast TV, but that may be years out.) It seems that 13 weeks after the release date of home release might be a standard. Of course, if home release becomes simultaneous with theatrical release, as may be coming to pass, that creates an awfully small window.

But what do YOU think about TV shows and movies? What should be the spoiler expectation, Rosebud?
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Those JEOPARDY answers.
SPOILER ALERT:::SPOILER ALERT

Show #5868, aired 2010-03-03 MOVIE SPOILERS $200: There’s a Washington, D.C. memorial to an ape general when Mark Wahlberg returns to Earth in this 2001 film
#5868, aired 2010-03-03 MOVIE SPOILERS $400: Bruce Willis is dead & doesn’t know it in this 1999 thriller
#5868, aired 2010-03-03 MOVIE SPOILERS $600: Faye Dunaway’s daughter is also her sister in this Jack Nicholson classic from 1974
#5868, aired 2010-03-03 MOVIE SPOILERS $800: The disabled Kevin Spacey seems to be the killer Keyser Soze in this 1995 film
#5868, aired 2010-03-03 MOVIE SPOILERS $1000: In this 1992 IRA thriller starring Stephen Rea, the “girl” is really a guy

P is for Periodic Table

sodium (Na) and fluorine (Cl) hook up to make sodium fluoride (NaCl)

Before I get started, a JEOPARDY! Daily Double from 4/14/2010:
ONLY ONE VOWEL $2,000: Though it has only one vowel in its name, this element’s periodic table symbol is 2 vowels.

It’s been a long time since I took high school chemistry. Check out, if you would, this nifty dynamic periodic table. If you put the cursor over a category, it will highlight those elements in that category. If you click on the category, it will give you an encyclopedic interpretation of the group. This is likewise true for the individual elements.

One finds a similar function for the elements only here, with YouTube videos about how the elements are used, when available, and a brief history of the periodic chart, starting with Mendeleev arrangement of the 65 elements that were then known back in 1869. Indeed, most of the periodic tables I found online has some interactivity.

If these were available when I was in high school, maybe I would remember more about chemistry than this: the alkali metals in group 1 liked to hang out with the halogens in group 17, because the former had an extra electron hanging out and the latter was lacking one; thus sodium (Na) and chlorine (Cl) hook up to make sodium chloride (NaCl), or salt. Conversely, the noble gases (group 18) didn’t play well with others.

One fun representation of the table is the Wooden Periodic Table Table which ended up winning the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with among other features, pictorial representations of some of the greats of science for which some of the latter elements are named, such as Curie, Nobel and Einstein.


But I was confused by the recent news that a new element, element 117, ununseptium (yeah, easy for YOU to say), described in the New York Times this way: “The team produced six atoms of the element by smashing together isotopes of calcium and a radioactive element called berkelium in a particle accelerator.” Wow. I thought the finding of elements would be more – I don’t know – elemental. (Here’s the story in the Christian Science Monitor and the Daily Mail). And only six atoms? There are things I know a lot about; this is NOT one of them.


ABC Wednesday
Oh, The JEOPARDY! question: What is gold? The symbol for it is Au.

 

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