My wife and I have just recently discovered Jeopardy, the TV game show that has been running for… well, decades. It airs during our evening cocktail hour so I have taken it on as a very RARE opportunity to prove to my wife that I am smarter than her in some things… (most of which have no relevance to our daily lives, but I digress.)I do fairly well on most subjects, excelling in those of a scientific nature. Obscure trivia, geography, followed by history I do fairly well on. Just about the time my first Cosmo of the evening hits my neural cortex, I get a bit cocky and think I could probably rake in some quick cash being a contestant on this show. About that time the show offers up some of those “Black Void” categories – subjects which I have almost no hope of knowing remotely about. Should I ever be selected as a contestant on Jeopardy, these categories would realize my worst nightmare:
SPORTS – During no part of my life have I had ANY interest in any sort of sports. I have no interest in who is playing who let alone what their scores may be. Sports are never final; they are played over and over and over again. Now the ancient Maya ball court games would put the winning (!?) team to death at the end of a game. Now THAT I would watch.
SHAKESPEARE – I never could figure out Shakespeare. Its written in some kind of literary “code” so you can’t just read it, you have to decipher the sentences to determine what exactly is going on: “Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral bak'd meats.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? Even reading the Cliff Notes from Shakespeare made my head hurt.MATHEMATICS – I require the use of a calculator to figure out how much to tip a waiter.
WORD ORIGINS – We speak English, right? So I am assuming all our words came from England. I hope that one was the “Daily Double”.
THE BIBLE – See: “Shakespeare”.
FRENCH LITERARY POETS – OK, You gotta be kidding!
Jeopardy both humbles me and buoys my fragile ego that I am not a complete ignoramus. Besides, all the Simpsons episodes now are reruns.
3 comments:
When you take the test to be a potential contestant, they keep track of your strong and weak categories so both will be on the program. Supposed parity.
Surely you remember the quiz show "College Bowl"--it was either incredibly difficult, or I was a lot less educated then.
see? you can build a Japanese bath house from scratch and i can analyze shakespeare...that's what i call a genetic bitch slap. to me.
Charlie:
I probably would wash out in Jeopardy when I told Alex I want to "phone-a-friend".
Kara:
Right on. Chuck Darwin... he da man!
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