Uneasy Lies The Head

I had forgotten how much fun it is to play along with Jeopardy! And having the burden of missed-clue-stenography lifted makes it that much more so. The VCR thought that Monday was Sunday, so I missed the first show. But I did see, and score along at home, the second and third shows of the Tournament of Champions. Hence there may be spoilers, so read ahead at your own risk.

1. I have a degree in history, and I still know squat about kings and queens. Nefertiti, Roland & Charlemagne, Montezuma, and Iphigenia & Agamemnon: I should have known them all. And I didn't realize until someone pointed it out that all of the pictures in this video clue were closeups of the rulers actually wearing crowns. Nothing gets past me, I tell you what.

I could bone up on them by using an online encyclopedia. I mean, I'm sitting right in front of a computer; it wouldn't take but a minute or three. But I'm not going to, at least, not right now.

2. I also know nothing about geography, especially on questions involving maps. I mean, I guessed "Indonesia" for a picture of Japan for crying out loud. The "more than 1000 islands" part of the clue threw me off. I know Japan has more than the 4 big islands, but the maps were closeups, and I couldn't see which continent they were off of and where. Etc, etc. Better call the wah-mbulance.

I did recognize Cyprus, but only because the outline is on the flag.

For the record, the four big islands of Japan are:

By size: Honshu - Hokkaido - Kyushu - Shikoku

North to South: Hokkaido - Honshu - Shikoku - Kyushu

I added infoplease.com to my Firefox search engines list, just so I could look that up . Now I'm cool for real, yo.

(Note: Sure I use Wikipedia. I use it a lot. But it's a quantum encyclopedia; you can never be sure whether the info contained within will be right or wrong at any given moment. So it's Infoplease primarily for me. It serves my purposes better, too. Less detailed)

3. Too many wrong guesses by Myron. My Wednesday score should have been about $6000 more, but I really wanted one of those "Alternative Energy" clues to be about wind farms, since there's a big one near the town where I grew up. I did give myself credit for "ethanol", even though I technically couldn't think of it before Vik shouted it out. It was on my microbiology exam this afternoon, for gosh sake. Also from recently taken exams: h being the symbol for Planck's constant (I guessed m). Yes that was last semester, but still.

4. Another major "should have known" clue came up last night. The "Alphabetically First" category asked for the alphabetically first U.S. Supreme Court justice (by last name). I was trying to think of one beginning with A, but I couldn't remember the name of

the most recently appointed one (1)

and sure enough, that was the answer. And I probably could have figured out

which non-radioactive chemical element fit the category (2)

too, if the game hadn't been so fast paced.

5. Categorywise I scored 5/5 on "Star Trek, Star Wars or LOTR" (a real nerd category, as discussed last week), the cutesy-pie lit recognition category "Tarzan's Book Reviews", "TV Numbers", "Politicians", and "Parlez-Vous Anglais", a French phrase ID category. 1 out of 5's were scored on the aforementioned "Who Wears the Crown", "Legal Types", and the also aforementioned "It's on the Map". I beat the smart kids on sauerkraut being the "fermented substance" in mulgikapsad, the Jan & Dean hit "Sidewalk Surfin'", and the TV show Adam-12.

Wednesday's game was awesome. It's good to be back enjoying my show and playing along. And writing about it.

Answers to questions quoted in this post can be found in the comments.

Links
Jeopardy (May 9, 2006), at j-archive.com
Jeopardy (May 10, 2006), at j-archive.com

Japan, at infoplease.com
"aforementioned", at m-w.com
"categorywise", at m-w.com
mulgikapsad, at MOFA (scroll to bottom of page) Bonus fun fact: Estonian web pages end with .ee .



All right, fine...
Nefertiti
Charlemagne
Montezuma
Agamemnon all from infoplease.com.