This entry was posted on Saturday, February 7th, 2009 at 15:29 and is filed under Odd STuff, justdrew Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
justdrew
Interactive musings from a creative technophile
Jeopardy is Wired
Cute, if somewhat awkward interview by a Wired writer who’s obviously more comfortable penning articles than interviewing, but this show is one of my guilty pleasures, so I’m always interested in behind-the-scenes things about it:
When I first started getting into the show in the early 80′s, I was astounded at how much (what was to me, at least) obscure stuff people knew with such confidence. I had a long way to go, since I didn’t really start learning useless (and some, not-so-useless) trivia until I got a bit older.
What amazed me even more as I started watching the show regularly is the discovery that it is the most watched gameshow in history. Really? With all those esoteric facts and references to art, literature and world history (notwithstanding the occasional factoid gleaned from People magazine or the E! channel). If most Americans are so stupid (I find evidence to contradict this harder and harder to find), why are they all watching this show? Do they like to be reminded of how dull and ignorant they are?
Maybe someday I’ll find the answer to this puzzler. In the meantime, I’ll continue to enjoy this great quiz-show (second in my book only to the old British program Mastermind with the late, great Magnus Magnusson).
For me, though, the one critical piece of technology that enables me to truly enjoy Jeopardy: the DVR (I loathe the commercials and the insipid interviews with the contestants, let’s get on with it already!!)
Which is no doubt one of the awesome strengths of Mastermind. No dallying about pretending to care about the contestant whose aunt knits sweaters out of cat hair. It’s a quiz show, you ask questions and the contestants try to answer them. Simple as that.
February 8th, 2009 at 10:25
Weird synchronicity… Okay, get this: I posted this article in the afternoon after I stumbled across the Jeopardy Wired piece. Then, as I worked on some repetitive catalog work for a client, I was listening to an audio book about Miles Davis (great book, BTW- called Miles to Go, by Chris Murphy).
I got to the point in the book where the author makes a temporary break from a depressed Miles to work with the new band, Weather Report. He just finishes talking about Jaco Pastorius and his awesome work on his fretless bass when I hit the pause button and wrapped for the day.
Later last night, when I got back from meeting some friends, I fired up the DVR in bed and my jaw dropped when several of the days’ clues tied back to my day. It was like a dream you have that plays back elements of the previous day’s events.
It would have been spooky enough to have one of the answers to a clue be the British show, Mastermind (yep, it happened), but to beat that; in a category called “J.P.” there was a video clue about this Weather Report fretless bassist who sometimes had to take a fretted bass and remove the fretbars from the neck himself… I truly thought I was hallucinating.