Category: Uncategorized

When Merv Griffin, inspired by his wife, came up with the concept of JEOPARDY! four decades ago, it was a stroke of genius. Three players who thought they knew a thing or two get to compete in a game where they give you the answer and you have to come up with the question. If you win five games, you go away, but you come back for the Tournament of Champions.

After a champion has retired, through the luck of the draw, there would be three new players; one of them would be able to go back to their hometown and say that he or she was a JEOPARDY! Champion.

What the rule change a couple seasons ago has meant has been the creation of scarcity. Under the old rules, Ken Jennings would have been gone after day five; under the new rules, and Ken’s 74th victory, about 15 people won’t even make it onto the show. The Tournament of Champions of 2004, in order to fill the fifteen slots allotted, needed to go to more four-time and even three-time champions.

This really isn’t about Ken Jennings, though I admit that I had tired of him in the same way some people root for anybody except the Yankees; it’s about the game. This is the designated hitter in baseball, the shot clock in basketball. And while those changes in other sports have produced MORE offense for SEVERAL, the new JEOPARDY! rule change has been beneficial for only a few, and as detrimental to the game as Astroturf is on the knees of a football running back.

I wish they would change the rule, if not to five appearances, then certainly 10. I want MORE JEOPARDY! champions, not fewer. But with the spike in ratings during Jennings’ run, I don’t anticipate any change. Sigh.

I’m not even going to share my own recollections of the day four years ago – maybe next year, on the fifth anniversary. Today, I’m just going to share tales of a couple friends of mine:

An Albany friend of mine took a train to NYC that morning. She had an appointment in one of the outer boroughs. But when she heard about the attacks, she didn’t even bother to try to call the client; she probably wouldn’t have gotten through, in any case. Instead, she took the very next train back to Albany at 9:30, just before the authorities decided to stop rail transportation out of the city. That proved to be a very sage decision, since it was likely the LAST train to leave the city for several days.
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Subject: Where is your office?
Are you OK?
ROG

Hi. It’s Thursday morning. I was about to board a Jet Blue plane at JFK when I called my friend. Her father had died Monday night after a long hospiitalization and while we were on the phone at 8:45 she saw the hit on tv and conveyed it to me. I informed the people around me what she was telling me. They had us board the plane and another person informed us of the 2nd hit as we were boarding. After 5 minutes on the plane they cancelled our flight and asked us to disembark.

I got out of the airport as quickly as possible at about 9:30 expecting to stand in an impossibly long taxi line. I remarkably was only 5th in line and got a cab right away. We took choked local streets back to my house in Brooklyn, saw the horror of the towers in flames, watched the first one go down and heard on the radio that the Pentagon was also hit and that #2 WTC went down.

Once we entered my neighborhood at about 10:45AM, the once clear blue sky turned to a white and grey cloud of falling ash. It looked like a snowy winter day for a couple of hours as the debris descended and again later in the day when #7 WTC fell. The toxic acrid smell in the air is undescribable. I hesitate to think that the ash that fell from the sky could have been cremated human remains and the odor in the air like that of a crematorium.

My building is directly south of Governor’s Island, one block from Pier 7 and as the crow flies, probably a mile from what was the WTC. I used to be able to see the top of the WTC that had the tv antennas on it from my apartment windows. Needless to say I was relieved and grateful to be home and that I hadn’t been en route to my office in Manhattan when usually at 9:15-9:30AM, I would have been on a subway that goes underneath WTC. It was difficult getting out word of my safety to my family because of the choked phone lines.

The telephone repair guy was the second one. I was defiant. Nope, “Mine,” I pointed.

The third time, my attitude was pretty matter-of-fact, as I caught a supposedly tethered baby unleashed while we were sitting at a concert in Washington Park. The guy said, “Thanks, gramps.” He assumed, as the others did, that my child was my grandchild. It is, if I’m being rational about it, understandable. I was 51 when I had Lydia. My father was 52 when my sister Leslie had her daughter Becky.

1. Are your grandparents still on this plane of existence? If not, when did the last one pass away?

2. Who was/is your favorite, and why?

Another time I was walking along State Street near Washington Park. This man was walking to an address on State Street, but he was very confused because State Street seemed to end. “Go over to Western Avenue, go two blocks, turn right a block, and you’ll find State Street starts again.”

Wha?

Albany is an old city. Its roots run back to a voyage by Henry Hudson in 1609. It was incorporated in 1686. Thus, a lot of the streets are not exactly parallel.
For instance, start at the bottom of the hill at State Street and Broadway. Get to the top of the hill, pass to the right of the Capitol (where the traffic pattern suggests) and suddenly, you’re on Washington Avenue. Where did State Street go? To the left of the Capitol on a one-way street, going the way opposite the numbering.

OK. Get to Lark Street. The bulk of the traffic seems to be going at 1 o’clock, and that continues to be Route 5. But that’s not Washington Avenue, that’s Central Avenue. No, stay straight in one of the worst-designed intersections in any city. Go about three blocks to the firehouse. Go straight and you’re suddenly on Western Avenue. Where did Washington Avenue go? You should have veered right.

In the opposite direction, Western and Madison Avenue do a divergence, with Route 20 suddenly moving from the former to the latter. New Scotland Avenue is an interesting street that is perpendicular to Madison Avenue at one point, and parallel a few blocks later.

The situation is made worse by development over the years. The creation of the Empire State Plaza, Washington Park, Albany High School at its current location, and the UAlbany uptown campus mean that there are MANY streets that start and stop and start again. An example: Hudson Avenue. It starts at Broadway and ends with the Empire State Plaza, built in the 1960s. It starts again on the other side of the plaza and ends at the park. There’s another segment between the high school and Allen Street. Thee are lots of examples of that. One would think this must be a police/fire department nightmare.