JEOPARDY Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

The JEOPARDY Alumni T-shirt

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Amy Roeder

Jeeopardy T-shirt A few years ago, I bought a Jeopardy Alumni T-shirt online. Initially, the shirts didn’t reflect the 1998-1999 season, in which I appeared. Presumably, the demand generated some of the earlier shirts.

The peculiar thing about this item is that I’ve never worn it. One doesn’t want to wear these customized things out too quickly. This year, I’m considering wearing it on November 9th, the date of my first Jeopardy appearance.

On the backside of the shirt is a list of all the people who were on season 15, listed alphabetically by first name, which I think is a hoot.

Jeopardy T-shirt

As you can see, there were 11 Celebrity Jeopardy games, including a Legends in Sports match on November 6 featuring Reggie Jackson vs. Martina Navratilova vs. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. I remember Kareem winning because it was the episode before my first match aired. Also, Kareem played a character named Roger in the Airplane movie.

Connected

So, it’s oddly fun to be listed on a T-shirt with Kareem, Bob Costas, Robin Roberts, Keith Olbermann, Al Franken, Garry Marshall, Jane Seymour, Graham Nash, and Maine state representative Amy Roeder, among other notables, plus about 400 other folks I have one thing in common with.

There were also 10 five-day champions, including Juliet Wiley, a Tournament of Champions finalist; the ToC winner was Dave Abbott, who played the previous season. A part of me wishes they would go back to limiting champs to five games, excluding the ToC. But that’s not going to happen. The fanbase and the JEOPARDY staff want to have players win 10, 20, 38, or 74 games.

The clues’ values doubled in November 2001, from Friday, the 23rd, to Monday, the 26th. Occasionally, I mused how I would have fared. But I recall that early players in that period had difficulty recalibrating their wagers, so it’s just as well.

People online

Wheel of Fortune and JEOPARDY

I read so much political conversation that I need to examine other topics, only to discover that people online can be annoying there, too.

Let’s find some math stuff. There are charts about the number of squares, triangles, or rectangles; the scolds remind us that squares are rectangles. (How many squares do you see above? And if you get it wrong, I promise not to chastise you.)

Also, how do you solve these equations? You prove you do or do not understand the Order of Operations in Math (PEMDAS).

Example: How do you work out 3 + 6 × 2? Multiplication before Addition: First 6 × 2 = 12, then 3 + 12 = 15. Example: How do you work out (3 + 6) × 2 ?Parentheses first: First (3 + 6) = 9, then 9 × 2 = 18.

Of course it is valuable, but the arrogant and demeaning way those who get it wrong are treated – sometimes with personal attacks! – diminishes the joy.

The games

Let’s go to pages tied to the Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. In those cases, people get agitated because the final puzzle or Final Jeopardy was either too hard—no one could get it—or so easy that anyone could get it.

On the last show of Season 41, July 25, 2025, the Final Jeopardy answer was, “According to one obituary, in 1935, he owned 13 magazines, eight radio stations, two movie companies, and $56 million in real estate.” The two challengers, Charlotte Cooper ($7,800 going into FJ) and Jonathan Hugendubler ($14,000 before FJ), wrote, “Who was [William Randolph] Hearst? His correct answer put Hugendubler in the lead by $1. The 16-day defending champion, Scott Ricardi, wrote, “Who was Howard Hughes?”

Some folks noted that they felt bad that Ricardi missed it, although he’ll be back for the Tournament of Champions. After all, going into the Final, Scott had 29 correct, zero incorrect responses. Jonathan had 13 correct, three incorrect, and Charlotte had 12 correct, one incorrect.

Others said, How could he not know that? It was” easy.” An article suggested that Scott “threw” the game because he didn’t want to be champion over the summer. What? Scott has denied tanking the game.

One person online said Hughes died in 1976, and the FJ answer said the subject died in 1935. Except that, and I admitted that the clue was strangely written, it did NOT say that. Hearst died in 1951, and some pedantic librarian, annoyed with this other person’s pedanticism, decided to correct him.

Show biz

This meant, “Oh, I have to get out of this.”

I came across a Facebook page about events in upstate New York. It mentioned that Cynthia Erivo, who had been scheduled to perform at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center on August 22, had cancelled her show for scheduling reasons and would be replaced by John Baptiste. A reasonable conversation would be about how to get refunds or whether the show will be rescheduled. But I found – and I’ve seen this elsewhere -the sheer number of people who wrote, “I don’t care.”

Also, a large contingent needed to comment on the length of her fingernails. But more than a few seemed to think she just lucked into a blockbuster movie, Wicked. She’d been in several movies, notably Harriet. She was a Tony winner almost a decade ago for The Color Purple. Well, whatever.

So it’s not just supporters of a particular political agenda who I find exhausting.

Lydster: Echolalia

the most hunted person

My daughter suggested that perhaps I have echolalia. What is that? “Echolalia is the repetition of words or phrases spoken by someone else. Children use echolalia as they learn how to communicate. It usually resolves by age 3, but may be a sign of developmental delay or an underlying condition if it continues or appears during adulthood. It’s common with autism spectrum disorder and Tourette syndrome.”

My daughter has a friend who is self-described as experiencing echolalia. But the situation where she attributed it to me doesn’t track. She or my wife said something about an Impossible Hot Dog my daughter was having for dinner. Naturally, I responded, “And four white mice could never be four white horses. ” It’s a non-repetitive response.

I’ve been doing this for decades. When my mother would request, “Help me,” I might reply, “And I do appreciate you being ’round.” It was usually a musical lyric response to a Beatles or Motown lyric.

Over the last quarter century, it tended to be more likely a musical, such as West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Hamilton, or a song from Rodgers and Hammerstein. The above reference is to the song Impossible from R & H’s television production of 1965’s Cinderella.

So I’m not buying the echolalia diagnosis.

Game on!

Still, she is very bright. My wife and I were doing the NYT Connections on June 26, and our daughter connected Lovelace, Bojack, McQueen, and Hawking as words with playing cards as the second syllable. We all knew instantly it had to be the purple (most difficult) answer, and it was.

Right before that, the Final JEOPARDY response popped up. In the category 20th CENTURY FIGURES: Ironic in light of her name, she was remembered in a eulogy as “the most hunted person of the modern age.”

One contestant replied (Who was) Sanger, presumably Margaret Sanger, founder of the birth control movement. One wrote Found, but Ken Jennings declared, “I’m afraid there’s no such person” (as Hunted and Found). The third player had no answer, but with a locked game, didn’t need to.

I was thinking of someone like Mata Hari, but my daughter immediately thought of Princess Diana; I had my doubts. But sure enough, Jennings noted, “If being hunted made you think of the goddess of the hunt, you might have thought of Diana, Princess of Wales.”

My daughter gleefully said, “You’d better put this in your blog!” I probably would have anyway…

Manic depression

backyard

I’ve been experiencing what they used to call manic depression. My highs can be really high and often unexpected. But my lows might be rage-fueled tantrums.

In music, which I’ve listened to dozens of times before, I’m often struck by how emotional I will get. Familiar pieces can bring me extraordinary joy – or great contemplation. An example of the former: The Concerto in F by George Gershwin is a recently heard example.

This tale of a memorial service brought me familiar recognition.

Here’s a wonderful bio piece about first niece Rebecca Jade for a concert she performed last week.

I loved the clue on a recent JEOPARDY so much that I stopped the recording – I watch almost nothing in real time – to point it out to my wife. 3 CONSONANTS IN A ROW, $800. “The comical coinage aibohphobia describes the fear of this type of word.” What is palindromes? I should have gotten it because it was used before, in 1999. PALINDROMES, $1000. “The whimsical coinage ‘aibohphobia’ means this.” What is fear of palindromes? It was a triple stumper both times.

I am bemused and more than slightly amused by how much the Jeffrey Epstein issue is the hill that MAGA people are willing to die on. Besides knowing that Epstein was dreadful, I’ve thought of nothing about him. Given all the other things happening in the country, he took no space in my brain.

Won’t get fooled again

I got an e-mail from what purported to be the company that hosts my blog saying that the payment didn’t go through. Given my technological difficulties a few weeks ago, this was a reasonably possible situation. So I went to the login page, but it wasn’t my provider’s URL, though it looked like their page. I contacted my provider, and they asked me to resend them visuals, as I must not have properly understood. So it was with GREAT JOY when they indicated they’d gotten enough complaints on this topic from others that I didn’t need to send them anything else—something off my plate.

Our backyard has a shed that holds our bicycles, lawn chairs, grill, etc. We could no longer lock it because some gophers or other rodents had undermined the shed’s base. This was a great concern because there’s a neighbor boy about 12 who would wander into our backyard; our next-door neighbor came to our house to express concern about the kid. We started putting cinder blocks in front of our yard gate, but that’s suboptimal. So I was pleased when one day we came home and suddenly the shed door locked; it must have been our contractor, whom we had contacted several days earlier. It gave me a sense of real joy.

Conversely

The news in the country made me not just disappointed but furious, enraged. No recent story ticked me off more than ICE being able to access information from CMS about 79 million Medicaid users, including home addresses and ethnicities, information being passed along so that they could “root out fraud.” It infuriated me so much that – and my wife can verify – I was spewing invectives to no one in particular. “Don’t those F***ing SOBs know about HIPAA privacy laws? Their ethnic bigotry knows no end!”

Then I read about the US Secretary of State’s plan to burn 500 metric tons of emergency food aid that had “expired” because the State Department failed to distribute it when it took over USAID.

The EPA says it will eliminate its scientific research arm and “begin firing hundreds of chemists, biologists, toxicologists, and other scientists, after denying for months that it intended to do so.”

And this, on top of the other crappy things, such as Congress codifying the cuts of previously allocated funds to PBS and NPR, and authorizing health cuts that would have prevented people from dying, really broiled me. Oh, former criminals need more access to guns!

It is a ‘State of Emergency’ for Civil Rights.

Me, me, me

You may have seen David Brooks share Alistair McIntyre’s explanation of FOTUS in The Atlantic magazine: He “doesn’t even try to speak the language of morality. When he pardons unrepentant sleazeballs, it doesn’t seem to even occur to him that he is doing something that weakens our shared moral norms. [He] speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. [FOTUS] doesn’t subsume himself in a social role. He doesn’t try to live up to the standards of excellence inherent in a social practice. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and [FOTUS] is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.”

And it makes me think of less than charitable thoughts… So, some joy, some rage. The rage turns into the melancholy of One More Damn Thing.

Song

Sunday Stealing: Follow That Dream

jEOPARDY, Scrabble, and 500 rummy

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

This week we stole from Follow That Dream. Bonnie, who posted it, admits she stole it from Stella. Now here it is, just waiting for you to steal it for your blog …

Stolen from Follow That Dream

1. My bestie and I once …

One of them and I went to Las Vegas in September 2024, which was my first time and likely my last, though I had a good time.

2. When I’m nervous …

I look around a lot.

3. My hair …

Has been receding since I was 17.

4. When I turn to the left, I see …

A shred bag blocked the front window.

Adenia

5. My favorite aunt …

My great aunt Deana (Adenia) Yates was born in 1908, the youngest of my maternal grandmother Gertrude Williams’ siblings. She is to the right in the picture above with her sister, mother, and niece (my mom). There are more descriptions here.

My sisters and I visited the house that Deana and Gert shared, 13 Maple Street in Binghamton, NY, almost every day during lunch and after school during the academic year.

If I hadn’t been watching JEOPARDY with Deana on weekdays at noontime, I might not have become so obsessed with the program that I tried out for the show in 1998. I taught her canasta, and she taught me 500 rummy. She played SCRABBLE with me a lot. Sometimes, I would watch her “programs” with her and her sisters, the CBS soap operas Guiding Light, Edge of Night, and Secret Storm.

I was sad when she died in 1966, in part because she was a buffer between her sister and me. Gert didn’t think a boy should wash the dishes, which I did at home. More than once, Deana said to her sister, “Leave the boy alone!”

6. I have a hard time understanding ….

Consider this an expletive-filled rant about the politics in the last six months in the United States, and the capitulation by media (I’m talking about you, ABC, CBS…) More people will become sick and die.

7. You know I like you if …

I tease you and/or engage in circuitous wordplay.

8. When I was 5 years old …

Among other things, this.