I’ve been a bad blogger. Things have been rather busy ’round here so I haven’t even been able to post about significant things, like my recent (re)appearance on Jeopardy!.

For those of you who are still holding your breaths, don’t–I came in second. Darn. And no, you don’t keep your winnings if you don’t win. Double-darn. That $20+K would have been grand to have.

I think I may have lost to the female equivalent of Ken Jennings, except I’m afraid she may be a bit weak in modern/popular culture categories. She’s a very smart woman, though, and I wish her well.

Other people have posted about Ms. Wenglinsky (actually, I think she’s Dr. Wenglinsky, Ph.D.) on the Jeopardy! forums and have said she was actually a lot of fun off-camera. I don’t recall her having any personality at all. Not nasty or mean or anything negative–just rather void. But then again, I didn’t really pay much attention to her.

As for my game, it was a tough one (according to the Jeopardy! forum members who track that sort of thing) and though I had a wonderful time, I struggled from the start to some extent. In fact, I wasn’t really ready for the show’s opening when it started so I was a bit off-kilter when they introduced me as seen here:

Probably helped me not look quite so dorky as I stared into the camera. That’s the worst part, the intros, because you have to smile into a camera across the set from you for what feels like an hour.

Anyway, game started and, promptly, I got beaten to the buzzer a good many times. All three of us were good players and pretty closely matched for a lot of the game. The first break and the ‘talk with Alex’ part was a relief which gave me a chance to get my head more in the game. You can tell I’m feeling better by the end of the interview because I’m standing on one leg again (note foot off floor here at the end of the interview):

I was actually in third after the first round and was happy to start off the Double Jeopardy round with my favorite category: Before and After. I did very well in the DJ round, including getting a Daily Double right, but the 18th Century Britain category was written for Maria (practically) and how I got at least one of the Zany for Zambia category right, I have no idea. Thus maria led somewhat going into Final Jeopardy.

The FJ clue left me blank for quite a while. I definitely didn’t know the answer and was struggling with figuring a good logical guess. It came to me late and, in a rush, I misspelled my response. Luckily, I used a homophone so it was counted as correct and, briefly, I thought I might win. Unfortunately for me, Maria got it right and bet enough to cover my total.

Second place again, but this time there was no foul. My Jeopardy! days were over.

As I’ve said before, it was a great experience and I encourage anyone who has every thought about trying out to do so. I was very lucky to have been able to play twice and would do it again in a second if they asked, but that won’t happen. So now I just watch like everyone else…

…and think about someday playing Millionaire.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 12th, 2005 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.