Static Zombie

Thanks, Peter! This was a fun surprise. Sure, I'd be easily convinced to comment afterwards - I highly enjoyed reading your backstage stories of Millionaire.

How long went between your Millionaire taping and the airing? I taped Jeopardy! two months ago, and am currently blanking on much of it, but expect it to all come rushing back when I watch it tonight. (My cousins overseas already saw the show - it aired at 8 a.m. their time, which was the middle of the night here - and one emailed me many details I had forgotten about.)

For the odd little artifact that is a Jeopardy! "Hometown Howdy," look here: http://www.jeopardy.com/showguide_thisweek.php
They tape them for promos on local channels, but I don't know of anyone who's ever seen one.

Woohoo! You had me worried there for a while, Robin-- I was sure you knew the material, but I feared you weren't going to get the rhythm of the buzzer. ESPECIALLY when you didn't ring in for the Princess Bride question!

Way to go! On to tomorrow!

Thank you, Peter! It was the buzzer - it was killing me! You know it hurt not to be able to answer on The Princess Bride, Casablanca (I had that Bogart poster on my wall for years), and The Little Prince, and the Kennedy Center. But luckily that didn't make the difference in the game.

D'oh!

The MARVELOUS category in round one was killing me, in a please-save-that-category-for-when-I'm-on-the-show kind of way. I thought the BOSTON LEGAL category would be better for you than it was. But the woman who beat you seemed to be right on the buzzer from the get-go. It's all about the buzzer.

When you hit the Daily Double I was urging you to bet everything. The amount you bet wasn't quite enough to take the lead if you got it right, and was too much to leave you competitive if you got it wrong. It felt to me like you had to take a stand on that question and bet everything to take the lead and try to stay there for Final Jeopardy. As it turned out, it wouldn't have mattered-- you'd still have been in second place and would have had to bet too much to still win if you got it wrong.

Congratulations on getting to the leftmost podium, though! So now that it's over, give us the inside scoop on your experience.

Peter, I knew you'd love the Marvelous category. I realized this morning that all of J's superhero toys are Justice League (they came together in a case), and therefore I know DC Comics much better than Marvel. Boston Legal killed me because I knew every single one of those answers, but got beaten to the buzzer. I had Dersh as a professor, even, so that one really hurt.

I should've bet it all on the DD. I didn't like the category (I'm not a dog person, never owned one, don't have a particularly warm feeling towards fictional dogs and haven't sought out books with dogs -- I've never read Old Yeller or Sounder, for instance). I'd already gotten 2 and feared that this would be some unknown dog. (As it turned out, I could've answered all 5 in that category -- though for Troy and Moreau I didn't know about the dog tie-in, but figured it out from the rest of the clue.)

I don't do math well in my head under tight time constraints (as I demonstrated shortly afterwards), and my thinking was "if it's late in the game, you should bet big, but it's not that late in the game yet, so save something." Better if I'd thought "You're having trouble on the buzzer, so this is your best chance to get some money." I had seen the previous champion lose it all on a Daily Double, so that probably influenced my thinking.

On the first day: Getting the Folger wrong was my most egregious mistake, but it was purely a question of reacting under the lights and having to read ahead in the question to get to the buzzer on time, since I was being beaten to it so often. I read ?Library on the Hill? and got ready on the buzzer, thinking ?Library of Congress.? I read 'theater' and thought ?does the LOC have a theater? Sure, I bet it has a little theater like most federal cultural buildings.? (And in fact, it does ? I checked afterwards.) I don?t think of the Folger primarily as a library ? I think of it as a theater because I've been to dozens of plays there.

The second I said it, I knew I should?ve said the Folger. We'd been there three weeks before for Midsummer Night's Dream, we?d talked to several of the actors, we?d walked in the Elizabethan garden at Shakespeare?s birthday! AARGH! But the contestant coordinator, Maggie, who is hilarious and full of excellent advice, had told us a story that morning about Cannonball Run (I looked it up and it seems to be actually from Gumball Rally) one driver tears out his rear-view mirror and throws it away, saying "What's behind me is not important!" So Maggie said, ?No rear-view mirror,? meaning do not focus on what you missed, just keep moving forward. That?s the thing I?m happiest about, that I was able to recover from that and move forward.

FJ!: when I saw American Plays, I was absolutely thrilled. My mom took me to the theater ever since I was a kid, and my favorite lit class at Brown was American Theater (I wrote a thank-you to my professor, who I loved and who taught us Long Day's Journey Into Night).

I'm curious about what you see standing behind the podium. Can you see your opponents' scores? Do they help you with the math in any way when you're figuring out your final wager?

From the podium, you see the clues across the stage (they're further away, and therefore seem smaller, then they do on TV - I got my glasses prescription updated a couple weeks before going). The scores are to the left of the clues, and you can see your opponent's scores, though I only glanced at them once in a while, then looked at them specifically in betting situations.

They don't help you with the math at all. You can take as much time as you need and use scratch paper to do the math.

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