Good Morning.
I started watching Jeopardy the minute I got to college. It was on at 11:00 a.m. and I headed for the TV room in the freshman dorm Monday through Friday with a Diet-Rite Cola and a pack of Winstons. The reason I was free at that time was because I always had early morning classes but got a late morning break. There was never a time in my college career that I didn't have an eight o'clock class every swingin' day of the week.
I still watch Jeopardy, but it's increasingly annoying because there's a lot of categories now that have to do with pop culture about which I know exactly nothing. TV Shows is a disaster because they're seldom about Bonanza or Dallas; they're into programming that doesn't ring the faintest bell with me even though I check the channel listings daily. If they get into late night television, I'm completely sunk because the last time I stayed up past 10;30 was when Carson was on. When they do Pop Singers they're talking about Bruno Mars and Pink, people I've heard of but about whom I know nothing. Any variety of literature makes no use of my long childhood hours playing Authors when I became familiar with the novels of Washington Irving and Robert Louis Stevenson - the only woman featured in the game was Louisa May Alcott, shame on them - but in any case, today's literature category on Jeopardy will probably be about the much more recent books I have ignored. I am the only person on earth, for example, who doesn't know a single thing about Harry Potter.
There are other categories that drive me bonkers. Outer Space, Computer Lingo, and Countries with a New Name that will probably include the post-Soviet states ending in -stan are a nightmare. I readily admit to being unacceptably deficient in my knowledge of sports, with the possible exception of tennis and golf, and I am terrible in math, physics, and chemistry. I feel like a lottery winner when I come up with a question about something I vaguely recall from biology like spores or bones. I can do state capitals, cooking terms, dogs, ballet, and the always useful Latin phrases. I can run through the popular category Potent Potables in a New York minute. This means, for you who do not watch Jeopardy, that I know something about alcoholic beverages. I'm also fairly good in anything to do with words. The people who formulate the answers for the show always try to be clever when they title these categories, i.e. POP Goes the Weasel means the letters P-O-P will come up in every correct question like populist, hippopotamus, and poppycock. I'm okay at spelling and passable in geography as long as it's in this country and not anywhere else. The other day they had British Slang and I knew that a diaper in the U.K. is a nappy and an elevator is a lift. I was very pleased.
The best categories for me involve classical music and composers. I majored in music, often when I was half asleep. Most of the contestants who go on Jeopardy either don't know much about classical music or they mispronounce the names of composers they probably studied up on before the show. A woman recently pronounced Franz Joseph Haydn's last name like HAY-dun and I yelled at her from my chair. It's HI-dun, I barked, but then she ran through an entire category on video games. By now you have correctly surmised that I know nothing about video games.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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