Uggghhhhhhhh, this game! My main memories of this one are:
1) feeling really bad about how many unanswered clues there were (
SO MANY); and
2) the moment at the end of my
fascinating anecdote about bee stings (which I forgot to mention happened when I was about 5 and was my first ever bee sting, which maybe makes it more of a story?), when Alex had me stick out my tongue so he could make sure it was okay in its present state. Unsurprisingly, our many lame silences meant this bit ended up on the cutting room floor... or maybe someone just realized that tongues are disgusting and ugh god, who wants to look at that??
Especially terrible was ending the game with that sports category.
Especially since it was an all-woman game. So many crickets. Way to reinforce outmoded gender stereotypes, us! But I knew I definitely didn't know any of the answers—I've just never been even the tiniest ounce a sports fan—so heroic as it might have been to give it a shot on some of them (
Fishercat), I wasn't about to surrender any of my cash at that point. And by the end of the round, my opponents' leads were either obliterated and then some (Bridget) or reduced to under $1000 (Ayana). Still, it was embarrassing, and I felt like we were pretty solidly underwhelming Alex at that point. So when he revealed 20th Century Technology as the FJ and started going on about how "Ooo, sounds
tough!", I couldn't help but fill in an implied "
... for your apparently feeble lady brains!" I'm sure (or I hope) that was mostly just my embarrassment projecting there, but still. I'd hate for Alex to feel like he got stuck with a game full of dum-dums.
Maybe still reeling from the butchery of DJ, my wagering scratch paper was a big ole mess this time around, and I locked in my $6000 bet knowing that it was really neither here nor there. Stratton's Dilemma was one I always had trouble with when I was practicing, so once again, I got a little lucky with the final outcome. (Terrible gender stereotype #2: Girls are bad at math! None of us really bet correctly in this one, did we? Yeesh.) Nuremberg came to me immediately—all those pictures of a room packed full of solemn men wearing headphones—so I was somewhat surprised when neither Bridget nor Ayana got it. But of course everyone's insta-gets are different.
Otherwise, wow Ayana was good. Both she and Bridget were killer on the buzzer, and once again, I was not able to get my timing down AT ALL. And then I had my lovely AMR = Southwest Airlines (obviously!) moment, which, watching from home, was such an eye-rolling fail. It really is shocking how easy it is to miss simple things like that when you're actually playing. I would always wonder about that when I would see contestants do something like answer a "Starts with R" category with something that
didn't start with R, or whatever, but you really can just get so hyper-focused on ringing in that you don't even see or hear the obvious.
The one moment that did have me excited in the game was when they revealed Keyboard Cats and I got to choose it! We'd been talking earlier about what our "ideal boards" might be, and my list had been something like types of pie, America's Next Top Model, Pavement albums, and cats on the internet. Sadly, the category was not quite so literal.
So, another raggedy win. It's kind of my specialty, apparently!