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Game Recap for Show #7180, 2015-11-27

CONTESTANTS
Bianca Benincasa, a software engineer from Silver Spring, Maryland
Darin Brown, a trademark attorney from Louisville, Colorado
Rob Russell, a tutoring and testing director from Johnson City, Tennessee (whose 1-day cash winnings total $20,800)

OPENING REMARKS
Alex: Thank you, Johnny Gilbert. Hi, folks. Welcome to our show. Darin and Bianca, welcome aboard. Let me give you some advice. Do not underestimate our champion Rob. He is a very sharp, soft-spoken gentleman. Okay, good luck to you. Here we go. Let's find out what the categories are, shall we?...

JEOPARDY! ROUND CATEGORIES
FEMALE NOVELISTS (4/5)
IN WHICH STATE? (4/5)
TYPES OF COMEDY (5/5)
"ET"YMOLOGY (5/5)
DEVICES (4/5, including 1 missed Daily Double)
RICK ROLLED (4/5)

THE RIGHTS & THE WRONGS
Darin: 10 R, 1 W
Bianca: 10 R, 2 W (including 1 DD)
Rob: 6 R (including 1 rebound), 1 W

Clues revealed: 30
Triple Stumpers: 3
Jeopardy! Round Potential Lach Trash: $2,400



SCORES AT THE FIRST BREAK
Bianca: $2,800
Darin: $2,400
Rob: -$400

CONTESTANT INTERVIEWS



Alex: Bianca Benincasa is a software engineer. And interesting, we don't know in advance which contestants are going to be on each program. And there's never any effort made to correlate the categories with the contestants. But we had a category in this one about etymology, and you are an amateur...

Bianca: Etymologist, yes.

Alex: ...etymologist.

Bianca: Yes, so this is one of my favorite things to do just when I--whenever I come across it. Um, so I--I--I learned Spanish in high school, and eventually made my way to majoring in Spanish also in college, and I grew up hearing my grandparents speak Italian. So it's now interesting to me, like, having that background, to be able to look at different words and say, oh, I recognize this root and I recognize that, you know, in German, I know that this word means that and therefore...

Alex: It's fun, isn't it?

Bianca: Yeah, it definitely is.

Alex: Very satisfying. Yeah.

Alex: It's neat to find those things, yeah.




Alex: Darin Brown is a trademark attorney from Colorado who has a lifelong love of... rhinos.

Darin: That's correct.

Alex: How did that come about?

Darin: You know, it was some sort of, uh, you know, it just--just happened one day. My--my--my grandmother is a big, um, donor to the zoo, took me to the Denver Zoo. And I just kind of clicked with, uh, with the rhino pen. And, uh, ever since then, I've just known an odd number of facts about rhinos. It's kind of been my entrée into trivia.

Alex: Uh-huh.

[Apparent edit]

Alex: Good. Okay.

[Laughter]

Darin: Mm-hmm. [In an apparent artifact of the aforementioned edit, the video of Darin does not show him sayin "mm-hmm" even though he can be heard saying it.]




Alex: Okay, Rob Russell is our champion. He is a tutor who used to love to hear his grandmother read to him. But she would read particular subjects to you.

Rob: Uh, yes. She had a book of the, uh, the Grimms' fairy tales.

Alex: Scary stuff sometimes.

Rob: Scary stuff. And--and for some reason, I just--I really loved having her read those to me late at night, when I would, you know, sleep over at her house. And, um, so it gave me a love for reading to my own kids.

Alex: That's great. Learning to love reading is very, very important in life, particularly if you, uh, aspire to be a Jeopardy! contestant.

JEOPARDY! ROUND DAILY DOUBLE
Bianca found the Daily Double on the 30th clue. Rob had $2,600, Darin had $5,000, and Bianca was at $4,600. Bianca wagered $800.

DEVICES $1000: This tech product got its name because its buttons were said to resemble little bumps on a certain fruit
(Alex: Bianca?)
(Bianca: Uh, what is a mouse? I don't know.)

TRIPLE STUMPERS IN THE JEOPARDY! ROUND
FEMALE NOVELISTS $400: In a 2015 bestseller, she retold "Fifty Shades of Grey" from Christian's viewpoint

IN WHICH STATE? $1000: The geographic center of North America, in Pierce County, just south of Rugby
(Rob: What is Kansas?)
(Bianca: What is Nebraska?)

RICK ROLLED $1000: He delivered the invocation at Barack Obama's first inauguration

SCORES AT THE END OF THE JEOPARDY! ROUND
Darin: $5,000
Bianca: $3,800
Rob: $2,600

Placeholder for DJ! Round

Authors

In 1990 he said, "I would like to do what Faulkner did, carve out a little piece of Mississippi territory & claim it for my own."

Spoiler

Who is John Grisham? Darin had Smith, Bianca had Faulkner.

Darin Brown: $7,800-$7,800=$0

Rob Russell: $11,400+$11,400=$22,800; now a 2-day champion with $43,600

Bianca Bennincasa: $16,000-$7,000=$9,000

A heads-up for Chicagolanders:
According to WLS, today's episode will air overnight at 2:30am.

Well, that was an interesting FJ response.

Instaget for me.

Congrats to Rob on another win. I had 41 correct responses including three triple stumpers: Rick Warren, 60 feet 6 inches, and West Nile virus. I also got the missed DD of BlackBerry. Instaget FJ.

That woman should have been negged for "the arch." She should at least have been BMSed to produce Gateway Arch. Me, if I'd been there, it would have been tempting to give the correct name of the arch. Who knows what that is?

WLT Agatha Christie at $200?

Lach Trash: North Dakota, West Nile

Ran "Et"ymology, Comedy, and Crow.

Thought for sure we'd leave the DD on the J! board, but we squeaked it in.

Rick Harrison = pawnbroker was a stupid miss on my part. I watch Pawn Stars all the time, but his name just didn't register since it's so generic.

"It" songs kept tripping me up because I kept thinking that it had to begin with "It", even if I got "Whip It" and "Shake It Off". Should've gotten Let It Be and Beat It should've been easy, but Drop It Like It's Hot was never gonna happen.

I literally could not think of a single male author to put down in 30 seconds.

GF said Grisham right away, and that felt right, but I guessed Tennessee Williams just to say something.

I thought that "militia" DD was too easy.

Damn, I really liked Bianca's sweater. And I mean, we always say that writing anything is better than writing nothing, but... Faulkner. Huh.

No idea Grisham had anything to do with Mississippi. One of many things I don't know about him and his work, no doubt.

Congrats to Rob on making more money than he would have if he had bet properly.

Walker Percy was my guess. John Grisham would've been my second, but only because I forgot about Horton Foote. Foote and Percy traveled together to visit Faulkner as young men. Foote did the actual visiting while Percy stayed in the car, too much in awe to approach. Those seem like the kind of guys that would express such a sentiment, not some hack like Grisham.

I admit I was troubled by the tense. In 1990, the year of his death, Walker Percy would not have said that he "would like to" carve out a little piece of Mississippi as his own. He would have said that he hoped he had done so. But I rationalized that the quote might be misleading, excerpted from something like "When I was young I decided I would like to do what Faulkner did, carve out a little piece of Mississippi territory and claim it for my own."

grindcore wrote:No idea Grisham had anything to do with Mississippi. One of many things I don't know about him and his work, no doubt.

I vaguely remembered that A Time to Kill took place in Mississippi--that was enough of a Mississippi connection for me.

We've seen other players forget that something was mentioned in the clue--that's got to be a tough way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Jeopardy! was preempted by high school football in the Dallas market.

Literature is one of my weak areas (on J! and LL) but I was 4/5 in "Female Novelists" and got FJ. FJ was a WECIB, since A Time to Kill came out in the early 90's and I couldn't think of anyone else from Mississippi.
It's tough seeing a contestant collapse like that. With time running out and the DD being the next-to-last clue, the optimal wager on that DD would be enough to get a lock but not so much that a miss would put you out of contention... so about $9000. Who else wants to restock Vermonter's liquor cabinet?

Instaguess FJ, aided by my ignorance of male Southern writers. I could only think of one other, and I didn't think they'd ever ask about Robert McCammon (and he's from Alabama anyway).

I missed the first 6 or so clues -- it started already in progress (after some sort of football thing) for what I believe was only the second time since I started recording it on WTNH instead of WABC, which preempts Jeopardy! whenever anything resembling weather happens.

Having missed the intros, I was all, "Wait, Derren Brown?" when Alex said Darin's name in the interview.

Bianca missed a very gettable DD in the first round, then let the opportunity to put the game away go to waste on the last DD.

There are times when I wish there was a clock on the screen. The time between the LTaM warning in the J! round and them finally clearing the board felt like an eternity, as if after the multiple unrevealed DDs the other day, they decided to wait out of pity.

FJ took a few seconds but then A Time to Kill popped into my head and I was home free.

30 right.

Female (3), State (3), Comedy (3), "ET" (3), Devices (2), Rick (2)
Article (4), Com (1), Beauty (1), "It" (4), Far (3), Crow (1)

Lach Trash: "(E.L.) James", "Massachusetts", "60 feet, 6 inches"

The only person I thought of was John Grisham, but I wasn't totally sure; still went with it anyway.

Instaget on Grisham - the "Mississippi writer who isn't Faulkner" connection has come up before:

#5215, aired 2007-04-20 WILLIAM FAULKNER $1200: (Jon of the Clue Crew delivers the clue from Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi.) Speaking at the rededication of Faulkner's home, John Grisham said this 1929 book at first baffled him; guess he thought it was signifying nothing

Fascinated by the "ogee" clue - that's one I've never heard before. Trying to hammer it into my brain but it isn't sticking - bit of a long shot, but anybody have any memorable ogee facts to pass on?

Had the sex of the author not been specified, I would have also been tempted by Anne Rice.