"'I figured, why not have some fun with it?' he said. 'Better to be a "stay-at-home son" than "unemployed" or "schmuck" or "lazy guy."' He certainly wasn’t expecting to set off a media moment of stories and think pieces on so-called 'trad sons' — adult men who embrace the lifestyle of living with their parents."
"'I’m sort of the origin of all this discourse,' [Brendan] Liaw, 28, said. He was speaking from an apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia.... After his 'Jeopardy!' appearance — during which he won almost $60,000 across four games — several media outlets, including Vanity Fair,People and the Wall Street Journal published stories about a rise in 'trad sons' or 'hub-sons.'"
"And I’m afraid that is happening in a lot of fields today. Government policy used to be based on settled scientific consensus in fields — just basic things, like climate is changing, or vaccines help prevent disease. This should just be base-line stuff. And now, apparently, it’s very partisan to believe either of those things. Legal facts like birthright citizenship, or facts from the headlines like who won the 2020 election — these are not just contested things; now they are litmus tests for a certain kind of tribalism, and that’s terrible for a society. A society can’t stand with that kind of disagreement over what is true and what is error, and honestly, one great thing about quiz shows is we are a little microenvironment where these facts do have right answers and wrong answers. And they all get resolved in a matter of seconds. Someone will buzz in, and they are either right or wrong."
Only "one side of the political spectrum" is "depreciating knowledge, the importance of knowledge and fact itself"? Or does it just seem that way from the point of view of the other side?
And the reason "Jeopardy!” is "a little microenvironment where these facts do have right answers and wrong answers" is because only unquestionable facts can be used as answers on the show. It's not that there isn't other material — facts yet to be nailed down and unknown and unknowable things of all kinds — it's that the other material isn't the stuff of "Jeopardy!" answers.
Yes, it's nice to appreciate the solidity of the facts that do make it onto the answer board, but that's not a basis for maligning the people who doubt and debate about what's true.
Here's the link to the tweet about the "Jeopardy!" spoilsport, Yogesh Raut.
And here's the link to the "Jesus Christ is Alive" trend. As it looks over there right now, it seems that "Jesus Christ is Alive" is a trend because there are a lot of posts saying "Jesus Christ is Alive" is trend.
"... during my 11-game stint, I went viral as a 'Jeopardy! villain.'... Now, I’m struggling to keep watching. 'Jeopardy!' is changing, and the show threatens to destroy its own appeal by abandoning the unvarying formula we’ve come to depend on and sidelining the people who most make it succeed.
It all started with the loss of Trebek. At my tapings, Trebek told us that if he were ever to retire, his one piece of advice to his successor would be, 'Stay out of the way, and let the contestants be the stars.'... When Trebek died... most fans expected for a replacement already to have been named and, after a bit of welcoming fanfare, for the show to return to normal as soon as possible.
Instead, 'Jeopardy!' trampled over Trebek’s directive. The hunt for the new host became a public circus of 'on-the-job tryouts' featuring a glamorous roster of A-listers, and the star of the show became the week’s celebrity guest host. Each episode, their followers tuned in to root for them, not the actual contestants."
"And they followed the deep partisan grooves of contemporary politics, in which liberals believed the absolute worst of a Trump supporter. But they also contained a thread of real conspiracy thinking — not just that racism is a source of Trumpian politics, but that apparently ordinary people are communicating through secret signals."
"So I feel like I could fit 46 into that 178 and make it work. It would be a dream job for sure, and I’m not shy at all about saying I want the job. That’s how I went into it. I want an opportunity to be in the mix.”
“I feel like I bring something different to the stage — I’m the youngest of any of the guest hosts, I’d be the youngest host of just about any major game show, I bring an audience from the NFL, and I feel like I appeal to nerdy people, too, because I was a nerd in high school and got caught in that weird phase of wanting to be a jock and an athlete and also really caring about getting good grades. And at the same time, there’s not many bigger fans of the show than me. I’ve been watching it for years and years and years. I respect the show and appreciate the history of it, and also there’s my background of stepping in for a legend and their footsteps. I feel like all that combined makes me a pretty good candidate.”
I love the forthright, heartfelt, humble/proud submission of an application for the job. He's such a huge sports hero, and he wants to come home to nerddom. So appealing!
***
There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.
"... published in 1945, and Hayek is virtually the father of postwar neoliberalism.... Hayek’s argument about knowledge is... markets are self-optimizing mechanisms.... This theory of knowledge is not unrelated to the wisdom-of-crowds scenario in which a group of people are guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar. The greater the number of guesses, the closer the mean of all guesses will come to the true number of jelly beans. A crucial part of crowdsourcing knowledge is not to exclude any guesses. This is why Wales, in his role as Wikipedia’s grand arbiter, is notoriously permissive about allowing access to the site’s editing function, and why he doesn’t care whether some of the editors are discovered to be impostors, people pretending to expertise that they don’t really have. For, when you are calculating the mean, the outliers are as important as the numbers that cluster around the average. The only way for the articles to be self-correcting is not to correct, to let the invisible hand do its job. Wikipedia is neoliberalism applied to knowledge...."
Jeopardy! is saddened to share that Alex Trebek passed away peacefully at home early this morning, surrounded by family and friends. Thank you, Alex. pic.twitter.com/Yk2a90CHIM
"There comes a time where you have to make a decision as to whether you want to continue with such a low quality of life, or whether you want to just ease yourself into the next level. It doesn’t bother me in the least."
“There’s a certain comfort that comes from knowing a fact,” Trebek said. “The sun is up in the sky. There’s nothing you can say that’s going to change that. You can’t say, ‘The sun’s not up there, there’s no sky.’ There is reality, and there’s nothing wrong with accepting reality. It’s when you try to distort reality, to maneuver it into accommodating your particular point of view, your particular bigotry, your particular whatever — that’s when you run into problems.”
And:
One morning last year, early in the course of his treatment [for pancreatic cancer], Trebek felt so sick that he lay down on the floor of his dressing room, sobbing from the pain. Producers suggested canceling the rest of the day’s tapings, but Trebek insisted on hosting all five episodes. When he walked onto the stage and greeted the audience, he felt focused, like himself....
“Once I introduce him on that stage, he is Alex Trebek,” said the longtime “Jeopardy!” announcer Johnny Gilbert. “You can tell that that’s what he’s living for.”
The cautious approach may protect audience members as well as the hosts and announcers, some of whom belong to high-risk populations that have been issued special precautions by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Jeopardy!” announcer Gilbert and “Wheel of Fortune” hosts Pat Sajak and Vanna White are all older than 60, which the CDC says puts them at “higher risk of getting very sick from covid-19.”
Trebek, the 79-year-old host of “Jeopardy!,” is doubly vulnerable because of his age and his recent cancer treatments. Since being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year, he has been undergoing chemotherapy, which can compromise the immune system.
Fans’ love for the “Jeopardy!” staples was obvious Monday, when many reacted to the news by cheering the producers’ decision to limit exposure to the public on the show’s set. “Protect Alex Trebek at all costs” became a common refrain on social media....
The song has been referenced several times on the game show itself, including once as a category on the current Alex Trebek-hosted version, and later when Yankovic appeared on Rock & Roll Jeopardy!....
The video takes place on a re-creation of the original set from the 1964-75 version of the quiz show Jeopardy! (for some reason, the exclamation point used in the show's original logo was missing). The video also depicted a "behind-the-scenes" look at the show, and featured cameo appearances by original Jeopardy! host Art Fleming and announcer Don Pardo, Yankovic's mentor, Dr. Demento, members of Yankovic's band, his real-life parents and a brief cameo by Greg Kihn [writer of the original song, "(Our Love's in) Jeopardy"] at the end....
Yankovic lands in the back seat of an Alfa Romeo Spyder convertible driven by Kihn himself, with the license plate reading "LOSER". In the original ["(Our Love's in) Jeopardy" video, Kihn drives away with a female bride in an MG MGB convertible, with the license plate reading "LIPS"...
The surprising end caused even the famously dispassionate host to practically lose his composure.
“What a game!” Alex Trebek exclaimed after [Emma] Boettcher’s final score popped up. “Oh my gosh!”
Holzhauer walked over to give Boettcher a high-five.
“Nobody likes to lose,” Holzhauer said in an interview. “But I’m very proud of how I did, and I really exceeded my own expectations for the show. So I don’t feel bad about it.”
I like the way Boettcher used a James-style approach to the old game, and I hope she goes forward and breaks some new records. I like to see an amazing champ, and she beat the most amazing champ, so let's see her carry on the tradition.
Although the cancer has a 9 percent survival rate, Trebek has been responding very well to chemotherapy. “The doctors said they hadn’t seen this kind of positive result in their memory.... I’ve got a couple million people out there who have expressed their good thoughts, their positive energy directed towards me and their prayers... I told the doctors, this has to be more than just the chemo, and they agreed it could very well be an important part of this... I’ve got a lot of love out there headed in my direction and a lot of prayer, and I will never ever minimize the value of that.”
"I ran into him recently, and he dropped to his knees to coo over how my puppy has grown. As he went to kiss her freckled nose, he flashed his crocodile smile. That same week, I heard from another guy — last I knew, he was a real mess, drove his marriage off a cliff, with his kids in the back seat — letting me know he’s now a life coach and focus counselor. He wants to help me live my best life and was offering me a 20 percent discount."
By the way, for a meaningful dose of artichokes, you might want to see the revival of the Sam Shepard play "Curse of the Starving Class," which is off Broadway until June 2. They throw a lot of artichokes around in that play. I literally got hit by artichokes, sitting in the front row in 1978. I can't remember what the artichokes meant, but they were important. I remember getting hit and I remember the line "So that's what artichokes smell like" but I don't remember what they were supposed to mean, though of course they had to mean something, since everything in a play means something.
The artichoke is the most fearsome vegetable. All those points, and if one sticks you, it might still hurt the next day, as if those stickers are venomous.
I was going to punch up this post with other vegetables in pop culture (other than those artichokes in "Starving Class"), but it was hard to Google. I thought I had something in "Eating Your Cultural Vegetables," a 2011 NYT article, but it's about watching movies and TV shows that are supposed to be good for you (i.e., metaphorical vegetables).
In college, a friend demanded to know what kind of idiot I was that I hadn’t yet watched Tarkovsky’s “Solaris.” “It’s so boring,” he said with evident awe. “You have to watch it, but you won’t get it.”...
A friend messages me: “Oh, you have to see ‘Mildred Pierce,’ ” and she’s right: I do have to.... But that doesn’t mean that, as Kate Winslet bakes yet another pie, I won’t sometimes wonder if those five hours might be more profitably spent aspiring in a different direction: exercising, maybe, or reading a book or just watching 10 episodes of the hilarious (and not at all contemplative) cartoon “Bob’s Burgers.”...
Yes, why watch something long if you prefer reading or exercising, both of which are at least as good for you as some aspirational film or TV series? Lately, the only TV I watch is "Jeopardy!" Do you think James Holzhauer has had his teeth veneered with bright white ceramic laminates?
Said Juergen Holzhauer, a 77-year-old German immigrant and the father of the great "Jeopardy!" champion James Holzhauer, quoted in a NYT article, which highlights how James has avoided the steady-job, working-for-the-man approach to life.
[He has] spent much of his life trying to escape a “normal” adulthood, fleeing the prospect of working a dull desk job in Chicago to gamble in Las Vegas....
“It’s just a regular slacker story,” said his 36-year-old brother, Ian Holzhauer. “Except it’s somebody who has a lot of really exceptional gifts.”...
[As a schoolchild, h]e consistently got A’s on math tests... But he was a C student — even in math — because he often skipped doing his homework or going to class, reasoning he could use the time more productively. "There were times in school where I would say, ‘I should go to class,'" Holzhauer said in an interview. “But I could make $100 playing online poker if I didn’t go.”...
After graduating from the University of Illinois with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, Holzhauer said, he spent a year applying for jobs as an actuary, even though it was the exact sort of desk job he loathed. He played online poker to pay the bills, but as legal restrictions tightened around the game, it began to lose its allure, he said. He decided to focus on sports betting....
James's father was an immigrant from Germany, and his grandmother — his maternal grandmother? — was, we're told, an immigrant from Japan.
Anyway, I'm interested in Americans who have stellar intellectual gifts but choose what their siblings might call a "slacker" lifestyle. It's one thing to miss out conventional career achievement because you're lazy or lost, something else to actively pursue freedom. It's usually hard even to see the people who are in that second category, and it's also hard to see inside the head of the many people who, like Juergen Holzhauer, can say, "I always had a steady job, always worked for 'the man' from 8 to 5," but wish they'd found another way. It takes nerve to be the one your family sees as a slacker, to have all these gifts and to squander them.
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