Alex Trebek/Jeopardy Tribute Thread

I saw Joe Charboneau in his prime. And Steve Balboni!

 

Steve Balboni, who may or may not still hold the Florida State League home run record when he was with the Fort Lauderdale Yankees. Bye, bye!

 

This run of contestants have been very disappointing. They have made betting mistakes and play the game like its 1995.

 

I keep waiting for Ken to have a Will Hunting moment.

 

Thanks for reposting and reminding me of a grammar mistake.

My memory is that Ken was just a trivia machine. It was the guys after him with long runs who showed the strategic ways to play the game. The gameplay is my biggest complaint.

 

This is an old man rant, but it seems that younger people don't know about anything from before they were born. Those of us in our 50s and 60s knew the music, movies and stars of our parents generation, but that hasn't carried over.
I'm sure most of it is due to the amount of information available now and how it's consumed, and other options, such as gaming. We had books and a few TV channels in the 1970s.

 

We consumed a lot of culture with/through our parents. Where I grew up we had no cable and most families had one TV. It was much more of a monoculture.

My kids aren’t watching Austin City Limits and 60 minutes with me because they are bored and it beats the alternative.

 

None of the most recent contestants have had much of any personality.

yeah, that's an extreme generalization old man rant.
The Beatles aren't relevant to someone in their 30s. That's just the way it is.

 

Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor weren't relevant to me in my 30s, but I knew who they were and could likely answer a basic trivia question about them.
On a recent The Weakest Link, a young contestant criticized an older one for not knowing the answer to a question about a Real Housewife but then she didn't know what magazine Helen Gurley Brown edited for 30-plus year. It's all perspective, interests and life experience. I'm much more likely to know the answer to a question about Charlie Chaplin than my 25-year-old is to know about John Belushi. In fact, I'd be surprised if he knew who either was.

 

This reminds me of a discussion I was a part of when I was in high school, a hell of a long time ago.

In the summer before my senior year -- so, 1984 -- I attended a two week high school journalism seminar at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. It was a great experience, run by college professors and pros from papers like the LA Times.

As part of that, we got a tour of the local newspaper in San Luis Obispo and the Editor spoke with us. He asked us if anyone knew who Dick Gregory was. No one did... so he spent the rest of the visit scolding us for not having any interest in the world or current events. I asked him if he was familiar with Simon LeBon. He was not.

In 1984 Dick Gregory could not have been less relevant. He was not performing, he was not taking part in any political action, and he had yet to start selling diet pills on TV. Simon LeBon was the singer of maybe the biggest band of the moment.

There was no reason on earth why anyone under 30 would know Dick Gregory.

(I would say the same about Helen Gurley Brown.)

 

I don’t disagree, but their retort would be, how would knowing pop culture from 40 years ago be meaningful in any way other than winning at “Jeopardy”?

And we’d have no retort.

Trivia is not a useful skill. AI is increasingly pointing that out. It’s not knowledge. It’s not wisdom. It’s something a program can learn to do.

 

Tonight's champ, Johanna, was adorable. My wife nailed the final Jeopardy as soon as Jennings finished reading it.

Going back to the MTM old man rant - the Beatles aren't relevant to young people today. There's no harm in that.