Alex Trebek/Jeopardy Tribute Thread

This shitty betting has to stop. Why bet it all in 3rd place? You bet to stay above what first place would have it he/she lost.

And Johanna was great. I thought she was going to pass out a few times.

 

I once was taken, by my parents and my grandparents,
to see Lawrence Welk and his band perform in concert.

Wanna talk scars? Let's go. The bad ones, they never heal.

 

Duran Duran sucks, though. A totally horrid band.
How they ever got any respect is a mystery for the ages.

 

Really surprised that they all missed FJ Tuesday. Really easy one.

 

Shoot, I was born in the mid-70s and had to go back when I was older to listen to the Beatles' catalogue. I knew basic things about them but really wasn't exposed to their music much. My parents didn't listen to them and I gravitated toward what was popular when I was a kid in the 80s.

 

My last semester of high school was when I started getting into classic rock and then for some reason it was really big in my college circles. So my 90s mental soundtrack is as much Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones as Hootie and Dave Matthews Band.

 

Duran Duran had some really good musicianship that was almost too palatably packaged. John Taylor, Andy Taylor, and (later) Warren Cuccurullo were much more than pretty boys.

John Taylor is an incredible bass player. No one is going to mistake him for Tony Levin but he got dismissed because he was too damn good-looking to also be so good.

Andy Taylor is a solid rock guitar guy straight out of the 80s mold. He did like to recycle riffs but that's not out of the ordinary (shit, KMFDM has been using the "Godlike" riff for 40 years). "I Might Lie" is better than the one-hit stuff Alias, Autograph, or Helix put out that grazed the Top 40.

Both John and Andy's best work was probably on The Power Station side project (which is worth listening to for session god Tony Thompson's power on the drums).

Warren Cuccurullo was/is an odd duck what with his dalliances with bodybuilding and porn but he's a genius. He played with Missing Persons and Frank Zappa before joining Duran Duran once Andy Taylor left. Ordinary World gets all of the praise but his best stuff is the solo album he put out in 1996. "Thanks 2 Frank" is all instrumental and all done live in no more than three takes. The title track is remarkable.

Whitesnake had Steve Vai (!), John Lord (Deep Purple), Ian Paice (Deep Purple), Vivian Campbell (who now coasts with Def Leppard but was a key member of Dio and also made this forgotten instrumental), and Cozy Powell (Rainbow) and all anyone remembers is Tawny Kitaen rolling around on a car.

(American Psycho 3 is going to be my meal ticket)

 

There was a debate on Conan O’Brien’s podcast on the useless trivia issue. His younger assistant Sona said she knows there was a Civil War, but there’s no reason to know which battle was fought which day at which site.

 

I just learned more about Duran Duran than I ever thought I would have and more than I care to have.

 

"The Reflex" is the worst song in music history.

 

Thus, perhaps, "The Reflex" serves as the ideal testimony to the high caliber of their musicianship and songwriting.

My high school physics teacher provided two paths to getting an A+ on a midterm or final - you get 100 (duh) or you get a 0.

These were multiple-choice tests and his thought was that it would take more than guesswork to find a wrong answer 75/75 times. Like The Great Vizzini, he assumed that a fool would eventually stumble upon one correct answer and blow it and that one would have to know the solutions to accurately choose the incorrect answer every time.*

For a band to do the worst thing possible for 4:26 is improbable. At least one of the five members would stumble upon a redeemable - if not pleasant - moment of beat, melody, or phrasing. By creating the worst thing ever, they must have known what to avoid so that the listener would derive nothing positive from the experience.

I argue that "The Reflex" shows them at the apex of their skills.

*I never had the guts to try. I am too dumb a smart guy or too smart a dumb guy to have successfully seen that proposition through.

 

Getting back on that thread topic: That large dufus champ from earlier in the week was undefinably irritating.