The 7 Jeopardy Categories of Your Life

[firecat]

Seemed appropriate to infect Livejournal with this as well...

if by some chance I got on Jeopardy & was facing the screens, if these were the categories that appeared, I would be grinning b/c I would know that I was about to ace the game. So what would they be? -- L1

1. Indie Punk Bands of 1982
2. Group Dynamics of Eclectic/Dianic Covens
3. Care and Feeding of Non-Tenured Scholarly Book Authors and the Correct Use of Commas
4. Product Team T-shirts of Apple Computer
5. Polyamory: Theory and Practice on the Internet
6. Cat Photography Tips
7. Homeowning on Fifty Cents a Day

Comments

[alfachimp.livejournal.com]

1. WWII
2. Muscle Cars of the 1960's
3. Polygon Structure in 3D modeling
4. Rock and Roll
5. Dogs
6. Photoshop
7. Potpourri

Potent Potables would also suffice.

[jenett]

Huh.

I wouldn't mind the "Polyamory: Theory and Practice on the Internet" one, though I might do slightly less well at it.

1) The Anne McCaffrey Pern novels written through 1996.
2) The Boston Massacre.
3) Western musical notation.
4) Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels novels.
5) The Dewey Decimal system (as long as no one asks me about Cutter numbers.)
6) Cryptozoology
7) US Fiance visa immigration procedures. (Right now, I could probably do this one in my sleep...)

And yes, that's a rather odd collection. I know bunches of other stuff, too, but I also know how much I don't know.

Some other alternatives:

* The Intellectual Freedom Committee of the American Library Association
* Marsilio Ficino
* Figured basses
* Arthurian Legends
* The Salem Witchcraft Trials
* Historical epidemic diseases

[firecat]

I like your collection. What is cryptozoology?

[xp85goblin.livejournal.com]

bigfoot...etc.

Kind of zoology's equivalent of my facination with Wierd Physics.

[jenett]

Depends.

It's theoretically the zoology (study of living things) of 'hidden' beasties or unusual ones.

That *can* be stuff like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. Or Champ, who happens to be my favorite lake monster. (Lake Champlain, between NY State, Vermont, and Canada.)

Or it can be animals which are out of place in the environment they're in. (The Beast of Bodmin Moor, for example, Bodmin Moor being, I seem to remember, in the north of England, and the Beast in this case likely being a panther or similar sized cat that escaped from somewhere. No one's completely sure, though)

Or it can be animals thought extinct, but then sighted, like the coecelanth, until they figured out there's actually several populations of them, and that the locals knew they were there all along. No one had told *them* the things were supposed to be extinct, after all.

Or, it can be animals that local legend or discussion say are there, but which haven't been scientifically proven by 'Western' scientific standards.

What got me hooked on the subject was the last one. The Giant Panda was originally considered cryptozoological, because no one but the local population had ever seen one, and no one had ever brought back even a dead carcass.

It took something like sixty five years between people saying "Hey, there might be something in these stories" and actually capturing one live (and the bulk of those years before they got a carcass, if I remember correctly. The book's at home.)

It's just a cool subject that allows one to collect random bits of trivia about obscure subjects, which is probably why I like it so much. (I feel the same way about archaeology, but that's a much broader subject, in a lot of ways.)

And, um, yes, I'm a little effusive about it. It's a subject that reminds me just how *little* we sometimes know about our world.

Wow another Elizabeth Peters fan!!

[shaktiqueen.livejournal.com]

Are you a fan of her Amelia Peabody series? Have you read the latest one? And crytptozoolology, Arthurian Legends and The Salem Witch trials too? A woman after my own heart.

Re: Wow another Elizabeth Peters fan!!

[jenett]

*grin* Nice to know there's others out there.

Yep. I think I own every book she's ever written under any of her three names, barring one of her non-fiction books (the one with "Red Land" in the title..) and I think one of the Barbara Michaels ones that's a couple of decades old.

I have indeed read the new one, as she's one of a very small handful of authors I buy in hardcover.

I got to hear her speak at the Brown University Egyptological Department centennial (she apparently more or less invited herself, and they were delighted to let her.) She stood up on stage and talked for a bit, and then took questions from the audience, including some pretty cutting edge archaeological stuff. Very impressive.

I asked her what other authors she really liked reading, and was amused when one of them (and the one I remember now) was Lois McMaster Bujold (whose work I also adore.)

(For anyone not sure why one should be this enthused, Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels are pen names for the same woman, who holds a Ph.D in Egyptology (and then decided she didn't want to go dig in the hot sun all winter...) and who's written a tremendous number of books.

They're all quite well written (though she's gotten better as she's done more, her earlier books are a bit weaker) with interesting characters, strong mystery plots in a sort of Dorothy L. Sayers style (strongly character driven) and often with a strong archaeological or academic sort of setting. The Peters ones are straight mysteries, sometimes with romance, the Michaels books are romantic suspense. (Not sappy, but you end up with romantic happy endings.)

[baratron.livejournal.com]

I'm still not very sure what Jeopardy is, as we don't have it here. I know it's a quiz show, and I think you have to answer in the form of a question, but how does it work?

Subjects I know lots about:
1) The music and history of The Wildhearts.
2) Trivia of London Transport.
3) Neil Gaiman's Sandman books.

um... I'll think of some more later. I'm sure I must remember something from my degree, for example...

Oh yes! 4) 101 things not to do in an organic chemistry lab :)

Everything you never wanted to know about Jeopardy

[firecat]

Right. Instead of questions, you are given answers and you have to ask the question that goes with the answer. The answers are in a grid, 7 categories with something like 5-6 answers in each. Each answer is hidden behind a block with an amount of money on it ($100, $200, etc.). So when it's your turn, you tell the MC which answer you'd like by saying, e.g., "I'd like 'Neil Gaiman's "Sandman"' for $100, please." If you get the question right, you get to ask for another answer, and if you get it wrong, the turn passes to your opponent.

Also, Jeopardy has a silly, singsong theme tune that some USian folks sing when they are waiting for something to happen. (On Jeopardy it plays during another part of the game, where the same answer is posed to both contestants and they write down the question on a board.)

[xp85goblin.livejournal.com]

1. It's heresy
2. History of the space program
3. The occult and the esoteric
4. World War 2
5. Modern weaponry
6. Game Design
7. Computer Graphics