Do we have any other Jeopardy! fans here? I stopped watching for a while, after my appearance years ago, but I'm quite enjoying it again, especially the current champion (another $130,000 today). It is intriguing when someone is suddenly incredibly much better than anyone else at doing something: Bob Beamon (breaking the long jump record by 2 feet), Secretariat (winning the Belmont by 31 lengths), and now Holzhauer (with, so far, the top 18 scores of the program's 35 years).
I like the show, but I cancelled cable a long time ago, so now I only see it when I'm at my Mom's and she has it on. But I've heard of Holzhauer's run, and I read this about it by previous Jeopardy! grandmaster Ken Jennings, which you may find interesting: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ken-jennings-why-im-rooting-for-james-holzhauer-on-jeopardy/2019/05/19/011e4056-798b-11e9-bd25-c989555e7766_story.html
Each day's program often is sometimes available free on the Jeopardy sub-Reddit on Reddit.com -- along with (always) seemingly endless discussion of that day's content. Things are tempered by the sad fact that host Alex Trebek has stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Since this season's tapings (through late June) are all done, presumably he survived till then, but the prognosis is very poor.
Well Dr. Bear, I have amazing news.... Alex Trebek appears to be winning his cancer battle. Almost three months after the "Jeopardy!" host announced that he'd been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, he has revealed in a new interview that he is "near remission." Speaking with People magazine, Trebek said that some of the tumors have "shrunk by almost 50%" and noted that even his doctors have expressed surprise at how well he's doing. https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Culture/alex-trebek-shares-mind-boggling-cancer-update/story?id=63329193
Thanks for sharing the encouraging news, Tireman. Even 9% chances are a lot more than zero. When I was on, one had to list five possible topics for the contestant interviews. Alex seized upon 'fake universities,' and one of my on-air questions, oddly, was "What is your favorite fake university." I wasn't about to give any publicity to these guys, so I picked the most innocuous one I could think of, the one then operating in Colorado that sold degrees to dogs for five bucks.
My grandmother, may she rest in peace, used to tell me that I should go on Jeopardy! So far, I haven't done it.
The current phenomenon, Holzhauer (who won his 31st straight game today) explained that he used to watch Jeopardy with his grandmother (Japanese, spoke little English), who encouraged him to go on the program, and he pursued that to honor her.
And the answer (for Ted) is: "It is believed that this crucial Civil War battle turned out as it did because clocks in the North were set differently from clocks in the South, and so the spies got the time of the attack wrong."
George Rippey Stewart's fine book, Pickett's Charge, is based on Stewart's discovery that clocks in the North and the South were something like half an hour different, so when a spy thought he had learned the time of the attack, he was wrong.