The inherent unpredictability in the behavior of a complex natural system, i.e. Lunch May 22
A few random thoughts during my midday repast.
1) Why don’t fortune cookies ever actually bother with fortunes any more? I want to know if I will die rich and loved or penniless and alone. Since no one else at the office particularly cares for fortune cookies, I end up eating most if not all of them, and my pack rat mentality means I have a huge pile of probably every fortune I’ve gotten while at work. Most of them are stupid aphorisms like “The truth always shines through” or “Happiness is a state of mind” or “You may be hungry soon: order a takeout now”. All of those are actual fortunes from the pile, selected at random. Today, I got two “fortunes” both of which are very appropriate for me: “Your winsome smile will be your sure protection” and “You look pretty”. Thank you fortune cookie for telling me about my fabulous smile and my good looks. Maybe you should inform the rest of the world.
2) Since the shifting of the Bravo schedule to move the West Wing out of the noon hour, we’ve struggled to find something that we can all agree on. Celebrity Poker showdown lasted a while, then we moved on to ESPNews, CNN, and Murder She Wrote (Angela Lansbury was hot once, I tells ya!), but we finally landed on Jeopardy! repeats, from possibly a year or so ago. Luckily none of us watch Jeopardy! at the pre-primetime hour, and if we did, we probably wouldn’t remember the questions for a year, so it doesn’t really matter. Anyway, after a coworker once guessed the question to the answer for Final Jeopardy! just based on the category, we traditionally make an effort to repeat it. Most of the time, we fail miserably, although it’s happened a few times, mainly when there are only so many responses it could be, like American Territories. Today, the category was The Globe. Of course, the first response is Shakespeare, but a more reasonable response would be some geographic characteristic of the Earth. Latitude, longitude, the aurora australis, and the like. Once you pick one of those, you’re probably ok. But with a question that points to quick answers, you tend to have time to think, or overthink, your guess. And I was thinking that it would be too easy to go with my original pick of latitude. I then thought of how inane the Jeopardy! people could be, and then said, “They could go with latitude or longitude, but in all likelihood, it will be something stupid like a body of water, so I’m going to go with the Indian Ocean.” They finally come back from commercial (No, I don’t want to buy a muffler or sue the government about asbestos, my kid with cerebral palsy, or unpaid Social Security benefits, thank you very much), and the answer is revealed, “If you burrow straight through the center of the earth from Canton, Ohio, you end up not in China, but in this body of water.” Which is, for those of you not longitudinally inclined, the Indian Ocean. I win!
3) And this is really a subset of the previous thought, but things go better in threes (I’m looking at you Robertson and Dobson): one of the challengers was this sort of ditsy Latina from southern California who wasn’t particularly impressive. At least until we got to the always awkward interview segment (my favorite of those is still Alex asking the winner of the Tournament of Champions whether he showered with his wife, not once, but twice). Her story was about how she once got stuck in an elevator, and after being told that it would take a long time before she could be rescued, decided to break out her groceries and other purchases, and ended up drinking wine and reading Harry Potter. Alex asked her if she was alone in the elevator, and she said that it was just her, Harry Potter, and Chuck, which seemed to confuse Alex, because she immediately said, “Two-buck Chuck”, everyone’s favorite extremely cheap, but surprisingly good (I’m told) wine from Charles Shaw, typically found at Trader Joe’s. This immediately made her a favorite over the idiot from upstate New York, and Rheal Cormier’s (no longer on the Reds!) cousin Henry Cormier (I’m just guessing he’s the cousin). So when she won, which surprised her, and me, frankly, because Bad Pitcher’s Relative said the Red Sea, Alex called her “The Two-Buck Chuck Girl.” Thus cementing her as my favorite contestant in a while, along with the Monotone woman and the teen who answered every question with the disdain it so richly deserved for being too easy.
Matthew Barney Gumble May 23
So long as we’re Jeopardy-blogging, I’d like to second CV’s nomination of disdainful teen contestant as my favorite in quite some time. He was clearly a stoner snowboarder from (I think) upstate New York, and I swear to god he rolled his eyes with every correct answer he gave (and he won his round, so there were many). You’re a hero to us all, so-over-this-Jeopardy-shit kid.
The Maestro May 23
Was the teen on Teen Jeopardy, or regular Jeopardy? Not that the regular questions are difficult or anything, but TJ questions seem to be more like preschool-level these days.
Caseus Velox May 23
The Maestro-
Oh, it was Teen Jeopardy!.
Well, Two-Buck Chuck Lady (she’s been upgraded by Alex) won again today, this time because she was the only one who knew that only the Baltic states were actually made into independent countries from Russia after World War I, and selected Riga as the third largest city in Russia. The category was Port Cities, and none of us were particularly close in guessing the question. The other two competitors, who were each around 10k at the end of Double Jeopardy!, both missed it, with the Hawaiian Firefighter and Liverpool fan (suck it Reds fans… oh, wait…) saying that Kiev was a port city. At least annoyingly slow overweight woman said Odessa. Which is a port. Two-Buck Chuck was embarrassing me for rooting for her for most of the match, until she hit some geometry questions and got a Daily Double (barely, because who doesn’t know the 3-4-5 ratio for right triangle sides… or even just the Pythagorean theorem) to put herself back on the plus side. And then she won. Her story today was just as crazy: she taught the daughter of a former Filipino president how to trick a pay phone into giving her free minutes. Since she’s so young, my money would be on the daughter being Jackie Estrada-Lopez.
Caseus Velox May 24
So down goes Two-Buck Chuck Lady. Her story today wasn’t as good, unless you think like I think she wanted us to think. She talked about going around looking for meteor showers and trying to find the best place to see them. So they ended up in the desert with a large amount of people and chairs. Alex asked about refreshments, and she kind of turned slightly red and said “All kinds of refreshments”. A group of people who wander into the desert looking for meteor showers? There has to be at least a chance that it was of the herbal kind, if not stronger stuff.
She again ended up with about half the amount of the other two contestants (a Creepy Librarian from Vancouver and a pediatrician from Arizona), but missed Final Jeopardy!. The category was Military History and the answer was one-month battle where the medals of honor were given to marines. It’s Iwo Jima, but Creepy Librarian said the Tet Offensive, which wasn’t even the right war, and Arizona Pediatrician was right. Two-Buck Chuck Lady said Guadalcanal (one of the many things I wrote a report about in school and therefore feel like I need to bring it up whenever I discuss it), which was around a six month fight. But she missed it, and was eliminated. However, she was determined to become one of the greatest Jeopardy! contestants ever: she had $7k to wager with, and instead of wagering all of it, she decided to wager $6969. Even though she lost, she won.
Vermonstrous May 25
http://www.meiwahrestaurant.com/fortune.htm
Caseus Velox May 25
Well, it had to happen some time, and apparently it was today: I finally got the exact same fortune as one I’d gotten before. Except this time, I had two fortune cookies and they were exactly the same fortune. Considering just how many fortunes there are, and how unlikely it is that two of them stay right next to each other from conception to consumption, how remote must the possibility be of one person getting two fortune cookies with the same fortune at the same time? The fortune? “Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.”
Matthew Barney Gumble Jun 29
This is somewhat late at this point (ok, very late) but for posterity’s sake:
Final Jeopardy category = World Events
MBG thinks hard, says “Krakatoa”
Is correct.
That’s right, my brain is master of all space and time. Boom, bitches.