Fri-day, Fri-day, Jeopardy! on Friday...

Bet you thought you'd gotten rid of me, eh? OK, maybe you didn't think that. Anyhow, I've been woefully behind on Jeopardy! viewing this past week (as in, I hadn't been able to see any of the episodes since Monday, even though I've found a reliable place where they can be found, and that's all I'll say about that here), but today I decided to bite the bullet and at least look at the Archive for how last week's games went...except for Friday, which I decided to watch in its entirety because Jessica, one of the contestants, is a member of the Jeopardy! board, and I wanted to see how she did. (I actually kind of found out how she did when checking the Archive, since I saw the player lists for Monday and Tuesday. Oh well.)

To streamline this recap, and because it's late and I mostly just scribbled random thoughts and stats (OK, mostly thoughts) about the episode down as I went (I didn't pause and keep record of each clue like I did for Monday's game), I'm going to break down and resort to bullets. (A time-starved blogger's best friend. :)) Here we go...

• The three contestants (thank you, J! Archive!) were our returning champ Justin Sausville (whose 6-day cash winnings total $134,000, Amit Kurlekar, an attorney from Oakland, CA, and aforementioned J! boardie Jessica Burr, a book editor (and as we found out in the interviews, page turner for chamber music concerts, which I think is way cool) from Bloomfield, NJ.
• I went 4/5 in Presidential Inaugurations...even though I could sense a little inflection in Alex's voice for the JFK clue (I wonder if it was intentional?), I just couldn't place it in time, nor was the clue giving me a huge amount of help. Ronald Reagan was a pretty easy get for the Daily Double, though...you can't really forget a program dubbed "Star Wars" that easily.
• The Playoffs category was brutal for me, but then the writers threw me a bone and had a clue about BYU for $800 (Go Cougars!) and then a clue about TCU for $1000, which I normally wouldn't have known, but got fairly easily because we played them my freshman year, and I was at the game, and we lost and it was heartbreaking. Sniffle.
• I was happy to see a clue in the J! round about Branson, because I have a good friend that currently works there right now, and is actually the sound engineer for the Cat's Pajamas, an a cappella group that recently competed on "The Sing-Off." (And now, a break for our sponsors: Actually, this is just me quietly plugging my recaps of the show on my Wordpress blog. Ahem. :))
• I have quite honestly never heard of Virginia Apgar (the response to the first DD in the Double Jeopardy! round). Then again, I haven't had children, so I guess I have some sort of excuse. (It would be rather disturbing if I did have children, given my age, gender, and circumstances.)
• In a strange turn of events, I was about to pull out the name of Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, but was unable to remember the name of Boo Radley, the character from "To Kill A Mockingbird," despite the fact that we read that book in high school and I loved it, and I have very little attachment to the aforementioned vaccine. (Guess seeing the commercials for it all the time helped?)
• The second DD in the DJ! round was about Kurt Vonnegut. It mentioned "several cleverly ironic sci-fi novels," which threw me off since I wasn't quite aware Vonnegut had written in the genre. My guess was Douglas Adams (of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" fame), and Justin's was Orson Scott Card.
• I swept the Oscar category except for the middle clue (about "Rain Man," which I'll probably end up seeing someday, seeing as it's, y'know, a classic or something), and I was glad they finished it, since Justin went to Paint In Oils with little time to spare, and I was afraid it would be a casualty. (I actually did surprisingly OK in that category. It may have been some knowledge from studying Art in AcDec years ago that somehow stuck with me, perhaps?)
• Just so this doesn't turn into Brandon's Storytelling Hour, the scores at the end of the DJ! round were Justin at $8400, Amit at $11400, and Jessica in the lead at $13000.
• The category for Final was American Business. The clue, in its entirety (once again, props to the Archive): "In the 1880s he developed Crystal A Caramels; a product under his own name came out in 1900" Jessica and I both said Werther. (I was holding out for the vain hope that he was somehow American.) Justin went with Russell Stover (which I thought was a good guess), and Amit got the correct response...Hershey. The caramels thing was huge neg-bait, I think. It really threw me off...who knew Hershey made caramels?
• Justin ended up grabbing 2nd place with $3799, Amit won with a score of $16801, and Jessica ended up with a score of $2399.

And there you have it. To close as always, the Coryats (it's only my second time keeping my score that way...the results were much better for me today):
9-23-11: Justin $12000     Amit $11800    Jessica $12200    Me $15200


I should be back here soon with a post about Tuesday's game (which I'll be watching in full, once again to root for a boardie). Sorry I disappeared for so long!