It's Jeopardy! Time!

For my stance on the strange punctuation of Jeopardy!, see the sidenote on a previous post. But this post is not about that. Yesterday, I took the online College Jeopardy! Test, the first step in being on Jeopardy! The aftermath was fun to watch on Twitter, and I contributed my fair share. And thanks to Twitter, I was able to find the answers and questions listed on the Jeopardy! forums, and compare what I remembered of my answers. And because I like stats so much, here's some stats:

24/50 correct (not too bad)
Longest right streak: 7 ("1812 Overture" to "Wifi")
Longest wrong streak: 4 ("Hemingway" to "Mamet")

Overall, it was lots of fun - reminds me of Knowledge Bowl, which I miss sorely. Stuff like "Equine, Feline...wolf is...lupus?...Lupine!" under a time constraint...I just love it. The feeling of figuring it out is just awesome, especially when there's something tangible you're going for. Dang I miss Knowledge Bowl.

Some of my favorites were ones that I knew for some random reason - I recently discovered that Yosemite was in California, so I knew that Yellowstone was the one in Wyoming. Crime and Punishment is one of my top 5 favorite books (thanks, Mrs. Ogden!). I was way into genetics in high school, so chromosomes were easy (thanks, Mr. Weeks!). I knew all about Athens and Sparta thanks to UScholars and my girlfriend. I watched Milk a couple months back, so I knew Sean Penn's second Academy Award. That movie, by the way, is highly recommended. You should watch it. And 30-Rock? I owe that entirely to stumbling across a blog post about the muppets several weeks ago. I remembered just enough to vaguely recognize the names.

Also fun were haphazardly educated guesses that paid of - Time magazine, Matron of Honor, Merril Lynch, the Rhine. And even that middle school knowledge that paid off - Eli Whitney, Deltoid, Eon. Man, I love Jeopardy. I need to watch it more often.

For anyone interested, by the way, the questions (and the answers) are over on Jeopardy.com, and I put a full list of my responses in a Google Spreadsheet.