Books! With Pages, Covers, and More!
Who Hates Whom:
Well-Armed Fanatics,
Intractable Conflicts,
and Various Things Blowing Up
A Woefully Incomplete Guide™
“Revelatory... Harris's sly wit and infectious curiosity make understanding world chaos fascinating... witty, horrific, and necessary.”
-- Boston Globe
"Brave... irreverent... charges into the thick of the globe's myriad simmering wars... hilariously relaxed."
-- New York Observer
“Fascinating, enlightening, and surprisingly: NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSING.”
-- John Hodgman,
author, The Areas of My Expertise and correspondent for The Daily Show
"A rollicking ride of intellectual discovery and emotional growth... his comic timing never fails"
-- The Wall Street Journal
"A surprisingly touching memoir"
-- Entertainment Weekly
"Effortlessly funny and informative... tender, human, and very wise... A must for anyone who loves Jeopardy!, or has ever seen it, or is breathing."
-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
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Main  Book Blog
It's right here:
And while you're here, kick off your shoes, poke around, scroll down, hit the Travel or the FAQ if you're curious or click over to the Trebekistan section if you want more Jeopardy!-related stuff, and otherwise make yourself at home. Thanks for stopping by.
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Sometimes weirdness completely outpaces all expectation.
 Turns out tonight was the taping of GSN's first Game Show Awards. Suddenly Ken Jennings and Ed Toutant -- whom you've previously glimpsed here when the three of us played an Jeopardy!-style exhibition match, and here when the three of us were 3/4 of Team USA in the European Quizzing Championships -- were both in town.
Next thing you know, we're all sitting in the Wilshire Theater surrounded by Charo, Meat Loaf, Bob Barker, Cloris Leachman, Monty Hall, and dozens of other people I grew up watching on TV.
If you'd asked me on Wednesday, I'd have told you I had no plans at all this weekend. Now I've got Rip Taylor's confetti in my pockets.
Rip Taylor's actual confetti, people.
I can't give away any details, but it's one of the more delirious TV productions I've seen. Highly recommended.
My thanks to Ken, Ed, Paul Bailey of the Game Show Congress, and some kind GSN PR people for interacting in ways that led to me finding myself in a ringside seat.
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I touched on some of this in Trebekistan, in the bits about encoding information so that it could be retrieved in competitive conditions.
But the more scientists learn, the cooler this stuff gets.
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Just a heads-up: last year's "Quiz Show" episode of Ira Glass's This American Life is repeating this week, including a very brief chat with yours truly in the wake of Prisoner of Trebekistan.
It's a free listen on the TAL website this week.
Next week, Ira takes an inside look at the writers of The Onion. Now that's an episode I'm looking forward to.
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I highly recommend getting at least one of the three from Amazon.
• The Badonkadonk Land Cruiser, nicely packaged for just under $20,000, including 14 cup holders.
• A twist-off jar of pure uranium ore, for just $32.44 including shipping, great for getting extra jiggawatts out of your flux capacitor. (Although any gills, gigantism, or tentacles you may develop are your own problem.)
• Or Ken Jennings's new Trivia Almanac, released today, just $13.60 and packed with over 8,000 questions.
Extra cup holders and jiggawatts sold separately. |
Haven't blogged in a while because I've been busy planning another trip, one I almost reconsidered. But got a reminder today that you gotta live while you're here.
Remember the two posts (first here, second here) about the insanely hard European Quizzing Championships? Where I grumbled happily about the Belgians and their otherworldly abilities?
Just found out that one of these Belgians has left us.
Lieven Van den Brande, top right corner with the beard, who seemed in perfect health to all, and finished second in the individual tournament, stepped out of the room quite suddenly today.
I only met him briefly, casually hanging out the same evening I took this picture of the full Belgian Armada, but he seemed like a very gentle and clearly brilliant fellow. Several of the people I met and liked very much at the tournament knew him well and are greatly saddened. I am sorry for their loss.
Life is so fucking short. Sure would be nice if it weren't. But it is.
Gonna go catch that plane now. Dammit.
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Friend of the blog Paul Paquet runs a combination PR and trivia-question-writing company in Ottawa that actually does a pretty nifty business. I had no idea the market for minutiae was so large.
His website hosts a weekly trivia quiz that Paul writes himself, and it's always a fun way to knock a few minutes off while procrastinating online. This week's quiz is loosely based on Who Hates Whom, a recent book of mine you may have seen subtly mentioned elsewhere on this site. Ahem.
I thank Paul for the thoughtful bit of pluggage. If you've got ten minutes and want to play, click on over.
One key caveat: the quiz also contains material not drawn from the book, and there are several places where the quiz phrases things in a way I wouldn't have chosen. Consider the entire quiz Paul's work, not mine. He deserves full credit for all any fun, reward, or outrage you may experience. Enjoy!
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Astute visitors here may have noticed that the site hasn't been updated in the better part of a week. That's because I've been in Blackpool, England, having a ball at the most unbelievable trivia tournament I've ever seen.
I'm at the European Quizzing Championships, part of a four-man Team USA along with Ken Jennings, Ed Toutant, and David Legler, with occasional cameos by the founder of the US Game Show Congress and US rep on the International Quizzing Association's board Paul Bailey. (Incidentally, if this group were the Beatles, make no mistake: I'm Ringo at best. If not Stu Sutcliffe. Those guys have a total of over $7 million in quiz show winnings between them. Me? I have, um, this blog.)
We've spent the last three days hammering our brains against about 100 inspiring fanatics from nearly 20 countries from all over Europe and as far away as India. And just how crazed can the questions get when you've got people that good from all over the world? This one was completely typical, I swear to you:
I had no idea whatsoever. (Not that you need me to tell you that.) But the English guy sitting next to me came up with it after about thirty seconds of thought. He figured it out, in fact -- by remembering which region Marmont was Duke of, then coming up with its biggest city, then modifying the name into a common French verb form, resulting in the educated and correct guess of "raguser."
Good lord.
Here's another:
There are people from Belgium, Norway, Hungary and so on who walk around knowing that Zamenhof was born in Bialystok. Yes, yes, dear boy, ask us something difficult, would you?
So: this was three days of trying to come up with Albanian dictators, East German ping-pong players, Senegalese poets, and more weird random crap than I ever imagined I'd see asked with a straight face.
We actually did OK, if you're curious. In the singles event, Ken ranked near the top (gee, big surprise there) and the rest of us were respectably middle and up. As a team, we again fared middle-up, losing the exhibition match against an international European side by one point, 60-59, because we could only identify two of the three snips of cinematic dream sequences we were given in the last round.
But winning was never the point, of course. Mostly it was a great chance to hang out with the guys and meet dozens of fascinating international nerds capable of raking at brain-frying trivia while -- let's remember -- not even playing in their own native language.
So: thank you, EQC, thank you Paul Bailey, thank you fellow US players, thank you Steven and Chris and Jane and a bunch of other folks who put together the quizzes, and most of all, my hearty thanks to thousands of random events, objects, and historical people whose names I have now at least heard once before I humbly die.
Incidentally, and I say this with glowing affection: the Belgian players are total freaks. Off the charts. They know crap in four to six languages that I can't even spell in English. Mark these words: never challenge a Belgian to a trivia duel. They will cut you with their minds.
At one point -- my hand to any god you prefer -- they actually asked which species of civet in the Balearic Islands marks its territory by performing handstands.
And like half of the people in the room just nodded dismissively as if they'd just been asked, I dunno, the capital of Denmark. I'm sure the Belgians were waiting for the really hard questions to start.
Wait a minute -- you mean there are civets that do handstands in the Balearic Islands? How did I not know this? At least now I have a picture to seek out for Friday pudublogging.
More when I get the chance. A couple of the guys and I are taking a few days to hang out in Northern Ireland before heading home, and I'm not sure what the WiFi sitch will be. Should also be some pics from there and around Blackpool here, too.
(And yes, I am leaving the identity of that handstanding Balearic civet to your Google skills. Assuming you don't just know it off the top of your head. I'll post the answer later in the week.) |
 Putting it plainiac, you'd be insaniac not to obtainiac. It's entertainiac.
Early next year -- just in time not to be just in time for the holidays, unfortunately -- Ken Jennings also has a new upcoming trivia almanac, in hardbac.
If you're a quiz-bowl type, the whole book is a cardstac.
Fun while eating hardtac in a guardshac.
I will stop now, before you complainiac.
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 While I'm thinking of Trebekistan today, a reminder:
Nineteen-game winner David Madden is still out there hiking the length of the entire east coast -- from Maine's border with Canada all the way to Key West -- while raising money for Fisher House, a top-rated non-profit that provides nearby lodging so that loved ones can be nearby while wounded military veterans undergo extended treatment for war-related injuries.
Last David checked in, he was strolling along a detour through Amish country. Sounds like an amazing trip. If you'd like to see what such a hike looks like, David's way-cool photo albums from the walk so far are here, here, and here.
Wherever we stand on the political spectrum, I hope this is something every American can support.
I hope you'll join me in chipping in, if you have one minute right now, plus a couple of dollars you'd like to share.
Thanks!
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If you've read Prisoner of Trebekistan, Lyn Payne is:
(a) the fellow contestant upon whose shoulder I put my head when I survived the first round of the 1998 Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions while suffering from a lousy fever,
(b) the fierce competitor who pushed me into the "Compleat Angler" Final Jeopardy moment in the semis,
(c) a real sweetheart, and
(d) going to be on Millionaire tomorrow (and possibly, I think, the next day if she does well).
I hope she won the whole giant kaboodle. Will be watching. Go Lyn!
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If you've read Prisoner of Trebekistan, you may remember my final nemesis, Michael Daunt, winner of the Jeopardy! 1997 International Tournament of Champions, at one time arguably the best player in the world.
Michael was the last (of several) players to beat me over the years, but he's a great, funny, brilliant guy, and we've stayed in fairly frequent touch ever since. Turns out he and some friends are just in the formative stages of launching a new online magazine called Quiblit, itself host to a series of ten other blogs (roll over "Hosted Blogs" for a list), none of which are nearly so hard to spell.
Worth a look. In a quick glance, "Man Bites Blog" looks particularly promising.
One warning: when Quiblit's writers all refer to Thanksgiving as something that just happened, they're not time-warped, they're Canadian. The only time-warping involved entails living in a country where wars aren't rushed into, health care and education are truly considered public issues of real import, and the environment is more than just a place to get and put junk.
I'm hoping that's ten years in America's future. Not part of some distant imaginary 1970s past.
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WhichBudget.com is a searchable destination-by-destination database of 116 budget airlines serving 874 airports in 124 countries. Warning: this site may get you so excited you can't sit still.
Want to find a cheap flight from, say, Vancouver to Hawaii in November? WhichBudget points you to WestJet, where you can do the round trip for about $500 before taxes. (Checking Travelocity, similar non-stops on the major airlines were already sold out for my randomly-chosen dates, although you could beat the fare if you were willing to route through Chicago.)
How about, I dunno, Los Angeles to Timbuktu? This took a little poking around and a bit of past experience, but in ten minutes I found connections on Point Afrique between the Malian city of Mopti and Paris, which you can skate to from Los Angeles via Ireland's Aer Lingus. (Once in Mopti, most folks take the slow boat up the river to Timbuktu.) Total airfare, with a little planning: roughly $1500, round trip, before taxes. To Timbuktu.
My guess is you're more likely to go to Hawaii. But just saying.
PS: if you're concerned about the safety record of airlines you may not be familiar with -- or, y'know, the whole zipping along seven miles up at 600 mph in a tin box thing anyway -- AirSafe.com has the lowdown on whose tin boxes tend to go up and down as intended. |
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I am so happy and proud to know this guy.
My good Trebekistan buddy David Madden, holder of the second-longest consecutive-game win streak in the history of Jeopardy!, is hiking the entire east coast of the U.S. -- from Edmundston, New Brunswick just over the Canadian border all the way to Key West -- while raising money for Fisher House, which provides temporary hospital-adjacent housing for families of wounded soldiers.
When I tell you over and over that Trebekistan is filled with incredibly cool people, this is what I mean.
And whatever you think of the war -- and David and I think along pretty similar lines -- there are now thousands of fellow Americans who were put in harm's way as a result, and they and their families have to pull together now and find a way to get through it. This is a pretty amazing (for David) and easy (for us) way to help.
He's got a blog up and running now, plus a couple of cool photo albums, if you'd like to see what it's like to walk 3000 miles for charity.
Toss in a penny a mile, and that's thirty bucks. Or throw in two pennies. Or three. Donations are tax-deductible and Fisher House gets absolutely top ratings from charity watchdogs.
Bright guy, David. Also, and more importantly, good.
Let's do some good now, too.
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SPOILER ALERT
If you don't know how the final of the quiz show Grand Slam came out, and you're planning on watching it later, avert your eyes!
Read no further!
Switch!
Congrats to our Trebekistan bud Ken Jennings for a truly awesome display against cartoonish supervillain Ogi Ogas in the Grand Slam final. Dude brought his A-game, and by the end, Ogi had not only been defeated, but transformed against his will, Bruce Banner-like, back into an ordinary human being, able to smile and converse and compliment others. Truly a comic-book-hero performance.
 Ken's a modest enough guy, incidentally, that his only blog post to date on the issue is genuine praise for Ogi, along with a call for the public to understand that he's not a monster, he's just a mad scientist gone astray. Pretty classy, you ask me.
Incidentally, Ken's newest book, Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac: 7,777 Questions in 365 Days, will be available just in time for... the day after Christmas, according to Amazon. Hmm. Apparently the marketers at Villard aren't as quick on the buzzer as Ken himself.
Anyhow, my congrats to the Brigham Thumb on that as well -- I know a little about how much work getting a new book ready can be, although more on that shortly.
Speaking of Ken's buzzer skills, if you missed it, we had the chance to do a joint book signing (Trebekistan meets Brainiac) a while back, followed later by an exhibition match between Ken and me and Ed Toutant from Millionaire.
If you're wondering, Ed won, running away from Ken and me as if we weren't even there. This surprised a few in the crowd, but not anyone who knows how good Ed is when he brings his A-game. (Incidentally, yes, Ed really is nine feet tall.)
When Ed was on Jeopardy!, he lost after only a couple of games. But 74-win Ken accepted his ambush trouncing from Ed that day with exactly the same grace he showed in winning Grand Slam this weekend.
Which is ultimately the thing I want to point to here -- not how Ken won, but how Ken won. Anybody who uses this guy's name as a shorthand just for braininess is missing a big chunk of what's cool here.
Ken deserves a lot of congrats at this point. A lot of which don't have a damn thing to do with quiz shows.
PS: Btw, I gotta admit, while I loved Grand Slam, I'll confess: playing along at home, I felt kinda like a boxer who'd been passed over for a major bout. I coulda been a contendah! I coulda had class, Charlie! Oh well. Maybe next year.
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Returning now to the Gratitude SummerFest:
I spent most of this last Saturday hanging out at the Game Show Congress and a party thrown by the former Game Show Network, both of which meant spending some quality time with the one and only Ken Jennings, winningest contestant in the history of Jeopardy!, author of Brainiac, and damn fine blogger.
We even did a joint signing of our books; I'm proud to say that despite our competitive instincts, we did not race to see who could sign fastest.
We did, however, compete to see who could have the reddest eye-flash.
Neither one of us can muster a laser thing quite yet. But we're working on it.
If you've read Prisoner of Trebekistan, you know that there's sort of an informal fraternity among many former contestants. Since our books came out within about a week of each other, Ken and I have struck up an increasingly friendly correspondence, and I've come to learn that one of the oddest things about Ken's Jeopardy! experience must have been his lack of opportunity to get to know any of his opponents the way that tournament competitors frequently do. Instead, it was apparently day after day of "welcome everyone, here's the 58-day champ about to terminate your hopes and dreams and take all the money, say hi" and then it was over.
Not a lot of emails exchanged with new friends, I imagine.
But here's the thing about Ken: he's taller than me, younger than me, richer than me, he already has a loving and happy family started, he's very possibly also nicer, smarter, and funnier than I am, and the guy even has better hair. And yet I actually still like him somehow. Apparently one of us is some kind of freaking saint. (And even that probably isn't me. Well, hell.)
Anyhow, despite it all, in person, the Creature from the Great Salt Lake has the ability to make me laugh until milk comes out of my nose, even when I'm not drinking milk. (I should probably see a doctor about that.) So I'll put up with his general excellence, the way friends always put up with each other's worst qualities. And the rest of the frat seems to have welcomed Ken just as eagerly. This is good to see all around.
Still, we did have a chance to play a game strongly resembling Jeopardy! and yet enough not like Jeopardy! to avoid any drive-by gunfire from Sony attorneys. For a few moments, I had thoughts of at least being able to claim I beat Ken at Schmeopardy! or whatever it is.
Unfortunately, Schmeopardy! is not a two-person game. The man on the right is Ed Toutant, whom Trebekistan readers will recognize as the fellow who beats me in Game Show Congress exhibitions every single year, usually by a ridiculously narrow margin seemingly contrived to torture my soul. (Before winning almost $2 million on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, Ed worked for IBM. Possibly as a supercomputer.)
What you're looking at, then, is a showdown between players with a total of over $5 million in quiz show winnings. Pretty cool, huh? Of course, that sentence would still be true whether or not I'm standing at the table.
Eventually, Ed thrashed both Ken and me on the buzzer. (This surprised me, actually; the one time I'd ever played Ed in a Schmeopardy! format, I'd actually won fairly handily. So the big guy is just getting better. Eek.) Our final scores, in the end, were roughly proportional to our heights.
So much for the grand battle of the Jeopardy! memoirists. Still, Ken and I did manage to surprise each other during the game, as I outscored the Mormon in The Old Testament, but Ken replied with an outlandishly hip "what is crunk?" So you never know.
For next year's competition, the organizers have announced that Ed will be divided into four equal teams. I will probably still lose by one dollar to his left leg.
After my annual defeat by Ed, we all headed down to the Beverly Hilton, which Trebekistan readers will instantly recognize as the hotel (a) once owned by the Merv himself, and (b) where I spent a nigh-delirious night trying to remember all the vice presidents while suffering through a raging fever. (It's an intertwined world, this Trebekistan.) On arrival, we were all shuffled off to a fabulous Hollywood party inside, complete with a terrific live band, gymnasts cavorting inside giant inflatable balls, and various attractive young people reluctant to make eye contact with the likes of you. Plus, booze.
We contestants pretty much hung out in the back near the poker tables and watched it all with a mixture of cool-kid amused distance and utter geekdom. A splendid time, all in all.
Ultimately, gratitude is owed here: to Bill Schantz, king of the Schmeopardy! simulator; to Ed, for keeping my ego in check for another year; to Ken, for being so cool that he even insisted on splitting the gas and parking money for the drive to the convention; to Paul Bailey, organizer of the Game Show Congress; to a half-dozen other former contestants I got to hang out, laugh, and catch up with; and to megaproducer Michael Davies, responsible for the existence of Grand Slam, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, and a party where a curvaceous girl in tights spun twenty feet in the air from a giant towel for no reason in particular. Hollywood, man.
My hearty thanks to all.
UPDATE: On Wednesday evening, I was on Main St. in Santa Monica, and I am 99% certain that I saw the exact same young lady riding by on a bicycle. My god, what a small town L.A. is sometimes. I didn't realize where I'd seen her before until she was half a block past me.
Gymnast miss, should you ever read this: if you want people to recognize you more quickly, please ride your bicycle upside down, twenty feet in the air, with a live band accompanying you. This will be a big help. |
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Not sure of any details yet exactly, but next weekend includes both (a) the Game Show Congress, which I usually enjoy as a wonderfully geeky event akin to a Renaissance Faire with less fashion sense but a better knowledge of history, and (b) a promotional thing for the new GSN (formerly the Game Show Network) program Grand Slam, which I'm not a part of, but have several friends competing in, all of whom I will cheer for.
The Utah Computah himself should be around for at least some of this, and there's some chatter about a joint book signing or even maybe a quizzy thing happening. Not sure what yet, to be honest. I'm out of town all week and booked up to the neck, so you might also want to watch Ken's blog or the GSC site for further info. I'll update here if I get a chance, of course.
Btw, if you liked Prisoner of Trebekistan and haven't picked up Brainiac yet, do. It's what Trebekistan might be if written by a guy who actually, um, knew stuff and won a lot more.
Finally, I should add that the UK version of Grand Slam rocks, and I assume the US version will as well when it debuts. Take all the big winners from other quiz shows and pit them in a tournament of single-elimination, one-on-one games requiring math, wordplay, general knowledge, and general balls under pressure. Here's a clip of the UK version to see what Ken and Bradzilla and some other friends of Trebekistan have just put themselves through for your upcoming basic cable amusement:
Man, that looks like a blast.
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Game shows, in my life, are a bit like the mob was to Al Pacino in Godfather III -- I can try to get out, but they keep dragging me back in. Although in this case, I couldn't be happier about it.
 My buddy J. Keith van Straaten, stand-up comic and former host of Comedy Central's Beat the Geeks, occasionally mounts a live stage version of What's My Line? that I'd highly recommend anyway as one of L.A.'s hidden treasures. It's completely sincere -- nothing ironic, nothing in quotes, just the actual game played with live music, real guests with strange occupations, and genuine mystery celebrities, exactly as if you're attending a taping of a show that never went off the air. I've been a few times, just to hang out, and it's a blast.
This week, they must be short of celebrity panelists, because J. Keith has asked me to sit in. So if any readers in the L.A. area are curious to see what I look like while asking "can I assume it involves an animal or a vegetable?" in a dark suit, drop by Acme in this Sunday at 8 pm.
The show's entertainment value should be bigger than a breadbox.
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I have a lot of strangers to thank today.
I don't know how the bloody hell people who work in hospitals handle literal life and death in their care every day. I wish I did. I wish I had that kind of strength. Maybe it's the joy of helping people get better, the sense of self-worth and just basic human goddam love that gets people through the pressure and the secret fears of failure and the occasional horror of seeing those fears come true.
And I don't know where scientists find the persistence and cleverness to contrive remedies that not only attack but fight off counterattacks from hostile beings in a literally molecule-by-molecule theater of war. They don't get thanked nearly enough, but they save lives every day.
But I do know this: somewhere out there, right this minute, are some labcoated people whom I will never meet, and in this moment, I actually love them. I swear to God that I do. I am grateful. I want to take them out for a beer and hear their stories and help them move heavy stuff and look the other way when they're jerks because I know they're really not.
Those of you who've read Prisoner of Trebekistan know that we've had some hairy moments in the family back in Ohio. I've been a little worried lately about the most recent one. Actually, a lot worried. I think the only real reason I distracted myself with The Sopranos for a day or two there, even though (as long-term readers here know full well) I usually don't even care much about that kind of pop culture thing, has been so I had something else I could think about. Besides what I was thinking about. Which I really didn't want to think about.
But I think now everything might be OK. I think.
In any case, I only regret that the people who invent and engage these magnificent molecular contraptions we call modern medicines will probably never hear how grateful I am for their work.
But I am. I truly am.
I complain like hell about the American health care system here sometimes, and rightly so. Whether you'd prefer a Canadian system or a French system or such, or even if you think the whole everything-for-profit model is the reason we have these medicines, whatever, you wouldn't disagree that we really could do things here even better, and probably a lot better. I wish it could be the sort of national crusade and discussion too often reserved for whether to blow something up.
But this post isn't about economics or a political debate. This isn't about people with M.B.A.s and J.D.s. This is about M.D.s and Ph.D.s. And R.N.s and M.S.N.s.
If you read this, and you know a doctor or a molecular biologist or a caregiving nurse or someone young who really wants to be one, please hug the holy crap out of them today. I mean it. Tell them someone they don't even know is grateful.
Thanks. |
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Prisoner of Trebekistan gets a nod in this Detroit News story about the way quiz shows seem to have changed over the years.
I'd like to elaborate, btw. There's a frequent charge that our country has dumbed down, and if you compare the questions currently asked on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? (which I didn't even know existed) to the questions asked on, say, Twenty-One, there seems to be a prima facie case.
And granted, there are days when I think the future of quiz shows will be a show called Who Can Push The Big Red Button, with ten beautiful girls standing next to ten three-foot-wide buttons, nine of which are blue. Pushing the lone red button gets the contestant $50,000. Can the contestant do it? Join host Don Imus and find out.
But the big-money questions on Jeopardy! are still pretty damn tough. The big-money Millionaire questions are, too. Just like in the 1950s. I think shows like Deal Or No Deal don't tell us anything about any possible changes in our knowledge or intelligence; people have enjoyed games of chance since long before TV was invented. Deal Or No Deal's current popularity may only tell us that our culture intuits luck as a factor in economic success a bit more, and if so, that would be a logical reflection of some of the structural changes we've seen in the last quarter-century or so.
There was a time when working-class people like my dad could very predictably get a good, stable job, buy a home, and have a relatively stable life, purely through hard work, which was extremely well-valued. Not quite so much anymore. Interesting to notice that Deal Or No Deal's contestants seem to be consistently working class.
Talking out of my ass, as usual. But that's what I think, anyway.
Oh, and none of this is in Prisoner of Trebekistan. Which is barely even about Jeopardy! in some ways. But a lot of you know that already.
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