game show night...

wow. yesterday, our part of NJ got around 6 inches of snow, ice, and other fun. classes were actually cancelled (not that i really take classes any more), so even though i'm capable of driving in crazy winter weather, i elected to spend the day comfy at home rather than scrape off my car and deal with chaotic roads.

towards evening, this ended up with me and my housemate leigh watching TV while i solved sudokus and she graded calculus homework. (we're grad students, what do you expect? ;) ), and the TV of choice last night was game shows.

there was jeopardy, then wheel of fortune, then 1 vs. 100, then amnesia....interestingly enough the shows appeared in the order they were created. jeopardy has been around for 40 years, wheel of fortune for 25, 1 vs. 100 for 2, and this was the first episode ever of amnesia.

tellingly, our attention waned throughout the evening and just made us increasingly sadder about american culture.

* jeopardy was fun. it was the championship night of teen jeopardy, so we had a much increased chance of figuring out answers, but it was still challenging.

* wheel of fortune was what it normally is, and we enjoyed it too... and were excited when we figured out puzzles before the actual contestants...

* 1 vs. 100 was the borderline. the plot of the show is fun.
(if you've never seen it, one player is asked multiple choice trivia questions at the same time as a "mob" of 100 people gets the same questions. after everyone has locked in their answer, if the player is right, they go on; but for anyone in the mob who misses the question, they're eliminated. so after each successive question, the game becomes 1 vs. (some smaller number). the more mob members that get knocked out, the more money you win.) the format is interesting. and actually last night oscar the grouch (from sesame street) was one of the mob members, which was hilarious.
what made us sad was this. one of the questions was "which celebrity marriage has lasted the longest?", and the player and the mob knew, no contest... another sample question was "alphabetically, which number comes first: 22, 24, or 26?", and this stressed the player and the mob out severely. it wasn't even like it was severe mathematical computation or something... when did following the fleeting lives of celebrities become more important than knowing how to spell and alphabetize?!

* amnesia was even worse. if you know the player, i imagine it becomes more interesting. but the whole plot is to ask a person questions about their own life for an hour. which after a point gets silly. some of the questions were just ridiculously hard. it would be the equivalent of "hey lara, what was your locker number your junior year of high school?". it's not something i remember... there's been a lot of life in the meantime. and if they miss, they make a spectacle of it......

i guess my summary is this: i have a hard time getting into the gawking nature of parts of american culture. like i said above when did "length of celebrity marriages" get to be a more fundamental memorization skill than "how to alphabetize and spell english words"? why do we enjoy gaping and making fun of others so much? i'm probably purposely more oblivious than some, but i see little point in memorizing the life stories of others and would rather choose to focus on living my own life story... it's not to say i totally ignore celebrities; they do such ridiculous things sometimes that it's fun to hear from time to time what they're up to, or at times they use their power and clout to accomplish tremendous things and that's cool too. but what bothers me is not what people pay attention to, but the relative value/weight they put on what they remember. why is "lives of those i don't know and probably never will" more important than spelling, arithmetic, and other fundamentals?

end of rant.

all this is to say... i just don't get it... and perhaps that just further solidifies my status of "nerd", but whatever.... i'm thankful for jeopardy. :)

happy saturday!