When I Was on Jeopardy

This chapter talks about the author’s ideal experience on the game show Jeopardy! Two other participants in addition to the author were Kyle, a brain surgeon and classical stage performer from Chicago, and Charise, a poet from Berkeley. After introducing the participants, the host Alex Trebek explained the six categories of the game, which were chosen at random. Brian chose the category “reinforced concrete.” After several intense minutes of play, the scores were Charise: minus 3,200, Kyle: minus 6,000, and the author: 117,400—an all-time record. This made the author feel very knowledgeable about the day’s randomly selected topics. The author felt fortunate that the categories were somewhat familiar to him. Usually the categories are subjects like “ancient Greek mythology” and “phonetic Haiku.” It was nice to have concrete questions for a change.