I might have mentioned this one or two times in the past, but I enjoy Jeopardy. It's sort of a family staple here in the Siegel household. And lately when my oldest daughter comes over for a free dinner or to wash her clothes or pilfer some furniture for her new apartment, she has been kicking my ASS.
It wasn't always like that.
In the past my wife and two daughters would watch and grit their teeth as I consistently blurted out the answer -- questions -- before anyone in the room could. This was especially annoying to them and conversely rewarding to me, during the Final Jeopardy phase.
"Who is Rachmaninov?"
"What is Lichtenstein?"
"Who were the 1969 Baltimore Colts?"
To be frank, I don't know how some of these factoids lodged themselves in my brain, they just did. When it comes to trivia I am a font of uselessness. Just don't ask me to name any of my wife's cousins or describe any of the branches on her amazingly large and confusing family tree.
Unlike my family tree which is more like a bonsai consisting of: We don't speak anymore or he owes me money or she tried to sue me once.
Likewise, don't ask me anything about Royals, be it from England, Spain or hellishly hot Saudi Arabia. The medieval concept of blue blood and the generations of their inbred descendants does not interest me in the least. Nor am I interested in the drama or the pomp and circumstance that accompanies their every movement.
If I'm gonna carve out any real estate in my brain to follow a family and their daily travails, it will be the Corleones, or the Sopranos, or the Sacklers, or even the always-colorful misdeeds of Precedent Shitgibbon and his line of unstable ungeniuses.
On a slightly similar and highly embarrassing note, I know little, if not nothing about the royals Shakespeare wrote about. Which explains why I will never have any credibility amongst, or among, my friends who are real writers. In fact the only piece written by the Bard with which I have any familiarity, is Macbeth.
And then only because I had a small role in our school production. I played the nameless Drunken Porter. It might have been some prescient typecasting.
Consequently, when Jeopardy features Shakespeare as one of the Double Jeopardy categories, I am shamefully reduced to:
What is Macbeth?
What is Macbeth?
What is Macbeth?
What is Macbeth?
What is Macbeth?
I usually have a 20% chance of getting one right.
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