Currently hooked on: "Yesterday Once More" by Karen Carpenter. Holy guacamole. When I'm hooked on a song, MJ is likely too, and so we just spend most of the day humming that song intermittently.
I may be a bit of a Jeopardy snob, but like basketball or other sports, I like to see the game of Jeopardy played well, and "may the best player win." Which is why I was frustrated at last night's Final Jeopardy question, with all 3 contestants all with about the same score going in at around $10,000 or $11,000 and the category of US city names: "Adopted in 1845, the name of this state capital is a feminized form of a big body of water." A lot of times Jeopardy will ask a question in the first 2 rounds that is a specific person or item or name of something that I've never heard of before, so I will have no guess, plus the fact you only get seconds of time to think about the clue before someone else has rung in or the clue goes away, it's perfectly acceptable to skip on the clue and avoid losing points for a wrong answer, and contestants are not penalized for not answering (kind of like the SAT way back in my junior in high school days of 2004, although I don't know if they still have the same point system). TOTALLY different in final jeopardy, where you set your own wager, often ALL or a substantial amount of your total, you have 30 seconds to answer the clue, and there's no difference between a wrong guess and leaving the answer blank. SO JUST GUESS! In this case the 2 ladies in second and third didn't write anything, and the returning champion (a college student from Towson, Maryland, who might be more familiar with SAT-type scoring) actually scrolled down a guess, Annapolis (capital of Maryland). Answer was Altanta, which was a surprisingly hard clue for me too because I started with states in the Midwest due to the proximity of the Great Lakes there and focused more on the "capitals" part of the clue, trying to scroll frantically through all 50 in my head, but the rabbit hole the viewer should have went down was "big body of water"- when Jeopardy says "this end of the alphabet word" it usually is "Z," not just a letter close to the end, so big body of water had to mean REALLY big, like an ocean, and if you started going down oceans you'd have would up at Atlantic = Atlanta, Georgia pretty quickly.
STILL! That's not the point! The 2 contestants need to write down SOMETHING, especially when it's narrowed down to 50, and they likely knew all or virtually all 50. Pick one that sounds feminie and just write it down! I finally settled on "Augusta, Maine" knowing it wasn't right and MJ made the better guess of "Olympia, Washington," which were feminine, but at least we took a shot! It's like a basketball team having the ball with 5 seconds left down 2 points, and just letting the shot clock expire without taking a shot. Erg! Frustrating, but I still love Jeopardy. Better than basketball and more compact, MJ and I can get through 61 questions in around 20 minutes. Efficiency.
Fashion has always been a weakness of mine, both in breadth of knowledge as well as application (physical appearance), but I gained some appreciation of the role of fashion in history and American/world culture by reading about the most famous fashion designers, from Levi creating jeans for farm workers so they could work more comfortably, to Valentino creating wedding dresses, to Stella McCartney creating all vegan (non-animal) designed clothing, to designers producing dresses for fashion icons like Princess Diana (Gianna Versace), Michelle Obama, Jean Harlow, Audrey Hepburn (Herbert du Givenchy), etc. Many of the classy films I've seen with fashionable woman were designed by iconic designers, and they can shape what entire decades of people look like, so they really mold into the "fabric" (pun intended) of society and history.
Fashion also is another art form. I know like the bare minimum of fashion terms like "haute couture" or "atelier" or "off-the-rack" (basically where I've lived for every piece of clothing), but I do understand that the pieces the designers come up with are more elegant and sophisticated than a T-shirt, some designers design one specific dress or clothing to fit the exact contours of a movie star or model's body shape to accentuate all the curvers, so there definitely is an art to squeezing a statement or an art form onto one's body. Also, fashion shows are pretty cool, models walking down the runway with so many birght colors, different materials, covering different areas of their body.....to compare it to my world it'd be like watching baseball players exhibit their best skills like hitting the ball really far, but also being able to throw the ball REALLY far and really fast, and catching balls that are REALLY far away from them. The best designers not only wow us but inspire us to think beyond the accepted fashions of the day. I just wish I understood that world better.
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