Will It Play in Peoria?

 A phrase that was completely unfamiliar to me before 2022, "Will it play in Peoria?" was according to Wikipedia because they do such a better job of explaining than me, a phrase traditionally used to ask whether a given product, person, promotional theme, or event will appeal to mainstream United States, or across a broad range of demographic and psychographic groups.

The "Peoria" in that phrase was Peoria, IL, which reflected middle America at the time and its Midwestern culture a the "mainstream," and nowadays I don't think it's much different: I would submit Chicago, IL as a great "test market" for any things that will appeal to wide swaths of the American public, not just the Ivy League elites on the East Coast or West Coast hipsters, and even with TikTok and a variety of other social media services that influence culture, I can still see it every time I travel through the Midwest: mainstream culture. 

Nowhere was this more reflected better than in my most recent trip to Chicago, where I spent a LONG day before New Year's Eve weekend at O'Hare Airport (Midway airport was compromised due to the aforementioned problems with Southwest), mostly at the American Airlines lounge. Families, friends, business travelers, people on vacation, families with children, all flooded through the airport on their way to different areas around the country, and all apparently needing a McDonald's or a Starbucks (depending on their priority to quench their hunger, thirst, or fatigue). O'Hare airport, at one time one of the busiest airports in the world (now that honor I think belongs to Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta) serving the second-largest city in the US (used to be Chicago before it was overtaken by LA) was featured on "Home Alone 2" as an important plot point, where Kevin McAllister (MacCauley Culkin) gets lost at the airport when his family is bustling through the airport to make it to their gate on time after waking up late that morning. Boy do I relate to that, both the rush to the airport (I'm like 20 for 23 on making it on my flight after close-shave trips to the airport, but those 3 times I missed the flight were pretty painful), and that sprint through O'Hare has always stayed with me even when I walk through the airport roughly 26 years later, like I'm revisiting a scene from my own childhood. 

Also, the visit to the airport reminds me of how far America has come since the pandemic: While China is barely coming out of it now, finally ripping off the band-aid after almost 3 years in lockdown trying to chase down the elusive white whale of zero Covid, the US is pretty much back to pre-pandemic travel rates, with less and less people wearing masks (ill-advised, IMO, but not a tradeoff people are willing to make anymore) and getting back to the lives of Christmas parties, New Year's Eve Celebrations, and rushing through airports. For some reason, I've had fond memories of spending time at airports perhaps because it's one of the best places to people-watch (better than even Disneyworld, music concerts, and outdoor parks) just from the sheer volume of people coming in and out. It's definitely not because of the jacked-up prices of food inside the hospitals or the consistently disappointing attitude I get from TSA agents (did they never get a morale boost from the movie Get Hard or at least understand the irony of being mean and condescending TSA agents?) but the idea of O'Hare airport being the hub of people going from one place to another and branching out, like life passing through and intersecting with others' lives, has an odd appeal to me. Oh and there are some weird places that American Airlines flies to from Chicago: Bozeman, MT? Grand Rapids, MI? Davenport, Iowa? And with a name trivia nerds love, Grand Forks, North Dakota. Yup, for one glorious day at the end of the year of our Lord 2022, I was at the center of it all, of civilization itself: the American Airlines terminal at O'Hare Airport. 

Flight Cancellations (航班取消)

 Due to a glut of bad weather especially in its hub cities of Chicago and Denver, Southwest Airlines has been the talk of the country this week as it cancelled thousands of flights during the holiday season, leaving passengers stranded and not knowing where its crew members were in some cases. Much like the Johnny Depp- Amber Heard case earlier this year (nobody talks about that anymore even it was the No. 1 story for weeks on end), this Southwest fiasco will eventually go away, but for now Southwest has really sullied its reputation and people won't be choosing them for a while. I'm scheduled to fly tomorrow to Chicago as well on Southwest and luckily there were other options on other airlines, who swooped in on Southwest's misfortunes (and mishandling of the situation) and capped their fares so that passengers could switch out of Southwest to them. Reminds me of the weeks after the pandemic when all airlines were issuing refunds and demand completely stopped, but the airlines were jostling with each other to not lose their airport positions (because once you lose those, you lose them forever).....right now it's the opposite problem, too much demand from customer going back to pre-pandemic levels, but not enough supply, or employees to staff those planes. 

Nowadays it's easy to cancel and switch out of flights, which reminds me of the times I cancelled and backed out of parties, plan, etc. For whatever reason, whether I was too naive, immature, inconsiderate, inexperienced, or didn't have an older sibling to tell me how to act, I took a lot of invitations for granted in my early adulthood and cancelled on things without really thinking about it (not that I was the most popular person anyway), or I tried to thread the needle and try to go to 2 different parties at the same time and leaving in the middle of one to go to another, which surely drew the ire or at least the gossip of at least one if not 2 hosts. Nowadays, having emerged from the pandemic isolation in a new city, I fully grasp the value of those invitations and wish I could do it over again, in a typical "you don't know what you have until you lose it" scenario. As a kid, you think you have plenty of friends and there will always be time to go back to certain friends.....as an adult you realize it's not always like that. If you miss out on one birthday party or don't invite someone back for something, or act in a weird or standoffish way, or just simply don't click with a group of people, those people are kind of just lost...forever. They're still alive, still the same people with they were before, but the link between 2 parties has been severed, it's like your friendship's been cancelled, and it's pretty hard to pick up the phone and try to get a friend back once it's cancelled. 

And it's not like when you cancel a Southwest flight, you can just go on their website for the next trip and see how they're doing then. I think back on so many conversations with people I've lost contact with over the years.....co-workers, friends, people I went to school with, people I used to spend every day of the week with (especially co-workers, the contrast between someone you sit with at work every day and know everything about is so vast compared to not seeing them anymore after the job/ project is finished) and the last interaction I ever had with them: did I know then that would be the last conversation I'd ever had with them? (probably not) Was there something I did to cause our friendship to deteriorate, something I could have done differently? (In some cases, maybe, but in others it's just the natural passage of time and not mutual slipping of communication that's the culprit) And then the harsher truths come to light: If we don't talk anymore, were we ever that great of friends to begin with? Did they even value my friendship enough to try to stay in contact with me? I'm sure these questions aren't exclusive to me, but sometimes I do feel if I was more popular, more fun, or people had more reasons to hang out with me, get something out of the friendship with me.....I'd have more friends, and not get the "cancelled" button. 

United Parcel Service

I've always thought that the busiest places in the world right before Christmas are airports from people trying to get home, and that may be true. After visiting the UPS Customer Center closest to me yesterday, December 23, though, I may challenge that, or at least nominate UPS as one of the more chaotic places to be before Christmas. Long before Amazon with all their Prime trucks, UPS was around with their "What can Brown do for you?" campaign and had the lockdown on delivery other than maybe the United States Postal Service. (I thought they also had the lockdown on delivery services depicted in movies, but apparently Tom Hanks's character in Castaway worked for Fedex, and Ken Jennings's famous wrong answer ending his 74-game winning streak on Jeopardy was "What is FedEx?" and not UPS, curiously. 

Anyway, the Customer Center on a Friday evening is quite a scene: Trucks milling about everywhere, people yelling to get packages out, people zooming around retrieving packages for customers, all as part of a mad dash to get ahead of Santa's December 24th deadline (presents have to get to homes before Santa arrives!). And this was 6:30PM on Friday night; it doesn't matter what day of the week it is, the only number that matters is the number of days before Christmas. A dodgeball friend just posted a very haggard, tired-looking selfie today on Facebook celebrating finally being done with deliveries.....there must be a tremendous pressure to get everything in on time, which perhaps explains why MJ's iPhone delivery didn't find its way into our apartment building: we have a security-activated front door that requires a code, so the UPS deliveryperson likely gave up trying (3 attempts!) in favor of going somewhere else to make other deliveries, hence my need to wait in line at the customer center to retrieve said package with iPhone in it. Once I handed the (surprisingly friendly, given the circumstances) worker, she went to "the back" to retrieve the package, which when I peered in through the door wasn't a "warehouse" at all, it was an open-air area with hundreds of shelves lined with thousands of packages, like one of those photos of Amazon warehouses that you see where droids are picking up packages that people had ordered. After what seemed to be about 10 minutes, she finally emerged with my package in hand; I could only imagine she went through mazes full of shelves, sifting through layers and layers of manila folders and brown boxes to find my needle in the haystack. Hope they get some rest in the holiday season (unlike MJ, who is working both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day! Some professions just are different than others- some "office workers" I know will take the day off if their internet connection is slow, such an inconvenience!) 

Plenty of entertainment options out there over the holidays since the streaming networks seem to know people are all at home without work and school obligations (and college students especially have plenty of time to binge watch shows) so there's plenty of content that dropped this past week, including "Alice in Borderland 2," a Japanese show that is based on a manga that spoofs Lewis Carroll's (aka Charles Dodgson) work "Alice in Wonderland. There is one "team game" in the show players have to play that plays very similarly to Mafia, the parlor game I've played many times with friends/strangers/ at parties. In fact, I believe Mafia is one of the best "icebreaking/fun activities" that one can play with any group larger than 5 or 6, and the more the merrier. Basic premise is that everyone is trying to work together, except there is one/multiple "mafia members" who are killing off other team members and working for themselves, but no one knows who that mafia members is (in the series that person is the Jack of Hearts, and the game takes place inside a prison, enhancing the criminal element of it). MJ hates Mafia the game; I kinda love it and have secretly yearned to play it with any group I hung out with since college, when I first stumbled into a game of it with people on my residential hall floor. There's also now an online version of it called "Among Us" that has done well, unsurprisingly to me because there's a pretty large demand of it and longevity in the concept: everyone kind of wants to be a detective and figure out who's the suspect, but for the more psychopath-inclined like me, we even more so want to be the mafia member who's lying to everyone despite fitting into the group. 

On that happy note, Merry Christmas, HO HO HO! 

Savings Account (储蓄账户, 普通預金口座, 예금 계좌)

 What a 2022 it's been for me financially- after starting the year's blog entries with "ER Nurses," my portfolio needs medical attention at an ER due to about the umpteenth nosedive this year just days before Christmas- this is one of those "coals in your stockings" years for stocks. After numerous false bottoms where the market had a prolonged slump but bounced back just enough for me to feel complacent again and hold on to my tech stocks (at least I didn't own crypto I guess!) it plunged even further down in a slow spiral of hell to me FINALLY throwing in the towel on trying to time a bottom and adopting the gloomy outlook for 2023 that the inflation and high interest rate environment dictates. It sucks but I have to put my money in a wait for it.......savings account. 

Turns out, possibly one of the only silver linings of rising interest rates is that the individual investor can also capitalize on the higher interest rates by getting some nominal interest in savings accounts, like not 0.1% anymore......now some banks are offering 3.5%, 3.75%, 4%, etc (mirroring the federal interest rate, except, a little less of course because banks need to make money!) Getting a small interest of +3.5% to 4% is better than say, oh, I don't know, a  NEGATIVE 50% return from Amazon shares this year (and not necessarily an improving outlook in 2003, although I guess it's harder to drop too much farther from here) so allocation to a savings account it is. For 2023, instead of most people's promises to lose some weight, my resolution is to stop being overweight.......in tech stocks. Damn them. 

Winter is just a bad season for people with dry skin, like me. Itchy everywhere, lotion required, static everywhere I touch, essentially death from a thousand cuts. But I can't complain; I could be in Chicago where they're gearing up for winter by "hoping for the best, preparing for the usual" (a co-worker on a call with a dry sense of humor said this about the looming winter snowstorms hitting the city delaying or cancelling many flights on possibly the worst weekend to have those issues- Christmas weekend). Or I could be in Antarctica right now....everyone imagines what Antarctica or Alaska is like in the summer to do a fun trip, but what about winter? Brrrr. I'm reading a history of the coldest continent and some strange stuff, like a plastic bust/statue of Vladimir Lenin at the Pole of Inaccessibility (constructed as part of the Cold War dick-measuring contest between US and Russia), Primus stoves used by explorers to heat stuff up easily, sealing clubs made of penis bone of a seal or walrus (yes apparently walruses have penises and they are hard enough to create a club out of it, including ones with scrimshaw on it), and a King Sejong Island on King George Island that has hydroponic (meaning growing things without soil) fruits and vegetables (hard to grow those things on Antactica, I guess). Also, King Sejong has got to be the most famous name used by Koreans for things around the world......I once knew a co-worker named Sejong, he was very proud of his name. Also, they used pee flags to mark territory in Antarctica. Yup, a pee flag is exactly what it sounds like: plant a flag and have some yellow snow around it. 

And finally, Antarctica is becoming a popular spot for weddings. Actually, now that I'm interested in all things Antarctica, I wouldn't mind going to a destination in Antarctica. I'd just bring on a lot of lotion. 

Midwest Appreciation Post, Part 2

 A year ago I read a book called the Midnight Library, about a girl on the brink of suicide who finds a magical library that allows her to live many different lives in various places of the world, like becoming a surfer in Australia, a polar explorer in the Arctic sea, a rock star in South America, an Olympic athlete in London, etc. Not sure if that's everyone's idea of a good time, but for me that's the essence of life: experiencing new things and new experiences, so that one can live many different lives within the only one we're allotted. I often wonder in other universes or other "Midnight Libraries" where I'd be now and what I'd have done, whether it's staying in China and not even moving to America, becoming a scientist or doctor, a homeless guy living in the streets (although a brutal prospect, I could honestly see myself in a different live living that way, without the drugs), being a traveling musician and traveling the world performing in front of crowds (this is MJ's dream, to be like a Ray Chen or Lang Lang or Itzak Perlman) or being a father of eight (Eight Ain't Enough! This one's a little hard to believe in this day and age but there are still some big families out there). 

One of the more likely scenarios from those admittedly outlandish and fairy-tale alternative realities is that I would have wound up living the Midwest. I've always maintained that the Midwest in general has nicer people than either coast of the U.S. (I've lived in both East Coast and West Coast), and anecdotal evidence and consensus polls confirm my hunch. Whenever I go to a Midwest town I feel like I understand the people who live there, have a sense of belonging with them that they are "confined" (trapped not exactly the right word) in the central part of the US but still appreciative of it and content with living a slower, more peaceful life in the suburbs without need of the glitzy and glamorous allures of the big cities. I once again got a taste of that this weekend in Cleveland, Ohio, not a winner of any national contests for "best and brightest city" and not a destination for any college kids trying to make it big or live the high life, but nonetheless a real city that has the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame (not my first time visiting, but first time appreciating the architectural splendor of the I.M. Pei-designed building as well as all the facts about American musicians over the years), a downtown by the lake that surprisingly reminded me of Chicago's Lake Shore. People here aren't caught up in being the latest fads on Youtube or social media and don't need to show off all their newest fashions or toys, it's a city on the Rust Belt (one of the areas that cost Hilary Clinton the 2016 election because it felt left behind by all the preachy liberals on both coasts) that embraces its own culture, where people I walk by actually say "Hi" in greeting and make me feel like a real person instead of just another customer or a non-celebrity getting in their way of meeting a celebrity or someone else who can help them get ahead in life. I'm content with the way my life turned out, but I could definitely have seen myself living a life of modesty and obscurity in a smaller city like Cleveland, just being a "nobody" in the right way. The lake-effect snow and brutal winters would have been unappealing (my legs are feeling really dry and itchy as I write this) but half the world lives in winter temperatures- there's something about bundling up and braving the outside weather together huddled together at a train station or digging one's car out of the snow before driving it, that builds character in cold-weather communities, I feel. 

MJ and I's world tour of visiting art museums is allowing me a lot of great stimulus, where Cleveland had a FREE art museum ( so far that's 2 for 2 for free art museums in Ohio for us, Cincinatti and Cleveland) that had a very impressive center square with a cool design. Note to any city that wants to have MJ and I visit: have a well-designed art museum, we'll be there in no time. 

Studying for the SAT

 Do high school students take the SAT anymore? Last year colleges started making it optional. It's a shame; I actually have some good memories of taking the SAT; I was one of those kids ready to go on the Saturday mornings with No.2 pencils in a bag itching to get in that test room, primed for 3 or 4 hours of releasing my knowledge onto the test. I think it was because the SAT represented a known entity in a chaotic time of my life that was high school, so many different stresses and opinions, at least I knew the SAT had equal portions of math and verbal, some fun math puzzles, and equal sections of analogies, reading passages, and "fill in the blank" sections, and then some fun reading passages about humanities, science, things going on in the world. Oh.....and I was pretty good at it. 

STUDYING for the SAT was a whole different thing......had to be systematic and delve into unknown world of words, words.....vignette, erudite, logorrhea, aplomb, predilection, paucity, gratuitious, etc.; that's why they coined the phrase "SAT words" for big words. But the thing about the SAT was, you COULD study for it, there were certain things about the test with its format, the way they ask the questions, and you could gear your studying towards those things, despite not knowing for sure what exactly was going to be on the exam as they could have any sort of reading passage about any topic in the world; but you knew they could only test for some finite bank of words. 

Forward to "studying for Jeopardy...." I don't know how many people are doing there out in the world, there's gotta be quite a few, and you can kind of tell who has or who hasn't when they get on the Alex Trebek stage and show off their knowledge to the whole world, and unfortunately you could tell who HASN'T studied that much for Jeopardy. It's like watching contestants take the SAT in front of the whole world, (even the jeopardy of losing points when you get a question wrong vs. just not trying to answer it is similar as SAT deducted points for wrong answers) especially with the Jeopardata box scores available now. Each night, I tally up my points and see how many times I "buzz in" on an answer (basically, if I can come up with a reasonable guess for an answer by the time Ken or Mayim finish reading the clue) and it ranges from about 40 to 48 on any given night (out of 60 total questions minus Final Jeopardy), less than 40 I'm really kicking myself or endured through a bunch of tough categories......it's a consistent quantity, and it's because the questions are generally predictable, running through a large array but still finite set of questions in the Jeopardy! "clue bank" (as opposed to the SAT word bank). And they'll reuse a lot of the same material over the years like the SAT runs through vocab words (garrulous, onerous, temerity....) 

When contestants get just 32 buzzes in, I just question whether they studied for Jeopardy. It's not that they're not smart, one lady was a consistent crossword solver which wins my admiration because crosswords boggle my mind, but she just wasn't familiar with what kind of questions could be on Jeopardy.... a 1789 search for this waterway is never going to be "the Styx" (her wrong answer) but Northwest Passage has definitely come up before, and surely will in the future. Similarly, "Presidential Facts" (final jeopardy) asked about one of the most common topics in trivia (and even more so on Jeopardy: American presidents: love them or hate them, you gotta know them cuz they're easy trivia fodder. Only 3 American presidents have married in the White House.. John Tyler was the first, and they ask about the last. You just have to have a rough timeline of Presidents in your head, (DATES, CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, TIME!) and Tyler was the 10th President. One contestant answered William Henry Harrison, who was the 9th President.......not even AFTER Tyler, which seems like a prerequisite for a guess. There's no penalty for guessing on FJ, except for the fact it's a little embarrassing and shows a lack of knowledge...and then the other lady guessed the 12th president, Zachary Taylor, which would have meant Tyler was the 10th, then 11th Polk just happened to do it too, then Taylor did it......ahh maybe she misinterpreted the clue? Regardless, not a good guess. The 25-year-old young man who HAD seemed to study for Jeopardy based on the clues he was giving (and a robust 48-question buzz tonight, better than me) did get the correct answer, Woodrow Wilson who came much later and who remarried while President, a fact gleaned if you've studied mostly Jeopardy-type facts over the years. It's an acquired taste; not for everybody I guess, just like studying for the SAT. 

Quid pro quo (交换条件, 見返り, 대상물)

 Tonight's Final Jeopardy was a Triple Stumper, but should it really have been? A Latin phrase that originally was used when a doctor or apothecary (fancy word for a pharmacist!) substituted one medication for another. I didn't get it neither, but despite the murkiness of the clue it still should have rang a bell since quid pro quo is one of the most commonly used terms, or at least read out/heard about Latin phrases due to one man in particular: Donald Trump, the infamous Ukraine weapons-for-incriminating facts-about-Joe-Biden scandal that lead to impeachment (but not conviction) and is now even more of an issue due to Ukraine actually desperately needing weapons. Somewhat sad that the term, a reasonable term for compensation/payment/trading something for something else (and really, is the whole concept of Christmas present-exchanging), is now forever a negative image in most people's minds due to Trump but also due to its ties with sexual harassment (requesting sexual favors in exchange for something at the office). I even was involved with a quid pro quo event when I ran for 1L Class President in law school, when I gave out a pen to a classmate and (I didn't ask for it specifically, but I guess my actions insinuated some sort of compensation) he voted for me in the election, citing the universal concept of quid pro quo. (There's actually a bunch of Latin phrases in the law like caveat emptor and res ipsa loquitor, which clouded my thinking on that FJ question). And what was I doing running for class president during the crucial first semester of law school, you might ask? I ask myself that too; I was just a different person in 2008, still striving for popularity and fame, visions of grandiosity, never had a real job and nothing close to any real legal experience unless you consider going to court to legally change my first name, and oddly wishing with all my might to go back to 2004 so I could still compete in high school chess. Weird dude, don't know how he graduated law school, really. 

2nd part of the blog that I didn't know how to segue into from the first: RATS! In every city I've ever lived in I've seen rats. Horrible, horrible rats......although, are they that much different from squirrels, really? I never cringe when I see a squirrel walking around in front of me or even grosser yet, climbing a tree and getting close to face level.......so why are so many of us (especially my wife MJ, who shudders at the sight of a rat half a mile away, while we're sitting in the car, with no danger of that rat ever touching her or even getting in the proximity of her) so grossed out by rats? Is it the way that the rats scurry around, the darting and shooting out of corners? Is it the thin, slithering tail that's more sinister than the fluffy, bushy tail of the squirrel? Is it because we associate rats with garbage and dirtiness which in fairness they are usually around all the time? It's some combination of all those, but it's also because of the SIZE of some of the rats I see. Maybe it's me but they've gotten huge, like I don't think my shoe could even cover the size of one. Oh and like elephants, I think humans don't want to think about things crawling around our feet and maybe getting in our feet (snakes give a similar vibe)- gives you goosebumps just thinking about it doesn't it? Maybe the only thing that will make MJ cringe worse than cockroaches, and that's saying something considering she just set up a new batch of roach traps around our apartment today to "kill the roaches where they sleep" as the kit she bought from the gas station advertises. 

You know what the SECOND largest rat in the world is? (oddly specific number, it's because No.1 is like the nutria/capybara, and that's not something everyone knows) It's the beaver, the log-rolling dam-building rats of streams and rivers. I would have no problem seeing a beaver up close, but rats? I've seen too many roadkill rats on the side of the road to have a good image of them. 

Podcast (播客, ポッドキャスト, 팟캐스트)

 Not unlike most times in my life, I'm still stuck on an outdated technology (blogs) from the early-naughts, while all my peers are on much more modern tech (podcasts and Youtube channels). Seems like everyone nowadays has a podcast or a Youtube channel that it's become a bit cliche- I wonder what's the next big step? telepathically reading someone else's mind while walking on the street? I don't know if that's that far away actually, at least in terms of sensing brain waves, emotions, etc. 

But for now Podcasting is a very useful medium (unlike say, actually talking to people you're in the same room/car/elevator with- I just found out my Generation Z sister rarely ever talks to her roommate, only through text each other even at times when they're in the house together.) and I, like everyone else, has favorites and ones I subscribe to, including a few trivia podcasts that's like a slow IV drip of trivia pumping through my veins all hours of the day, my stock market podcasts that I've grown weary of this year due to all the doom and gloom this year in particular (just depressing hearing about how much money I'm going to lose in the near future). I did get inspired by one podcaster named Jeric from the College Jeopardy Teen Tournament, who channeled his energy for the show into a podcast where he interviewed Jeopardy contestants who had recently competed on the show. Loved the podcast......but alas, Jeric, being a college student and all, possibly ran into a busy schedule and hasn't been updating. 

Should I take the leap and start a podcast? A quick google search indicates it requires a microphone and headphones and possibly some other equipment, but otherwise yes I guess anyone can start a podcast; that's the power of technology these days. What's the one thing missing from all of our daily schedules? (Ok, from MY daily schedule?) A 10-minute recap of the Jeopardy episode from the previous night and commentary on the significant clues, how hard Final Jeopardy was, etc. I find myself going on Reddit anyway to interact with the J! community, but a podcast inserts the human touch of one's voice into it and gives you that feeling you don't just get from staring at text: Actual emotion and passion! 

If I had a podcast, I'd also talk about my most recent visit to a Jeopardy live taping show with MJ, my 2nd visit in 13 years. Without giving away any spoilers from that day's taping episode, I'll say that going isn't exciting as I thought it would be: there was a long wait just to get into the studio (we were probably waiting in line for just as long as actually were in the Jeopardy studio), we had to go on a random Tuesday afternoon which is work time for most Americans but more importantly meant they only shot 2 episodes, and by the time it was over it was 5:00PM, spitting us out into Culver City and the heart of....LA traffic. Horror of Horrors. 

Other than that, though, the taping was a joy.......it was a Ken episode! (My hero; Mayim has grown on me a tad and is important to appeal to certain demographics to expand the show's audience but MJ has strong feelings on her...body movements), but the biggest takeaway for me was how fast the show was: at home I can pause the show at any time to think of the answer, and I often give myself too much leeway to think of the answer, much longer than the show would allow for, but the actual show just goes bam-bam-bam, almost no breaks, and the contestants mostly answer immediately without any hesitation. Pretty intimidating, although I do suspect at least one of the games that the competition was an above average performance from a couple really good players. If I never make it on to Jeopardy, at least I'll know I lived vicariously at those tapings and tested myself through them, and fared.....OK! And if I do make it on, at least I will be familiar and not look like a cooked goose up there or (better animal metaphor) deer in headlights. 

Now to think up some names for my podcast......Bobby's Hobbies? Bob's Pod? Robert Yan the Man with the Podcast Plan?