There's a saying in trivia that you have to "protect your house," aka do well in categories that are your strengths, and in certain games like Jeopardy you can capitalize by betting big on daily doubles in those categories of strength. This makes a lot of sense, except a week ago when a recent medical school graduate bet almost everything on a medical category (called "stitches," and the previous 3 clues in the category had all been human body/medical related).......I would have done the same thing, except the clue turned out to be a clue any semi-regular baseball fan would know: the namesake of the most famous elbow surgery in baseball: Tommy John surgery. The newly minted doctor stared at the clue blankly, let the time run out, his score went down to almost zero, instead of having an insurmountable lead he had an unrecoverable deficit, he went on to lose the game, and his Jeopardy ended just like that. There's definitely such a thing as being TOO overconfident in a certain category: just because you're confident in it doesn't mean you know everything there is to know about that category. There are chinks in every armor, even in a medical category for a doctor. It's actually a huge risk getting a question in your "wheelhouse" on a quiz show: on the one hand you're more likely to know about it and get the answer right, but on the other hand, if you DON'T get it it's incredibly humiliating and embarrasing, like if I went on a quiz show and get a law question wrong. Do I get a notice of disbarrment as soon as that episode airs?
I, personally, feel like I have an edge up in Presidents, geography, history, book titles, sports, math, law, but for sure there are holes even in my knowledge for even my best categories, and some I actually know less than the normal person: like Chinese dynasties. Apparently I'm not that good at them, as first of all I only learned of them in Chinese from my grandpa, but I also don't have all the dates down. I missed a question the other day about one of the biggest cultural revolutions in China from 202 BC- 9AD, and I just couldn't make the connection between Liu Bang and the stories I heard about him as a kid and guessed "Qin" instead of the correct answer, "Han." Also, I didn't know until I was today years old that the Manchu dynasty = the Qing dynasty, which is the different than the Qin Dynasty. Confused yet? All this is very unlikely to matter because American trivia writers don't care about Chinese history, but in the small likelihood it comes up.......Oh and the Ming Dynasty is actually a pretty regular staple in China, known as the one between the Mongol and the Manchu Dynasties, 1368-1644, and if you're pressed to guess a Chinese dynasty the Pavlov response (like guessing Kierkegaard when someone asks for a Danish philosopher) the one to go with is Ming.
Speaking of the Ming Dynasty, they utilized the Great Wall of China pretty well (although they didn't build it) in defending against invading forces, and that's what I picture when I run around big cities and run in the skywalks connecting Hyatts/Hilton/Weston hotels. You know the ones? Where the big fancy hotel chains that built large complexes in big cities thought hotels would be a bigger deal and created all this fancy stuff, only to have it sitting unused and appreciated because hotels just aren't as profitable in the 21st century as must have been projected? Well I love running around them because they're still accessible to the public, they connect to cool areas around cities as was their original intended uses, and they have great views of the cities or some kind of swimming pool, pass over traffic. Great wall indeed, of unused hotel chain property.
What was I doing in late 2017- early 2018? I guess enjoying newlywed life with MJ, but I just watched a documentary today (despite this being the big release weekend for movies of the summer Barbie and Oppenheimer) called "Glitch" and HQ Trivia, which was apparently a big craze during that time giving out prizes for answering trivia questions, reaching up to 2.3 million daily users (that's getting up to Jeoaprdy TV viewership level). Just a testament to how quickly things can change: 2018 I didn't care at all about trivia, 2023 I can't get enough of it.
I learned today that there's a difference between Alan Arkin and Alan Alda. (I know, kind of late in the game to finally grasp that distinction).
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