Bobby Supreme

Title inspired by the 2025 Oscar Award nominated movie "Marty Supreme" starring Timothee Chalamee as a table tennis legend who pursues excellence in ping pong. I've always wondered what that's like, to be one of the best in something, to be on a quest to be the very best in something, like the training montages in the Rocky movies or any sports feel-good movie you've ever seen. For the last year or so since I learned I would be in the Jeopardy contestant pool, that's essentially what I've been doing: trying to be good at something. Definitely not trying to be the best ever at Jeopardy, I could study non-stop every day for years and years and never be as good as the best trivia players in the world; no I wanted to try to become the best Jeopardy player that I could be, to be "Bobby Supreme." Thanks to Jeopardy I could pursue a dream even at the ripe old age of 38 years old (soon to be 39), when most people my age are just growing old with their lives pretty constant, or just taking care of their babies and children until they become adults and allow them to pursue their own dreams, not pursue their own dream. Jeopardy put me in an obsessive "Jeopardy brain" mode, where everything from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed was categorized into 2 things: 1.) something I might need to know for Jeopardy and could be in a Jeopardy question, and 2.) everything else, including chores, bills, jobs, wife, and eventually.....Baby girl Yan (don't worry Social Services, I did hold off on studying once Baby Yan was born and actually took care of the baby). And I did devote time to work that was needed, money is still a motivating factor for me and there's no guarantee of any Jeopardy winnings, except maybe the $2,000 or $3,000 consolation prices once you lose. I studied everything I could get my hands on, encyclopedias, newspapers, old books about old movies, new books about new movies, kids books, foreign language books, I watched movies while donating blood with the subtitles on just to learn foreign languages. And of course, watch the show. Jeopardy fed my obsessive personality that if I really like something, I'm into it 100% and nothing else really matters (and then when I lose focus, I will lose a significant amount of interest in it). From studying for Jeopardy, I understand why it's a popular show and has been in the American culture zeitgeist for many decades, since the 1970's: The little dopamine hit from getting a question right is really addicting, like the endorphin hit you get from running or little bites of chocolate. Studying for Jeopardy had the similar incentives: I was conditioning my brain and feeding it with information so that the next time a question involving, leatherback turtles or transpiration, let's say, comes up, I am equipped with the requisite knowledge to get that hit of dopamine. Essentially, I'm banking dopamine points. (Problem is, not everything that you stick in your brain sticks, necessitating some rote memorization, or mnemoics, flashcards, or other brute force methods to shove that information into the brain so that it doesn't just forget it when you go to sleep.) I'm sure I forgot a LOT of the stuff during the several months I spent studying for Jeopardy, but a lot of it did stick, and still sticks today. And on May 7th (Thursday), I get the opportunity to show the whole world (or at least, about 7 million viewers, 9 million when superchamps are on like Amy Schneider is on......or Jamie Ding is on his 31-day run like he is now) how much I know, or......fall flat on my face. That's the fear, of course, for any Jeopardy player: you study all this stuff, spend hours and hours of your time dedicated to this game (it is just a game) that you love, and you're only going to use a tiny fraction of that knowledge on the actual game that you play, more than a fraction if you're lucky and play more games because you win. That's the nature of the game: you don't know what's going to come up, so you have to study everything, or at least topics you think are most likely to come up. For me, all that studying is worth it regardless of the outcome, because sometimes the trip is not about the journey, not the destination: I know that all my preparation gave me the tools necessary to win at least a game of Jeopardy, if not more; the rest is luck, opportunity, and a little bit of magic. Did I find magic on Jeopardy? Tune in to find out May 7 (or stream it next day on Hulu or Peacock, at which point you risk spoilers and not really being in the moment of a live sports event like what Jeopardy is meant to be, but at least you watched it!) -Bobby Supreme

100 day miracle

Korean people celebrate when a baby has surpassed the 100-day threshold, as the first 100 days are the most vulnerable for a newborn: they're susceptible to diseases, they're just adjusting to the new world, and MJ was constantly stressed out about SIDS, or suddent infant death syndrome, and also whenever I would sleep near the baby she would make sure I didn't roll over and trample Baby Girl Yan and prevent her from breathing. But we made it! It's well past 100 days now, but right around that 100 day mark baby's sleeping began to normalize and she behaved very consistently, acting in patterns and allowing us to plan ahead and not always scrambling to figure out what's the next step. Some call this the 100-day miracle, that somehow the baby will turn into an angel and be much more well behaved, cry less after 100 days. So far, it's been pretty true! And also she started social smiling now, knowing when to smile and not just smiling randomly. It's probably one of the things that's keeping our marriage alive/strong, (both alive and strong!) as MJ will pretty much forgive everything that happened as long as baby smiles like an angel. That's probably our best form of therapy right now: let the baby smile. There's currently a Jeopardy champion on a streak right now named Jamie Ding who feels like he might be on his way to a 100-day miracle, or at least the 74-day mark held by Ken Jennings. Jamie looks....very Chinese, but I'm happy for him and proud of him because he's making Chinese men like myself look good, like we're not just nerdy introverts who just know random facts......oh wait, that's exactly what he looks like, but he's doing it with style, his own style, and not coming off too cocky or gathering a lot of haters.The last time Jeopardy had a male Chinese superchamp (defined as having a streak longer than 10 games) Arthur Chu in 2014 was villified for his mannerisms and attitude, so I think Jamie is doing a little better, although his anecdotes might need a little work. He's at 26 games now, so he's reaching the true elites, enough to put the mainstream media on notice and not just famous in Jeopardy circles. I've always wondered what it'd be like to be Jeopardy famous, which is like very famous in the Jeopardy subreddit, but also picking up some steam in news articles and online web sources, social media........enough that his high school class in Detroit (or Grosse Point, a suburb) has daily updates about him, people are writing opinion columns saying "this is why you should be watching Jeopardy right now...." Basically, Jamie is living my dream, which I will never be able to achieve..... a wonderful month-long (now more than a month) magical ride where everybody is talking about you and wanting to know how long your streak can continue (or end abruptly, there are always haters like that). I can't help but think his chest is puffed out a little as he walks in the street, he's fielding calls from everyone he's ever known, maybe even get an agent for publicity and appearing on local news networks (my dream was always to speak at my high school, or go on CNBC to talk to Jim Cramer on one of the programs he appears in, or to throw out the first pitch at a major league baseball stadium). Jamie has the chance to do all of that now, and good for him, he is one of the best players ever and much better than me at Jeopardy. But for every streak and win, I always think of the people whom Jamie beat along the way: Jeopardy does a great job covering the winners and telling their stories, but losers are never heard of again. And Jamie produces exactly 2 losers every time he plays, people who earned their way onto Jeopardy only to come up against one of the best players ever and have their dreams shattered without even putting up much of a fight (Jamie's victories have mostly been runaways, some close calls, but mostly games where he is leading throughout and never relinquishes an insurmountable lead). Those contestants had hopes and dreams too, but they had to give up those dreams all in service of keeping this one streak going. So my point is, (I think), enjoy everything Jamie, you deserved it, but also keep in mind all the people who had to be disappointed for you to win.....dont' take winning for granted, that kind of combination of opportunity and luck and execution only comes once in a lifetime. And for most people in the world, it never comes: that thing we desire the most that we'd be working for for so long, comes and goes by like sand through the hourglass: slips right through the fingers. For every one story of extreme wealth and accolades, there are so many stores of loss and missed opportunities and regret.

Fruit Flies (果蝇, フルーティーなハエ, 과일 파리)

I may have posted this before, but fruit flies absolutely drive me bananas (no pun intended). We're currently going through a fruit fly infestation here at the Yan househould and it is pretty bad; I almost lost it yesterday when several flies were landing on me at the same time while I was holding Baby Mina and trying to work. They're worse than telemarketers! I don't know how they got into our home, why there are so many, why they keep coming in droves, but I'm actually hoping for winter to come back now to freeze out these little buggers. It got so bad I panic ordered traps from Amazon that is just basically a blue light with glue on it to attract the flies and get them stuck on a piece of paper. The other inhumane device, of course, is my dad's favorite: a device looking like a tennis racket that he swings around to "zap" the bugs in the air, as anytime the bugs go through the circle of the racket an electric charge shocks them. Pretty tough for the soul to no I've ended more than 100 lives in one day, but there's really no way to get these fruit flies out otherwise, and they're tearing up all our food! They even somehow make it into our refrigerator, and lots of little dead fruit fly carcasses lie on the bottom of our fruit shelves as testment. They're also hanging out in the door, through the gasket (the part that seals the refrigerator, a fact I learned recently) and just anywhere they can to get to our food. They're faceless, tiny, nerve-tingling beings that are peak cringe, and cringe the way it's supposed to be used, not the "cringe" that Gen Z has overused to the point it means anything they think is uncool or inappropriate. Maybe this is just a sure sign that spring is here and summer is right around the corner. This is going to be another boring summer. MJ and I haven't really had an extended vacation since summer 2024, when we visited Korea and China, which seems like a whole lifetime ago yet also feels like it just happened yesterday, minus a 9-month pregnancy and 4-month life of Baby Mina. Some events in your life just stay with you forever, just because of how unique the experience is and never doing it ever again. I remember on that trip spending just 48 hours in China, part of it in a hotel room finishing up work at 1AM local time because it was business hours in the U.S., then waking up at 8AM there to do a podcast episode with my fantasy baseball friend, just to go out and explore the most populated city in the world right after, and the city of my birth, Shanghai. Ah, those type of days aren't going to happen for awhile, where I'm just by myself living in the world with few responsbilities, world is my oyster. Now my oyster is the 15-pound bowling ball of a baby I hold almost night and day because she's just so attached to me. I yearn for freedom, but also I cherish the moments now with her because probably in what seems like a flash she will be too heavy to hold and no longer want me to hold her. Welcome to parenthood: it may seem tough now, but some day even these will the good old days (that's a Macklemore song feat. Kesha called "Good Old Days.") Except the fruit flies. Anything with fruit flies can never be "the good old days."

Wordplay

Wow it's been a solid 3 months since I posted last! I'm sure many parents have this same feeling, but so much has happened in those 3 months, yet it also feels like nothing has really happened. In those 3 months since January, I've spent probably 95% of it in my home with MJ, Baby Girl Yan, and myself, so not going anywhere physically, but mentally I've traveled so far and to the ends of the earth in my study for one of the best competitions ever. Oh and there was a road trip in there as well we took where Baby Girl Yan spent 2 nights in a new location sleeping in a hotel room, and like her father she took it pretty well, adjusted like a champ....except we got greedy at the end of the trip enjoying the outdoors and she got sick, lost her voice on the way back. Like her father, though, she recovered quickly and is the picture of health. One ofthe greatest luxuries in life is to be able to sleep well, stay health, and eat heartily, and then right after that is for your child, in this case infant child, to do all of the above, and she does. Now if we can just survive the upcoming teething process and get her to sleep all the way through the night instead of waking up once or twice.... that would just be the icing on the cake. Honestly, as a new parent who doesn't have any other experience with newborn babies, I feel extremely lucky to have wound up with Baby Girl Yan, she's made our lives so much easier than it could have been, I still get plenty of sleep at night, we haven't lost our minds, and we haven't lost a fortune on medical/health expenses or anything like that, only on diapers and baby wipes (she is a poop machine!) In my trivia preparation, I've come to understand what my strengths and weaknesses are, they become pretty obvious after you go 0/5 on certain categories on Jeopardy or run certain categories with ease....one of my many weaknesses is wordplay, anything with anagrams, add a letter, spell a letter backwards, palindromes, etc. This wouldn't be that big of a problem except the Jeopardy writers seem to be adding more and more of these every year, hoping to weed out the memorization-based players like me who can memorize a lot of facts and study flashcards but can't think on their feet well especially when words get scrambled. A big part of this weakness for me is never having gotten into crosswords and similar puzzles. I've always heard of the NY Times crossword puzzle as the gold standard of crosswords that all cruciverbalists swear by, but I just never got really into it outside of picking up an airplane magazine while killing time sitting on a flight, never actually finishing one because I'd inevitably get stuck and have to start looking in the back for solutions. I assume the thrill of finishing a crossword without any hints is like that adrenaline rush you get when filling in the final piece of a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, or finally achieving checkmate in a drawn-out battle of chess, or finishing a week-long research paper... that feeling of completion that you finally accomplished it and can say confidentally that you did it. I crave that completion feeling, which is why sometimes I rush and get antsy when something is not finished (like the income taxes that I keep putting off). Recently, though, in the past year I've seen Paolo Pasco start on Jeopardy, win 8 games with seemingly effortless ease, then get to the Tournamnet of Champions and dominate in 3 games. Then today I saw the movie "Wordplay" (Free on Youtube!) that's much-heralded as one of the best documentaries ever, not just of the documentaries made for nerds. It's very similar to the documentary "Spellbound" about the National Spelling Bee, Wordplay follows several competitors on the roard to the 2005 National Crosswords championship, where these super-smart people solve really clever puzzles put together by Will Shortz and other crossword gurus. It's very adjacent to Jeopardy where you have to have knowledge.......but also an ability to put words in the right spot and figure out what the clue is asking for in a short amount of time. I watched Paolo Pasco win the 2025 crossword championship....and I no longer quesitoned how this 25-year-old (I think?) got so good at Jeopardy....he's just super-fast and super-talented at breaking down clues and understanding what the writer meant, it's like he's done these crosswords in his sleep, and since birth. That's the thing about youth, I wish I had done these nerdy pursuits earler in life, when my brain was ready to be molded into a machine for solving puzzles like Jeopardy and crosswords...instead it was busy just doing busy homework and reading books, not a bad use of time but it was never honed for competition. Gotta start young! Baby Girl Yan, we will help you do whatever you wish to do but also steer you in the right direction. - Tiger Dad