I was just on Jeopardy

Maybe I should have announced ahead of time, but if you watched it, the guy in the middle slot on tonight's episode, who came in a distant second... that was me.

 

Ha ha no, but he is all business.

Hope your daughter is doing well!

The protocol is...
1) Online test. They announce on the show when these are happening.
2) If you do well on the online test, you get invited to an audition. There you take a second, written, test, and basically play a few clues' worth of a mock game and answer some questions about yourself. They're really watching to see how you would do on TV - if you freak out, clam up, come across like a jerk, etc.
3) Anytime in the next 18 months (mine was after about 3 months) they email you to invite you to LA to tape a show. There's lots of paperwork to fill out, questionnaires about all your personal facts, you can't be an employee of Sony or its affiliates, etc. Travel is at your expense but they give you a discount at a nice hotel and run a shuttle to get you to the studio.
4) They film 2 weeks' worth of shows in 2 days, 5 shows a day (you bring changes of clothes in case you win and come back, to preserve the illusion that each show happens on a different day). There's makeup and briefings on how to play and you get to play a few clues' worth on set to get used to it, then the audience comes in and they're off. Each taping really is just the 1/2 hour that the broadcast takes. You sit in a special section of the audience until your name gets drawn.
5) Show broadcasts about 3 months after taping date and checks mailed 3 months after that.

That's the outline at least.

Ha ha yeah, wish I had a "call a friend" option to my sister on that one.

I was wondering why he did that. He was a really nice guy and I think it was his sense of sportsmanship not to bet big when the game was already so uneven.

Planning on it!

I know, I know... TWO bass player questions! If they'd said "one-handed drummer" I would have had that. "Deaf Cats!" has become my family's mock rallying cry now.

That's a classic for what Jeopardy does to you - it's not just knowing stuff, but being able to sort through the complicated clues FAST and beat the other guy on the buzzer. I rang in so fast on that I hadn't really thought through the clue yet, I saw "hearing-impaired" and got Def, but then my brain got stuck on Def Jam records and the Def Tones. I saw "feline" so I knew those weren't it, it was something to do with cats, but the timer was about to run out and I had to say something (the timer had killed me on "Colombia" before), so "Def Cats" popped out. Two more seconds and I would have had it, but no cigar.

Same thing on the Pete Wentz question. I saw the name, said to myself "I know him, he's in that guyliner pop-punk band.." which made Blink-182 get stuck in my head, which I KNEW wasn't it. "Boy" was there in the clue, but that only made me waste time dismissing Boyz2Men and whatever, and then the timer hit me again and I blurted out what I KNEW was a wrong answer.

Thanks! Ben was an amazing player, and really was a nice guy backstage. He is a machine, though - so fast on the buzzer you don't know what hit you. I didn't even look at the scoreboard, at first, trying to catch him, and then when I did it was already $6400 to $1000 or something. I knew a lot of the ones he got but he was just faster. So I started focusing on trying to beat him on the buzzer, and that got me into the brain-scramble "Deaf Cats" answers.

It's a lot of fun. You don't see much more of Alex than what people see on the TV at home - he's back in his own dressing room, comes out for 1/2 an hour at a time to tape each show, then back to his dressing room to change. There's another guy who is "stand-in" Alex for rehearsal while you're trying out the console and the buzzer and all that before taping starts. During the post-game conversation with Alex, which also really doesn't last much longer than what you see on TV, we're mainly talking about how the game went.

Alex does screw up a clue sometimes. When he does, they re-record it during a commercial break and overdub it in the broadcast. Apart from that, he takes questions from the audience. He's very laconic most of the time, and you can tell he's gotten a lot of the questions like "how did you get to be the host of Jeopardy" and "do you know the answers to the clues" a million times and answers them very curtly. He lights up when he gets a question about his outside life. He really enjoys doing handyman stuff at home and will talk at length about fixing his garage door and stuff like that.

Most of the time you're dealing with a team of contestant handlers, who are great people, very charming and fun. They do everything from dealing with your paperwork and personal info (they boil it down to three things you've written and Alex chooses which of them he'll ask about, so you have an idea what you'll be asked), give you pep talks, strategy tips, all that. The contestants were all very nice and personable people, you didn't have a lot of competitiveness or negativity or psyching each other out. Ben, the recurring champion from the prior week (our first day out there), came in both mornings talking about how hung over and tired he was, which may have been his way of psyching people out, but that was about it.

Once you lose, you sign more papers and then that's it - you can hang around and watch the remainder of the day's taping if you want, or just leave. Most people (including me) just left - it's just hard to contemplate going and sitting in the audience after the huge emotional rush of playing and losing. It's a little anticlimactic that way.

Yikes!

I'm glad I didn't wind up in the red - was worried for a while there. When we got to final, I obviously had no chance of winning. At that point, I just wanted to wind up ahead of the third contestant, because 3rd place gets $1000 and 2nd gets $2000. If I wound up in 3rd, that would basically mean I got my travel costs covered. But if I made 2nd, I could at least have enough winnings to buy a new bass. Gonna get me a Carvin SB4000 when the check comes in. And engrave "Who are Def Cats" on the truss rod cover.

 

Awesome! Is it on youtube or hulu or anything?