Cassi Creek: Tonight
is the Jeopardy on-lined audition; the first step in the selection process for
Jeopardy contestants. At 2000, this
evening the Eastern Time zone will be teeming with thousands of hopeful men and
women who think that they can become winning contestants on the long-running
television game show. That is, they can
become winning contestants if they can meet the selection criteria.
Up and down
the Eastern United States, they will be anxiously staring at their computer
monitor, hands poised over the keyboards, as a series of questions flashes too
briefly in front of them while they try to think of the correct answer and
input it into the appropriate response slot.
The dwell time between first look at the question and the sudden shift
to a new question is brutally short. It
is intended to be brutal, so that it immediately puts the would-be contestants,
me included, under steadily increasing stress.
The audition
is like the actual game, kind to those with a wide range of trivial facts
stored in some portion of their brains.
Hand eye coordination is important.
It does no good to recall the answer to “what is Avogadro’s number – to the
12th decimal place”, if you are the 2nd one to buzz in
with the correct response. Of course,
being first to buzz in is of no benefit if the answer suddenly disappears from
memory, or even worse, is incorrect.
All things
being otherwise equal, there is an immense importance that the hopeful
contestants are possessed of broad and easily accessed range of trivial
facts. Those tend to be the sorts that are
only of benefit in just such an event as the Jeopardy audition and game. Successful candidates and contestants will
know everything imaginable about everything imaginable.
“How far to the Moon?
“How fast does light travel?
“How many salmon spawn in the Columbia River basin?
“What is the atomic weight of U-238?
“Who wrote Hayden’s unfinished symphony?
“Who won the NHL championship in 1999?”
And the list
continues just as do the categories. The
mix of categories is the crucial thing for me.
At least, it has been so in the past.
Parkinson’s disease has introduced a delay in working the keyboard that
wasn’t there when I first began taking these on-line auditions. The inability to move as rapidly with
certainty and accuracy, then directing my hand to the next key without
hesitation is as critical as ever. But
the mix of categories and the mix of questions within those categories is the
primary problem to be overcome.
I have no
interest in team athletic competitions.
Ask me about football, basketball, hockey, and I’m almost certainly
lost. I might, just might, know the
answer if it is “Babe Ruth, Joe Dimaggio, Mickey Mantle, Stan Musial, Sandy
Koufax, or Larry Bird. Otherwise, I’ll
draw a blank. Likewise, the categories
dealing with Opera, ballet, or popular music performers post 1973.
Tonight I
will sit down at my notebook and log into the test website. I’ll be as hopeful as the person holding a
lottery ticket that has yet to be checked against the official results. 15 minutes later, I’ll be joking with Gloria
about “the mix,” and shelving my hopes of becoming a contestant for yet another
year.
Bear in mind,
however, that lightening does strike
twice, that the glass combat boot just might fit your foot ( as it is most
likely to small for mine), and it is possible to land a 20 pound salmon on a
#22 fly and a two pound test leader if you are extremely skilled and extremely
lucky.
If, by
remarkable chance, I get up from the audition tonight with an incredibly high
score and then appear on Jeopardy, I’ll be even more surprised than you. I didn’t visit a cross roads at midnight,
signed nothing in blood, and didn’t have a radio transceiver in my hearing
aids. It was just the mix.
I’ll have “obscure
naval battles for $2000, Alex!”
No comments:
Post a Comment