Final Jeopardy: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Authors (3-6-14)
The Final Jeopardy question (3/6/2014), in the category “Pulitzer Prize-Winning Authors” was:
He’s the most recent winner of 2 Pulitzer Prizes for fiction, winning in 1982 & 1991 for books in the same series.
In the 4th match of the 1990s Battle of the Decade, the players are: Claudia Perry, a 4x winner; Mark Dawson, the 2003 TOC winner; and Dave Abbott, the 2003 TOC winner.
Mark found the Jeopardy! round Daily Double in “Internal Fluidity” under the $800 clue. He was in the lead with $6,200, $2,400 ahead of Dave in second place. He bet $3,000 and thought it was “lymph.” That was WRONG.
Plasma is blood without cells; this is blood without cells & clotting factors. show
Mark finished in the lead with $6,800. Dave was second with $4,600 and Claudia was last with $2,600.
Mark found the first Daily Double in “Consider that a Divorce” under the $1,200 clue. He was in the lead with $10,800, $3,000 ahead of Claudia in second place. He bet $800 this time and thought it was Princess Grace of Monaco and Prince Albert (actually, her son), so that was WRONG.
Their storybook royal romance produced 2 daughters but ended in 1996. show
Mark found the last Daily Double in “Islands in the Stream” under the $2,000 clue. In the lead with $13,600, he had $3,800 more than Dave in second place. He bet $2,000 and thought it was the Ganges. That was WRONG.
Elephantine Island and Kitchener Island. show
Dave finished in the lead with $16,200. Mark was next with $13,600 and Claudia was in third place with $5,800.
TWO of the contestants got Final Jeopardy! right.
Updike picked up 2 Pulitzer Prizes in Fiction from the 4 “Rabbit” novels: “Rabbit is Rich” in 1982 and “Rabbit at Rest” in 1991. Updike is only one of three authors to have won more than once in the category, two if you want to be technical. Booth Tarkington won twice (1919 and 1922) before the “Novel” category was renamed “Fiction” in 1947. William Faulker (1955 and 1963) also won twice. (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
What was the prize worth? $7,500 each time. The prize amount was raised to $10,000 in 2002. Makes the winnings on a half hour show like Jeopardy! look pretty good, eh?
Claudia got it right, doubling her score to $11,600. While Claudia rejoiced, Dave let us all know he blew it.
Mark also got it. His $1,999 bet brought him up to $15,599.
Dave wrote down “John La Carre” (That would have been wrong even if it had been about Le Carre). He lost $11,001, finishing with $5,199.
So Mark Dawson is the winner of this match and moves on to the semi-finals.
2 years ago, nobody got this FJ: Current American Companies
The name of a Kansas City-based consumer product company, it’s also a term goldsmiths use to denote quality. show
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i’m a little confused here: 5 semi-finalists per decade? how is this going to work? unless they will add 4 wildcards and drag each decade semi-final out for yet another week.(day 1,2,3 to determine the “finalists”, then a 2 day “final” for the decade….) by the time they get to the final/final half of the contestants may not be alive anymore….in retrospect i think this was not the best idea j ever had. to quote a german proverb: “in der kuerze liegt die wuerze”. sorry, don’t have any “umlauts” on my keyboard. translated verbatim: “in the shortness lies the spice…”
I dunno how it’s going to work out. All I know is I’ll be glad when it’s over. I don’t like tournaments to begin with and I agree that this one isn’t the best idea they ever had.
they do save a little money though,sending the eliminated home with 5K and have only one payday in 2 weeks. otherwise they might have to shell out potentially 30K or more per day for 10 days…(2 weeks)???
Haven’t you already asked this?
They’re going to wind up with 15 semi-finalists. Then there’s going to be a standard two-week tournament. The tournaments always start with 15 contestants.
So, the first week there will be five winners plus the four “wild cards,” i.e., the four highest scoring non-winners. Those will be the nine players for the second week — three games to get the three finalists, then a two-day final match.
What’s got me down in the dumps is, since I’m sure they’ll always have these stupid tournaments, we’re going to be subjected to Arthur Chu for the next fifty years. He’ll be coming out on a walker eventually, still the same egotistical sociopath he is now.
No way that The Great Chu would have known this FJ. I did, of course, but that’s neither here nor there.
smart wager by mark, but again, hindsight is 20/20. he was lucky enough that claudia got it and not dave…..