Final Jeopardy: 20th Century Play Titles (5-27-14)
The Final Jeopardy question (5/27/2014), in the category “20th Century Play Titles” was:
This play’s title comes from the name of a Greek king said to have carved a statue of a woman and fallen in love with it.
16x champ Julia Collins racked up another win yesterday for a total haul of $337,700. Today she is up against these two players: Dylan Gaillard, from Omaha, NE; and Jeanne Kaiser, from Springfield, MA.
Round 1: Julia found the Jeopardy! round Daily Double in “Movies Inspired by Literature” under the $400 clue. She was in the lead with $3,200. Dylan had no money and Jeanne was in the hole for $600. Julia made it her second true Daily Double ever and she was RIGHT.
2010’s “‘Easy A’ re-imagined this decidedly unfunny 1850 novel as a comedy. show
Julia finished in the lead with $13,600. Dylan was second with $1,400 and Jeanne was last with $1,200.
Round 2: Dylan found the first Daily Double in “Visa” under the $1,600 clue. Still in second place, he had $3,400, $9,800 less than Julia’s lead. He made it a true Daily Double and came up with “religious purposes.” Asked to be more specific, he said he didn’t know so he was WRONG.
A visa to Saudi Arabia for this purpose only covers travel in the vicinities of Mecca, Medina and Jiddah. show
Julia found the last Daily Double in “Discover” under the $1,200 clue. She was the only one with any money once again — $14,400. Dylan had nothing and Jeanne was $400 in the red. She bet $4,000 and she was RIGHT.
The first fossil recognized as a human ancestor was a skull found near Dusseldorf belonging to this prehistoric man. show
Julia finished in the lead with an unbeatable $28,400. Dylan was next with $4,400. Jeanne was at negative $2,000 so it was the end of the road for her.
Only ONE of the contestants got Final Jeopardy! right.
A Brief Summary of Pygmalion in Greek Mythology says “Greek mythology has two versions of Pygmalion. In one tale, Pygmalion was a Greek king, grandfather to the handsome Adonis. In another, the poet Ovid wrote a tale about a sculptor who created a beautiful statue that he named Galatea, who subsequently came to life. The playwright George Bernard Shaw updated the Pygmalion myth in the 20th century with his play, which was transformed into the hit musical ‘My Fair Lady’.” The pre-Ovid version is in the Pseudo-Appollodorus. In some versions, these two stories are combined — Pygmalion is said to be both a sculptor and a king.
“The King and the Beggar-maid,” a story about an African king named Cophetua and his love for the beggar Penelophon, is also sometimes cited as an influence upon Shaw’s treatment of the Pygmalion myth.
Dylan wrote down “Broccoli,” a joke for his kids. He only bet $10.00 so finished with $4,390.
Julia got it right. Her $6,600 bet brought her already winning total up to $35,000. Her 17-day total is $372,700.
2 years ago:: Only ONE of the players got this FJ in “Classic Mystery Novels”
A letter in this mystery says, “We are going… to Luxor and Assuan by steamer, and perhaps on to Khartoum.” show
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Interesting material in the links, etc., regarding the Final Jeopardy clue. Thanks for that, vj.
Remember Julia went to MIT and is an engineer with the credentials of a supply chain engineer which is very difficult to achieve.
Thanks. Will do.
We haven’t fogotten. We have been discussing for weeks on this website her undergrad Wellesley and MIT master degrees. She still has been defeating contestants with doctorate degrees, law degrees, etc. Hope you are not implying a cause and effect with her MIT degree. Been a viewer of Jeopardy since the days of Art Fleming. Have seen Jeopardy contestants with doctorate degrees from MIT get beat big time over the past decades. To date Julia is the only MIT master degree alumnus who has won so many consecutive games on Jeopardy.
Per her 8th grade yearbook, according to her, she wanted to be a Jeopardy champion. Evidently, her passion for trivia is in her DNA. No mention of what colleges she desired to attend at that age when she got older. But, Jeopardy was clearly on her radar.
I hope everyone reads Bill’s comments below where he, in essence, states there is no correlattion between being a good contestant on Jeopardy and being well-educated. Remember Julia has a Master’s degree but she knocked off a dentist and a professor (who holds a doctorate degree) in her game. The latter person did not qualify for FJ because she was in negative territory. Too many contestants brag about their education and end of losing big time. My grandfather had an expression “There’s book sense and common sense. Common sense wins every time.” Nowhere have I seen this to be true than on Jeopardy.
Brad had the least formal education between him, Ken, and Roger. Who walked away with the $1 million? The guy who had $10,200 on two DD’s on two different days said “I’ll bet it all” and lost it all held a doctorate degree in Computer Science. Roger, sorry but it’s true. Common sense flew out of the window. Need I say more?
I would still say that Roger put himself in a better position to win than did Ken. Roger’s mistake was in not keeping sonething in reserve the first day. That would have given him the chance to bet it all on the first FJ. He played to win and, given the disparity between first and the other places, played correctly.
Thanks for the props, again, Jacob.
And as to Roger, he lived by the sword and died by the sword. But as he himself indicated, his life has been changed dramatically by his Jeopardy fame. I hope he does something truly inspirational in his life as a response to his fame, whether it’s now, or later on in life.
Gratitude, it’s a wonderful thing!
A note on TOC odds…
In a 15 person tourney even odds to win would be 6.7% each. In my opinion even Arthur Chu, the probable favorite, doesn’t warrant much better than the 15 to 20 percent odds range. So to eyeball it, I’d throw out, say, 18% for Arthur and 14% for Julia which gives about a 30% chance that one of those two will win the TOC.
Any way you look at it, I just can’t see them at better than 40% to win the TOC. Thus, I’d take the field. But I wouldn’t put money on it if given the opportunity because I have at least a creeping intuition that some sort of favoritism to these “celebrity” contestants might be ordered by the Jeopardy producers.
I think if you look at the list of players eligible thus far, there are at least 5 to 7 very good candidates to win the TOC.
This is totally rigged with her being pitted against weaker players so as to have a strong female winner. Also, can’t someone on staff teach that poor thing about how to dress for the show. She wears the same sweaters over and over and they aren’t attractive on her. You don’t have to look like a hollywood star, but you could dress more appropriately!
For someone who holds a Master’s Degree in Engineering, she is a fashion guru.
Yeaaaah…I’m sure the good people at Jeopardy! are wanting a big female champ sooo bad, they’re willing to risk going to federal prison to make it happen. You realize how asinine that sounds? You do know it’s against federal law to rig a game show, right? I cringe whenever I see a post like this. Just because a contestant you dislike is winning, you cry rigged. I guess whatever helps you sleep at night.. If it helps to think its rigged, if it makes you feel less angry over her winning, fine, but posting stuff like that in the open, with all due respect, makes you look idiotic.
And WTF does her wardrobe have to do with anything?! She looks fine the way she is. Stooping down to those kind of critiques is just plain childish.
Actually, it depends on what kind of crime you commit as to whether it warrants prison time in the U.S. Massive scale bank fraud is one your best bets these days. War crimes are pretty choice too, very often. I could go on, of course.
What you DON’T want to do is “low level” crime, particularly drug offenses because those’ll get you time almost automatically, especially if your skin is of a darker shade.
I recommend Michelle Alexander’s, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, for a primer.
As to Jeopardy, they probably play by the rules, but what those rules are would be interesting to know in their details.
OK, I’m starting to buy into the conspiracy theories.
They ARE throwing weak players at Julia. And maybe her buzzer DOES work fractionally faster than the others.
Now, why would they do this? Well look at the male lineup in the finals for the Battle of the Decades. They want a woman to be among the all-time top winners.
And by “they” I mean the female staff on Jeopardy (I think I read years ago that most of the behind-the-scenes staff is female.)
When you want something bad enough, you can rationalize all kinds of cheating.
As for the weak players, the woman in the middle was a doozy today.
The split second they said she was a law professor, I said, “She won’t make it into Final Jeopardy.”
How did I know that?
It’s been my experience that, among educated people, lawyers are the dumbest people I know. They seem to know law (if that) and little else.
I know a female lawyer who literally had to use a calculator to add 200 and 300!
Now, obviously, there are exceptions, but generally I’ve found lawyers can be real dimwits. And the woman in the middle is today’s Exhibit A — wow, was she dumb.
Was the lawyer figuring your bill and couldn’t believe the amount?
good one!
Rubbish, There is no conspiracy theory.
Ginny, you must be a lawyer.
Of course there’s a THEORY. What you mean is, there’s no conspiracy.
Lets have some fun, but iff it’s ok with VJ (who is in no way affiliated, nor endorses this contest). VJ: if you don’t like this idea for ANY reason, please erase this post and it will never be mentioned again.
Everyone gets 1000 points to start. I’ll tout some games, players, and the ToC. Whomever accumulates the most points……..will have the most points and have absolutely nothing else. There will be nothing awarded. This is all just for fun.
If this post remains, this week: Wendy Hardenberg and Feifei Jiang are 5 to 1 (all odds are win only), Matt Weldy is 15:1 and anyone else is 10:1.
For the ToC, assuming both Julia and AChu are entered, Julia even 1:1, AChu 7:5, and the field is 2:1.
I hope that we can have some fun with this, but it certainly will be understandable if the idea receives the veto.
It will be painful for me to watch the ToC because I don’t ever want to see Chu again.
But it will be interesting to see how Julia does against his aggressive style. She seems to be a calm, orderly person who may not take well to Chu’s jumping around and dirty looks.
As for the contest you propose here, I feel like a lawyer right now: I don’t know what you’re talking about! 🙁
Don’t worry about it. It looks to die a natural death. I like games too much at times.
Glad to read your posts again, though.
just enjoy the show in which he will LOSE.!!
look at it at a positive way! he is bound to stumble the way he plays when he is up against others who are not too shabby….
goodgrief goodgrief goodgrief, i know nothing of theater or plays and yet i got the fj right away, just as i did the terminator yesterday, and roberty kennedy, and 2001, and the royal society, and lord of the flies before…and i also knew all three daily doubles today…omg omg omg, my head is spinning like a top, this is the sixties all over again with the quiz show scam…more and more imbeciles being pitted against Julia…religious purposes???!!! WTH…goodgrief goodgrief goodgrief, this is the sixties again; i wasn’t even born then…omgomgomg, please J!, dont put Alex in bellbottoms.
It seems like you are destined for Jeopardy! ! If you go on, you will have to tell us your name, then John and I will tell you ours.
🙂 it’s a deal Eric…and seriously, religious purposes??? I mean, I know because I’m Muslim, but still, pilgrimages are part of many religions and the hajj is one of the planet’s biggest ( about 5-6 million people annually). A Jeopardy contestant should be expected to know about the basics of the major religions.
especially since the hajj or hadj is mentioned so often in other books, and whoever completed it gets to wear the white turban, right?
btw , my name is already up there, it’s not a username.
Also, I saw Easy A just last week 🙂 …Emma Stone has great comic timing. And Pygmalion was a no-brainer. As someone else has pointed out, it has appeared many times on J! before.
There is a fantastic youtube video of Emma Stone and Jimmy Fallon lip-synching. Please check it out.
If I were to go on Jeopardy, I would definitely study world religions, greek mythology and geography, as I know just enough now to be dangerous.
Also, I wish everyone knew how accepting and peaceful of a religion Islam is.
Thanks Eric for that wonderful comment about Islam. And I just checked out that video you said; enjoyed the Emma Stone bits, ignored the Jimmy Fallon bits…dunno why, but the guy seems so fake. (Let’s end this here, dont want to turn this into a pro-Emma or anti-Fallon thread :).
You are not alone, Nomi. Jimmy Fallon gets on my nerves too. Dunno why either.
I think it’s the pc thing about being a major talk show host, partly. I like a little grit and grime, and those who climb the entertainment ladder understand that there are boundaries they shouldn’t test if they want to “succeed”. Or is it, suck seed?
😉
By the way, a superb intro to Islam is Reza Aslan’s, “No God But God”.
I’m currently reading his latest offering, “Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth”. It is unbelievably fascinating. It’s one of those books where you read it and you are suddenly far more informed about Christianity than probably 99% of the American public…or probably 99% percent of even the American Christian public. Ten thumbs up!
If you should know one thing about Jesus, it might be the fact that his life and message were far more radical (and Jewish, tribally oriented) than the later Christian church re-molded it –they made the historic Jesus unidentifiable, frankly. Way cool stuff.
I do want to add that the movie reinforced my belief that Stanley Tucci remains as one of our premiere supporting actors.
Chu is too much of an emotional person and likes to get in verbal discourse with Alex which pulls him off of his game. I can’t see him winning in toc. Although Julia has a good stride she may meet the same fate Ken Jennings met against Brad in toc. Of course during the time Brad played regular Jeopardy the limit was 5 games. We will never know how long Brad may have played with no game restrictions. Having said that I think someone out of left field could win toc.
Wow! Congratulations Julia!
Pygmalion has come up several other times in FJ! over the years, I guessed it because of it being a semi-favorite of the J! writers. Julia is now $59,700 away from Dave Madden’s $432,400 second place regular game total (including his $2K consolation money for second place on the game he lost) and two wins away from his 19 games won.
I read the Pygmalion myth when I was a kid so I knew about the myth before the play or My Fair Lady — for me, it was like Eric said yesterday, easy when you know it.
I think that Julia is reading our posts. Apparently my flipping her for betting 400 (I think) on FJ two games ago has stirred her. Even more so, she seems to have realized Bill’s assertion of the quality of players was spot on.
ok, I realize that she probably had daily fatigue after playing five straight games on Friday’s game and that she had a night, or five, to reassess her options and opportunities for the last two games, but I didn’t want to pull the curtain on the wizard first.
She has certainly made the ToC something to anticipate. Anyone want her vs. AChu in a friendly wager? Or does someone prefer the field (all of the rest)?
If you’re offering me even money odds I’ll take the field over Julia/Arthur, Eric!
That is, if Jeopardy is not up to some sort of “wizardry”.
;o)
I maybe sipping the Julia kool-aid (re. Posts on her tweets), but I would feel bad about the even money. Naturally, the “wizardry” would be hard to prove, but certainly would be working against you: the producers would probably do almost everything to insure that AChu and JJ made it to the final.
I also wonder if she wins through the end of the season, will they postpone the ToC for a holdover year?
idk if she’s reading the game posts, but she may have seen the stats post since the Huff Post linked to it in an article she mentioned on her twitter.
I think she’s already made more $$ than she thought she would and figures she can afford to be a bit more daring.
Reading that article lead me to reading her tweets. There was an interesting exchange with Ken Jennings where he said that of a woman wins consistently they will say that there was weak competition. Way more interesting, though, was a tweet where she asks for another reader of the Ovid version of Pygmalion in latin. I mean, Holy Carp, it is entirely possible that this woman is a monster-genius.
I can assure you that if I were anywhere nearly that smart, I would be truly insufferable. Truly.
She majored in Art and History. It’s a fair guess that this was right in her wheelhouse. On the other hand, yesterday’s, “Cyrus the Great’s empire in Asia, etc.” resulted in a triple stumper.
You cannot be serious.
Oh but I am serious. I know some people who can read Latin, and it certainly falls into the brain activity one would expect from someone who studies Art and History. I also know gifted minds, one of whom went to Caltech, in the world of engineering and science. I honestly do not know anyone who has, or probably could, synthesize the two spheres so well, or, at least, they haven’t. Writing this has made me thirsty for the Kool-aid.
“You cannot be serious”, was in reference to the triple stumper on what should have been a slam dunk response of, “Where is the Persian Empire?”
Julia is undeniably very smart and very well educated. On the other hand, I think the two (Jeopardy and well-educated) don’t necessarily have a great deal to do with each other. For instance, I’m sure you wouldn’t have to look far to find someone with a gold-plated education who was not a particularly good Jeopardy player –not that it’s likely they would be utterly atrocious, but they could conceivably be quite poor in the realm of Jeopardy’s material.
That’s part of the reason that I cringe a little when people ooh and aah over a player’s educational background. Julia seems quite evidently to have been a “star pupil”. Good for her, and I wish her the very best in her career(s) and life in general.
Her Jeopardy skills likely have as much to do with her love of the game since she was eight years old, as with her educational experiences.
As an additional note, we’ve seen how even very well educated people don’t necessarily become the most admirable people in our society. As if I need to beat the proverbial dead horse here, but our American mortgage crisis and our seemingly endless wars and “targetted assassinations”, etc., etc., ad nauseam have been conducted under the auspices of some very well educated folks who should have known better.
But I digress….again.
:8-)
A visa to Saudi Arabia for this purpose only covers travel in the vicinities of Mecca, Medina and Jiddah…
Like…uh…what are religious purposes, dude. I mean Alex…dude?
I’m like, whoa, good ANSWER dude!
Anyway, nice work by Julia on that Final.
😀
I must agree with you Bill. Hajj is simply the Islamic term. But, Islam is a religion. By deduction Hajj is a religious journey. What do I know since I am not Islamic.
I’m thinking Dylan could have said, “pilgrimage” and been correct.
Yep. That would have worked too.
I actually disagree. Is there a difference between pilgrimage and religious purposeful travel?
that’s what I think, too (that’s why I put pilgrimage in parentheses)
I just watched. You may have missed it, but Dylan said “religious purposes”. He did not put it in the form of a question, a big no-no in double jeopardy.
You’re right Marilyn, he didn’t say it in the form of a question. How odd, then, that Trebek didn’t give that as the reason for him being wrong.
Well, the quite obviously over-vague, “religious purposes” combined with not answering in the form of a question makes his response rather “double dunce” in my book!
julia is getting “feisty” in her fj wagers. i was actually shocked when she bet 8.600 yesterday…
well, 2 more wins and she is tied with dave madden in terms of games won. she is at the moment some 57.700 behind him moneywise, so she will need a game more, unless she can average close to 29 K per win tomorrow and thursday…. 2 record waiting to be broken. become # 2 on the all time list in games won and in money won in regular j.go julia!