Final Jeopardy: 20th Century American Music (10-16-20)
Here are more triple stumpers from the 10/16/2020 Jeopardy! game:
(Please don’t put the answers in the comments so people who haven’t seen the game can try to get the clues)
CITY NICKNAMES ($400) Hyderabad, India is known as the “City of” these marine gemstones
2-LETTER WORDS ($800) In the title of a Eugene O’Neill play, it precedes “Wilderness!”
($1000) Scrabble players know this 2-letter word is a type of 3-toed sloth found in Brazil
ACTORS & THEIR ROLES ($800) Groundskeeper Carl Spackler & Franklin D. Roosevelt
($1000) Captain Hector Barbossa & the Marquis de Sade
FEEL THE POWER! ($1200) One of the best electrical insulators is simply the complete absence of materials
($1600) California’s Ivanpah plant focuses solar rays to heat tanks of water, spinning turbines with this 19th century type of power
POETS & POETRY ($800) This president asked Robert Frost to read “The Gift Outright” at his inauguration, but with the last line changed
($1200) This patriotic Oliver Wendell Holmes poem warns, “The harpies of the shore shall pluck the eagle of the sea!”
ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE ($800) For the Fourth of July in 2012, an order was placed to deliver 30,000 12-inch these to Americans serving overseas
($2000) In 2019 the Defense Dept. placed the largest order in its history, $34 billion to this 2-named co. for a batch of F-35 fighter planes
THE ENGLISH MONARCH WHEN… ($800) the charge of the Light Brigade happened at the Battle of Balaklava
($1600) Magellan’s fleet began its circumnavigation voyage
Answers to the Sneak Peek clues — The players missed one clue (*) in ELVI:
($400) Grammy-winning merengue singer Elvis Crespo grew up near San Juan Bay on this island
*($800) This rocker’s backing band on 1977’s “My Aim is True” included members of The News, of Huey Lewis fame
($1200) Film critic & public radio host Elvis Mitchell had his own interview show “Under the Influence”, on TCM, this channel
($1600) H.S. teammates Desmond Howard & Elvis Grbac fled north from Ohio to play football for this rival university
($2000) Elvis Stojko won his first Olympic medal, a Silver in Men’s Figure Skating, at the 1994 Winter Games in this Norwegian city
ANSWERS: show
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Haven’t seen a picture like this one since Season 14.
Tonight’s show was one of the more painful ones. I must admit the Final stumped me. Thought for sure it was “Rodeo” and gave it no further thought.
SO many stumpers again. I tend to compare the routine players, even the winners, with the all-time greats, which of course is unfair. But it highlights the massive difference between them.
I certainly didn’t know all of them, but scored on several. (I won’t say which ones because VJ requested that we not answer them so as not to spoil it for those who see the show later.)
Thanks, Howard. You can certainly say how many of them you knew and you can refer to the category (like, I got the two Actors stumpers) or make a reference to something in the clue (like, I knew that 2-word Scrabble answer 30 something years ago) .😀
We end the week with a double stumper.
In the beginning of the game, Alex said “What are the odds… we select two challengers from the pool at random. They both wind up on the program and both their first names start with double A. Never gonna happen… never gonna happen!”
That is unusual, I’ll agree, but I have to say I have seen way too many challengers with names that start with the same letter on the same show. Many times, Alex has said “the Js (or Ms or whatever) have arrived.” It’s made me wonder if their selections are really alphabetical.
On the other hand, in light of today’s final, it really was a crazy coincidence that one player’s name was Aaron Ballett! (I loved his apple pie answer in the Magnitude category)
It looks like in the U.S. about 10-15% of all people’s names begin with ‘J’.
For men, it’s about 15-20% ()
If we say the chances of a contestant’s name starting with ‘J’ is 15%, then the chances that two challengers chosen at random will both have their name begin with ‘J’ would be .15*.15 = 0.0225 = 2.25%.
If there are, say, 40 weeks a year with new, non-tournament shows, there would be 40 x 5 = 200 games per year with two challengers. That means you’d expect 200 * 2.25% = 4.5 times per year that both challengers’ first names would start with ‘J’.
The next most common starting letters are ‘A’ and ‘M’, each of which start about 10% of all names in the U.S. So those would each contribute about 2 times per year that both challengers’ first names start with the same letter.
That’s a total of 8.5 per year from the 3 most common starting letters. I’d bet the remaining letters might get you up to at least 12, probably close to 15-18, which would mean 1-2 per month, on average, if contestants are chosen at random.
Some years ago, JP, I made a name meaning/nicknames site for my daughter. On it, so far, we made this many pages for each of the letters you mentioned:
A – 79 male / 55 female
J – 62 male / 42 female
M – 70 male / 94 female
S seemed like it was never-ending, too: 55 male / 66 female
Of course, I mainly stuck to the most common version of a name and put variations in the same post. Otherwise, I’d still be doing that and not this. lol
As someone who works in web development, I must say that’s a pretty cool website for someone who does not do that work professionally!
Thanks, JP!
I couldn’t resist. I looked at season 35 (2018-2019) on j-archive. I found 190 non-tournament games. 6 times both challengers’ first names started with J, And 2 occurrences for both A and M. And a total of 17 same-letter-of-first-name challengers. Which matches the back-of-the-napkin calculations I did incredibly closely.
It actually reminds me of a video I saw recently. Towards the end, he mentions how the mathematical principle can be used to detect fraud in corporate bookkeeping.
The idea is that when you expect some phenomenon to be distributed randomly, sometimes you can check for small things that would indicate that it was not random. Based off my findings, I’d say it’s very likely that Jeopardy does not take contestants’ first names into account when selecting challengers, because their distribution, at least by the above measure, matches the theoretical prediction almost exactly.
Ever since Kevin Walsh won his 5th game, things have gone downhill fast, especially for Final Jeopardy!
Yes, this week has been both an interesting & really hard week. We have had only 3 correct responses, out of 12. We’ve had 3 Triple Stumpers, which, again, everybody hates. We have had both a Single Disqualification & a Double Disqualification in 1 week, and we also have 1 of the Lowest 2-Day Totals ever. It’s not a record, but still, and on Wheel of Fortune, we only had 1 solve, out of 5. However, some good things did happen this week. On Wheel of Fortune, the 1 solve that we did get FINALLY gave us our 1st $100,000 Winner in almost 2 years. We had our 1st Single Player Final Jeopardy! in over 5 years, and Kevin Walsh was successful in Final Jeopardy!, and speaking of Kevin Walsh, he became our 1st 5-Time Champion of Season 37. Let’s hope that next week will be a lot nicer & better. Will it actually happen? Will we go through 1 week without a triple stumper? Keep your fingers crossed, and find out.
Well we finished the week with our first five time champion, three dismissals, and many triple stumpers. Aanchal had trouble with the game and missed some easy daily doubles. Congrats to Kristin on her win but I think she might have Karen Farrell’s playing style, VJ. This fj wasn’t as hard as yesterday but I would love to see kristin get fj right next week to build on her win.
Man, this has been a sluggish week on Jeopardy. Earlier this week, we had a solo player FJ! and today we’re down to two contestants left in FJ! so that means 3 of the contestants have been disqualified. Hopefully next week it will be better.
$13,400 in Triple Stumper clues and a win from the fourth podium. That is the third or fourth time I could do that this season out of 25 games.
It’s actually Trebek who won.
Thank you, VJ for sticking to my idea.
well, Richard, that is the way it was shown. They can do this with 2 players right next to each other, but they won’t be able to do it with the first and third positions
If it’s in the first and third positions, then how will you post the picture?
Probably the same way I always do.
Man, this night had it’s ups and downs.
This entire week has had it’s ups and downs.
Because of the national health emergency.