Final Jeopardy: Literary Narrators (5-9-25)
The Final Jeopardy question (5/9/2025) in the category “Literary Narrators” was:
This work has 10 main narrators, 7 of them women, including Fiammetta & Lauretta
2x champ Dan Moren, a writer & podcaster from Somerville, MA, has now won $33,500. In Game 3, he competes against: Kara Peruccio, a university professor from Bangor, ME; and Zach Dickstein, a café manager from Chicago, IL.
Round 1 Categories: Our Neanderthal Relatives – Signs & Symbols – There’s a Bird in Your Response – Are We Having Fun Yet? – Pick a Nick – Baskets
Dan found the Jeopardy! round Daily Double in “Signs & Symbols” under the $800 on the 4th pick of the round. He was the only one on the board with $600. Dan bet $1,000 and he was RIGHT.
From Latin for “apple with many seeds”, this fruit is a symbol of fertility in many cultures show
Dan finished in the lead with $6,800. Kara was second with $2,200 and Zach was last with $2,000. All clues were shown.
Round 2 Categories: Queen Story Hour – Americana – Words About Words – Islands – The 1913 Armory Show – Property Watching
Dan found the first Daily Double in “Words About Words” under the $1,600 clue on the 3rd pick of the round. He was in the lead with $8,400, $6,200 more than Kara in second place. Dan bet $2,000 and came up with redacted. That was WRONG.
Watergate helped popularize this term for a bad word; it plus “deleted” replaced curse words in White House transcripts show
Dan found the last Daily Double in “The 1913 Armory Show” under the $1,200 clue with 5 clues left after it. He was in second place with $7,200, $2,600 less than Kara’s lead. Dan bet $1,500 and guessed Renoir. That was WRONG.
10 years after his death, this well-traveled painter from Paris was at the Armory Show in spirit with his “Faa Iheihe” show
Kara finished in the lead with a runaway $12,200. Dan was second with $5,700. Zach was last with negative $1,200, so he was out of the game. All clues were shown.
Only ONE of the contestants got Final Jeopardy! right.
WHAT IS THE DECAMERON?
The bubonic plague swept through mid-14th century Florence, killing more than half the population. In the wake of the disaster, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) wrote “The Decameron”, an anthology of tales told by a group of 7 women and 3 men who self-isolated in a countryside villa.
Boccaccio is said to have drawn stories from many sources, ranging from raunchy to tragedy to comedy. “The Decameron” itself became a source for future authors, including Geoffrey Chaucer and his “Canterbury Tales”. Film adaptations include “Decameron Nights” from 1924 and 1953. Netflix has an 8-episode mini-series that debuted in 2024.
Dan went with Dante’s “Inferno”. He lost $5,600 and finished with $100.
Kara got it right. She bet $200 and won the game with $12,400. Kara Peruccio is the new Jeopardy! champ.
A triple stumper from each round:
PICK A NICK ($1000) This Nick was the alter ego of Ernest Hemingway; he’s featured in the collection “In Our Time”
ISLANDS ($2000) The Greater these islands include Java & Borneo
2 years ago: Only ONE of the players got this FJ in “NEW WORDS IN THE 18th CENTURY”
Describing these, Captain Cook wrote, “The manner in which” they’re done “must certainly cause intollerable pain” show
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What a god-awful 2nd round. Zach disappeared after round one, and Dan took a bigger dive than any boxer or wrestler I’ve ever seen. Maybe he was fatigued from sitting through or playing five games in a taping day.
All 3 DDs were easy, IMO. Final very gettable but I blanked. Iliad, Inferno, and Paradise Lost made brief appearances in my mind. They left way too many easy-peasy clues unclaimed: prehistoric person; what Neanderthals couldn’t do; Dutch queen; Washington first in; word used in place of another; easily deceived or duped. (I may still have the newspaper with the special section of the transcripts of Nixon’s secret White House tapes with many examples of the word that preceded “deleted”.)
Nice rally by Kara, but still a lousy game IMO. As they say in tennis, Dan had that game on his racquet.
Don’t forget the Louisiana pirate, Howard. I’ll bet my Twix ice cream bar you got that one.
Well yes VJ, the Louisiana pirate was rather obvious, but yet one of those contestants even said Blackbeard.
We’ve got some bad news to deliver here. Zach becomes the latest Jeopardy contestant to receive a dismissal.
Fun Fact: Kara mentioned that her sister competed on Jeopardy back in 2013 and didn’t win. Today, Kara made her sister proud and now she is a Jeopardy champion. It looked Dan was going to run away with this one but he missed too many clues and Kara went on a tear and made a big move at the end of the round to secure a runaway.
What a wild game! The scores after the 12th clue of Double Jeopardy were Dan $10,000 Kara $200 and Zach $800.
After the 26th clue, she had $11,400, double the $5,700 Dan had left after some bad luck. A $2,000 clue and three $400 clues were left. The $2,000 clue and one $400 clue were runaways. Kara got the other $800 and finished with a runaway!
I was 3/3 on DD (helped that I am a Francophile, and visited Tahiti a short 23 years ago), but missed FJ, as I have never read The Decameron.
Good on Kara for her win. She has that “academic cute” look. I don’t recall whether they mentioned what is her area of study, but I hope she can string a few together!