Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

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Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

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J! Round
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

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DJ! Round
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by theFJguy »

FINAL JEOPARDY! CATEGORY
19th CENTURY HISTORY

FINAL JEOPARDY! CLUE
Wanting more French influence in the area he called Latin America, Napoleon III installed an emperor in this country

Alex Hookway: 6800-1948=4852
Usha Sankar: 1000-1000=0
Karen Farrell: 16200+1000=17200 (New Champ)

Correct response:
Spoiler
Mexico (Alex – French Guiana) (Usha – French Guyana)

Daily Doubles
Alex: 1600+1600
Alex: 4400+3000
Alex: 12200-3000

Coryats
Alex: 6800
Usha: 1000
Karen: 16200

Combined: 24,000

Scores at the end of the Jeopardy! Round
Alex: 3200
Usha: 2600
Karen: 7000
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by MarkBarrett »

At clue 16 (of 26 that would be played) Alex led 12200 to 9000 to 2600 when he found DD3. 11 clues later Karen had a runaway.

All of the negs by Karen's opponents made it comfortable for her to be on easy street for the FJ! round. With a sole solve Karen was going to win the game no matter what Alex did with DDs.

In high school I took a year of world history and there is no counting how many times it has paid dividends when watching J! over the years. The clue could have asked for Carlota and I'd be checking the box. Just the country? Zooooooom!

Alex and Usha each went way too far south for their guesses and we'll see how posts go here for it possibly being a poll choice.
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by TenPoundHammer »

3/5 in Cooking Verbs. Marinate for baste, flash-boil for parboil (NHOI)

Why didn't "boil" get BMSed to parboil, anyway?

Surprisingly got all but $2,000 in Art in the Vatican.

"Mestizo" joins the list of "Spanish words I've somehow never encountered before".

Champ got really sluggish in the Shakespeare category. Combine that with all the inexplicable negs (Al Green for Marvin Gaye?!), and you get one royally pissed-off Hammer who didn't get a chance at running Singer or Band in Question. (Unless the $400 was like, Cardi B or something...)

Absolutely zero guess on FJ!

Lach Trash: varnish/vanish, Yonge Street, rollbar, Toby Keith. Also got the Barbary ape DD.
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by hbomb1947 »

MarkBarrett wrote: Thu Dec 26, 2019 11:04 am Alex and Usha each went way too far south for their guesses and we'll see how posts go here for it possibly being a poll choice.
French Guiana isn't a country, so there's that.
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by DBear »

Yeah, Al Green for Marvin Gaye gave the Challenger a runaway. :(

Maximilian would never have taken the throne in the first place if the US wasn't... preoccupied...
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by mas3cf »

Coryat $34200 (39 R, 1W)
DD 3/3
FJ :(

LT: Yonge Street, varnish/vanish, parboil, roll bar, (Barbary macaque - same thing as Barbary ape), millibar, Euripides, lisp

Lots of LT available today. I said Haiti for FJ, because French. I thought it wasn't a horrible guess, other than the fact that Haiti had been independent of France for decades by the time NapIII came around.
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by True North »

Coryat: $28,600 (38R, 0W)
DD: 1/3
FJ: :(
LT: cobblestones, parboil, varnish/vanish, Yonge Street, roll bar, millibar

Watched this back-to-back with yesterday’s episode. SO GLAD Karen won! The other two were just too slow for an enjoyable viewing experience. Hoping we go back to getting 61 clues tomorrow.

Pretty bad DJ for me, I missed all six $2000 clues, which was the main reason (aside from the six leftover clues) for my first sub-30k Coryat since the ToC. Couldn’t make a connection for FJ, I stayed away from the obvious French Guiana negbait and went Haiti instead.
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by twelvefootboy »

Yay, I have a singleton (so far) with Cuba. Boo, this isn't a TD. I forwent (first lifetime use of this word, lol) French Guiana and even considered Canada but rejected Mexico for lack of any knowledge of French influence there.

The J! writer that defended millibar as an accessible clue by giving the units is shaking his/her head :). I could have broke it down, but not in real time. But since "bar" was in the clue, and I saw mm (I think), it was an easy coin flip.

I loved the early female-friendly categories if I can somehow express that without sexism and/or chauvinism. How are we going to learn these cooking terms and designers without more of these categories? That parboil clue rocked and even the saute one was educational.
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Volante
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by Volante »

So much for the theory that they were editing J! to get all 60 clues this season, or maybe things have been so bad not even...and I just now realized I can't name drop -any- Hollywood editor. (Directors pulling double duty don't count, including Roderick Jaynes) So I'm going to let that analogy crash and burn in slow motion and walk away...

Finished Stranger Things season 3 yesterday (...yes, I'm behind...), so one of the clues elicited a strong guffaw. Guess which! :lol:

Instafinal.
twelvefootboy wrote: Thu Dec 26, 2019 9:58 pm Yay, I have a singleton (so far) with Cuba. Boo, this isn't a TD. I forwent (first lifetime use of this word, lol) French Guiana and even considered Canada but rejected Mexico for lack of any knowledge of French influence there.
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by MarkBarrett »

Volante wrote: Thu Dec 26, 2019 10:38 pm ...

Finished Stranger Things season 3 yesterday (...yes, I'm behind...), so one of the clues elicited a strong guffaw. Guess which! :lol:

...
"Turn Around / Look at what you see"

Was a highlight of the season along with the choice of entrance music for Billy the lifeguard.
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by This Is Kirk! »

twelvefootboy wrote: Thu Dec 26, 2019 9:58 pm The J! writer that defended millibar as an accessible clue by giving the units is shaking his/her head :). I could have broke it down, but not in real time. But since "bar" was in the clue, and I saw mm (I think), it was an easy coin flip.
I expected a reversal on this. I mean a millibar is just a thousandth of a bar. Certainly atmospheric pressure would never be measured in bars, but "air pressure" is and that was the wording in the clue.

I got FJ based on Maximillian, but I wasn't 100% sure he was French.*

*Turns out he wasn't. He was Austrian.
Last edited by This Is Kirk! on Thu Dec 26, 2019 11:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by econgator »

This Is Kirk! wrote: Thu Dec 26, 2019 11:37 pm
twelvefootboy wrote: Thu Dec 26, 2019 9:58 pm The J! writer that defended millibar as an accessible clue by giving the units is shaking his/her head :). I could have broke it down, but not in real time. But since "bar" was in the clue, and I saw mm (I think), it was an easy coin flip.
I expected a reversal on this. I mean a millibar is just a thousandth of a bar. Certainly atmospheric pressure would never be measured in bars, but "air pressure" is and that was the wording in the clue.
Yeah, but when spotted "bar", I don't see how you can reasonably expect the correct response to be just "bar".
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by This Is Kirk! »

econgator wrote: Thu Dec 26, 2019 11:39 pm
This Is Kirk! wrote: Thu Dec 26, 2019 11:37 pm
twelvefootboy wrote: Thu Dec 26, 2019 9:58 pm The J! writer that defended millibar as an accessible clue by giving the units is shaking his/her head :). I could have broke it down, but not in real time. But since "bar" was in the clue, and I saw mm (I think), it was an easy coin flip.
I expected a reversal on this. I mean a millibar is just a thousandth of a bar. Certainly atmospheric pressure would never be measured in bars, but "air pressure" is and that was the wording in the clue.
Yeah, but when spotted "bar", I don't see how you can reasonably expect the correct response to be just "bar".
Well, that's sort of the show's problem. I don't think that should be disqualifying.
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by talkingaway »

I was surprised at the non-reversal for bar, too...and, like Usha, I said "bar". I'll admit - I actually thought it was spelled "barr", so I figured the extra "r" made it a non-"STUPID ANSWER"....but, frankly, the phrasing of that question was suspect, at best - particularly the words "based on". If they had said "approximately (equal to)", then there's no wiggle room - if it's millibar, a reasonable response is NOT bar when you stick the word "approximately" in there. But, actually, a dyne per square centimeter is a MICRObar, not a millibar...

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1 ... +millibars

So, really, they should have said "This unit of pressure is approximately 100 dynes per square centimeter" - but then again, that's esoteric.

I've now rejoined the "Can't get Limahl out of my head" club. Thanks, J!

Totally guessed but clammed on the "Bertha" clue. I guess the "big" was leading me there, but I didn't go with my gut.

Precalled "sautee" in cooking, and they did not disappoint. I also negged with "flash boil", but for some reason "blanch" was in my mind for that, too.

Etruscans. I wonder what they'd think if they knew that nearly 2-3 millennia later, a magic box would beam facts about them across the globe?

Once again, my knowledge of Canada is bolstered by my knowledge of hockey - whatever the Air Canada Centre is now is right next to Yonge street.

But, O Canada, I guessed you for FJ!. In the words of Alex: "Oops." The way the clue was phrased, I thought it was excluding "actual" Latin America, meaning it was a country in the Americas that Napoleon considered Latin America. That pretty much just left me with the US, Canada and maybe Greenland? Maybe a South Pacific country in a pinch? A quick wiki search shows that the French occupation of Mexico was apparently the origin of the phrase "Latin America".
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by mas3cf »

Scientist here, I'll chime in. The dyne/cm² clue was a classic example of a horribly worded J! science clue:

"This unit of measure of air pressure is based on dynes per square centimeter"

Well... a millibar is based on a bar, not on dynes/cm². A bar is defined as 100000 Pa, and a Pa is one N/m². So the millibar is actually "based on" N/m² when it comes down to it... or kg/m·s² if you want to drill down to fundamental SI units. A dyne is based on the same thing, it's just a pressure unit from the antiquated cgs system. Dyne and bar aren't based on each other any more than a kilometer and a mile are based on each other.

And one dyne/cm² is a microbar, not a millibar. So they're saying a millibar is defined as 1000 dyne/cm²? No, I don't think that's how it works.

I have a science Ph.D. from arguably the world's top department in my field plus 20 years hard time in the hard sciences, and would never have been able to connect dyne/cm² to mbar in 3 seconds if I had gone down the road of thinking about SI units. If you had asked me "how many dyne/cm² is one millibar?" I'd have replied "how am I supposed to know? Who uses dynes?"

Luckily for me, I've learned how J! science clues are written, and I went with millibar just because it's the most commonly used unit of pressure with "bar" in the name. But that doesn't excuse the poorly written clue.

A far better clue that would be perfectly pinned to millibar would be:

One atmosphere of pressure is equal to approximately 1013 of these.
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by seaborgium »

If that FJ had been a regular clue I probably would have gotten it right. But the very fact that it was FJ put me in "solving mode," and I completely overlooked the fact that I had full-on knowledge that would get me to the correct response. I figured "Oh, it must be 'Guiana' and that's how we ended up with French Guiana, right?" Wrong.
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by heppm01 »

Tally up another FJ! response of Haiti.

Tally up another expectation for a reversal on bar.

Did anyone else notice an odd timing issue when contestant Alex was responding to a clue? He rang in, the camera framed him and there was a lengthy pause as his timing lights started extinguishing before host Alex called his name and he gave his response. Was this just sloppy editing? I assume the player's time starts as soon as they ring in but if Alex is slow to call their name doesn't that unfairly eat into their time?
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Re: Thursday, December 26, 2019 Game Recap and Discussion (SPOILERS)

Post by talkingaway »

heppm01 wrote: Fri Dec 27, 2019 10:50 am Tally up another FJ! response of Haiti.

Tally up another expectation for a reversal on bar.

Did anyone else notice an odd timing issue when contestant Alex was responding to a clue? He rang in, the camera framed him and there was a lengthy pause as his timing lights started extinguishing before host Alex called his name and he gave his response. Was this just sloppy editing? I assume the player's time starts as soon as they ring in but if Alex is slow to call their name doesn't that unfairly eat into their time?
Yes, it was especially noticeable on one of contestant Alex's successful rebounds (in DJ!, I think) - I think he got down to 3 or 5 bars on his timer before Trebek called on him. I was actually a little worried that Trebek wasn't going to call on him in time.

Is there any off-stage indicator for the contestants to show who's "on the clock"? I'm pretty sure I read that there are off-stage scoreboards for the contestants to use when wagering for DDs, and if it's a TV monitor, they could easily have a graphical border light up around a contestant's name/score combo to indicate when they ring in, in addition to the cue of Trebek's voice. An actual shot-clock countdown (or a copy of the visual on the podium placed so contestants can see it) might be helpful, too, to let contestants know how much time is left...but maybe that's too distracting.
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