Wow - what a great game to watch! I had watched all three of these contestants on crackle beforehand, so it was fun to see how the players had changed since their initial appearances!
Some incredible gets by the players: casus belli, Sharm el-Sheikh, Esther (given Vashti & Ahasuerus). I negged on Chuck's DD with "Exodus", thinking the "great wind" was parting the Red Sea, but in hindsight I don't think there were any tempests involved in that.
Although I knew that there was a Jeopardy! bit in "Groundhog Day", I guess I never looked into the specifics of what game it was, who the contestants were, etc., so I was surprised/delighted by Jim's interview! Now that I know who he is, I'll look for him the next time I watch the movie (missed it this year).
FJ! was an instaget* -- so much so that I nearly got it wrong! I started writing
Louisa Catherine Adams before AT even finished reading the clue. Luckily, I had it down so quickly that I still had time to go back and reread the clue carefully enough to realize that they didn't want "the only foreign-born First Lady"; they wanted "this man", her better known husband. (I think subconsciously I may have been assuming that they would ask for the more difficult of the two given that it's a champion-level tournament.) (At home, I just scribbled JQA, but I wonder if they would have taken that in the studio?)
* It's funny sometimes how you know what you know. I have the McCullough biography as a book-on-CD in my car. It has been in my car for, oh, the last 6 or 7 years at least. Every time I have a road trip on the horizon, I think to myself "I should really swing by the library and pick up something to listen to on the drive". But what with packing, watching Jeopardy!, etc. it nearly always slips my mind until I'm actually
on the road (DOH!), at which point my listening options are limited to random radio stations or the Adams biography. So, yeah, I've listened to it
way too many times
.
But I really do need to put something else in my car. In fact, I think I'll get up and do it right now. Just as soon as I'm done watching Jeopardy!