Heh, heh, yeah. Just once I’d love for someone to say “And I’m married to my lazy skirt-chasing husband Patrick”.
Oh, you hush, you defector you.
I saw a clip from DoND where the contestant said she was married to her husband for like 47 years, with only two of them being happy years. The guy looked like he’d been pole-axed.
Heh.
The key for any charities wanting to get in on this is to get ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic to play for them. That guy pwns on game shows.
The one who made me laugh out loud was Tammy Wynette on Wheel of Fortune, staring in drooling bewilderment at:
CO_NTRY M_S_C R_D_O ST_T_ON
My wife and I used to complain about this a lot… until she was a contestant. Yes, yes, my wife “Went on Down” (hehe) to be a contestant on The Price is Right. She was the 2nd to last person called, so she only got two bids. The first bid was all over the map… but being first called, she was first to go and didn’t have a chance.
The 2ND bid, she found herself in the enviable position of going last. The prize was a buttload of coffee table books… First person bid $700 2nd person bid something really outlandish like $1200 or something… 3rd lady bid $650… my wife decides $651 is right out since she gives herself the smallest window that way… she’s either going to bid $1 or $701… she decides on $701 and the price was $656. DOH!
To the logical do not always go the spoils.
We got a nice portable Bar though as a parting gift.
Liberal - Aw, heck, it’s nothing I haven’t been preaching for at least several months now. In fact, here’s another possibility: Run it like the Tour De France. Everyone starts at the same time and their time for each leg is recorded; fastest overall time wins. Just one difference…don’t reveal until the very end. I mean, think of all the problems this solves. No getting up and going at incredibly odd hours. Easy to avoid shafting anyone with hours of operation. Big incentive to go for the Fast Forward; potential disaster for those that fail to get it (the tension! the drama!). No more impromptu alliances or sandbagging (at least without getting an earful from the teammate); you never know if that “straggler” is actually breathing right down your neck. Best of all, everyone goes hard from start to finish…oh, BTW, did I also mention no cruddy eliminations?..because it could be anyone, and no one will know for sure until it’s all over. Take out the cheesy forced tension, a lot of stupid luck, and the overall phoniness of it all and make it what it should be, a race.
And I just came up with that off the top of my head. The thing is, if the producers of The Amazing Race want to make it fairer yet still exciting, they can, and all they need to do is end that ancient inflexible one-at-a-time format that really only made sense for Survivor to begin with. Sigh.
Phase 42 - Oh, geez. Do you know how that ended? Did she at least retain enough sense to buy a U?
“…and I have three beautiful children, and two ugly ones.”
He lost on Jeopardy. Baby. Oooh, ooh ooh ooh.
I remember Wheel of Fortune from when they did that. I think the deal was that you had to spend whatever money you had on the merchandise. So if you had $4,000 left, and the only thing that cost no more than that was the $3,700 ceramic greyhound, you had to buy it. (And then you could take whatever amount was left in the form of a gift certificate.)
My Wheel of Fortune peeve:
More than half the time is spent showing the wheel spin or the contestants. How the hell am I supposed to concentrate on solving the puzzle when I can’t see it and the contestants have the edge on me? I doubt they’re spending time watching the wheel spin or looking at the contestant next to them. Gimmee a split screen!
Anyone who bids one dollar over or under another contestant’s bid on Price Is Right (the part that decides who goes on stage) should be taken outside and shot. BTW, does anyone know if CBS is going to pull the plug on Drew Carey? Every time I’ve seem him he gives off this deer in headlights look.
Maybe for bidding a dollar under, because that’s an almost guaranteed way to lose, but what’s wrong with bidding a dollar over? It’s often an excellent strategy that works.
I’m afraid not. She didn’t even make a guess. I couldn’t help wondering if she was drunk, to tell you the truth. Time ran out and the next player solved it (I don’t remember who the other players were - this was a good 13-15 years ago). I think somebody just made a bad decision in persuading her to do the show. She didn’t do well at all. That particular puzzle came in the last round (it may have been the final puzzle of the show). Tammy was so far behind the other contestants at that point that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they were handing her a “gimme” with that puzzle. The other contestants certainly could have solved it two turns earlier, given how well they had been doing, which makes me suspect that they were trying to let her have it. Sajak looked distinctly uncomfortable when it got to the point it did and she still had no clue.
I guess Wynette’s ma ‘n pa didn’t hold with no book-l’arnin’.
Maybe, but it also often comes across as supremely dickish, especially when you have a contestant who is obviously not bothering to come up with his own bid, just automatically overbidding the last player by a buck.
I told my sister once a long time ago, that if they have no upper limit on what you are allowed to bid, I’d fix a contestant like that. After about the third “dollar over” bid, I’d start bidding outrageous amounts like $10,000. After all, with Dipstick one-upping me each bid, I’m not going to win anyway, unless my bid is exactly right. This way, I force the jerk to come up with his own bid, or we both go home with a year’s supply of Rice-a-Roni.
In ‘The Price Is Right’ there’s four bidders so a dollar-over bidder at least has to put a modicum of thought into which other bid is closest to the retail price without going over. Indeed, making an outrageous bid of $10,000 would make that bidder’s job easier since he has one fewer bid to factor in.
Also, since the person bidding first rotates, a player realisticaly can do the $1-over only every fourth round, since bidding $1 over in the third position is presumably going to prompt the guy biding last to go $2 over.
The patter saves money. More talk less money given out.
I do not like it when Jeopardy has celebrities. The questions are easy and the celebrities and the political pundits show off their lack of knowledge. It is the same every year. Comedians seen to do well. There must be a lesson that can be derived.
I was mainly referring to the auto-bid guy–no matter what the previous bidder says, he goes one more. No considering of price, just previous bid + $1. I’ve seen this over and over and that’s the person I’d be messing with. The conversation with my sister took place after we watched one contestant continually frustrate the woman bidding just before him by topping her bid EACH AND EVERY TIME. She finally hit him!
Still, you’d like to see the other three gang up and bid $1, $2, and $3 just to get rid of one like that–yeah, he’d get to go up on stage, all right, but there’s no guarantee he’d win anything else, and the rest of the bidders would have a fair chance to win later on! 
By bidding an outrageously high price, you wouldn’t be messing with that guy. You would just be knocking yourself out of the competition and giving him an increased chance of winning. That’s the point 42fish was making.
42fish addressed this point too. The bidding order rotates, so no contestant could keep having the edge over the same person.
I don’t think purposefully losing with such a minimum chances of getting to the stage would be such a good strategy. Bidding a dollar over the highest bidder also isn’t always the best strategy. If you’re the last bidder, it would only make sense to bid a dollar over the bidder you think got closest to the price without going over. There’s nothing dickish about using the best strategy to win.
They rotate the bidding order? I thought that the player who had been on contestants’ row the longest got to bid last. That would seem to be fair, since there is an advantage, especially when everyone else underestimated the value of the prize.
The player who just got to contestant’s row bids first, then bidding passes to the viewer’s right.
Bidding order could stay the same a few times in a row (it often does) or the whole show. If you never win because the guy next to you keeps one-upping your bid and he never wins, the pair of you will bid 2nd/3rd or 3rd/4th all show.
I don’t know about that. I get a lot of amusement out of Sean Connery’s appearances.