I wonder why they don’t have some sort of device they can type their answer into. That would take care of the handwriting/spelling issues.
That’s a really good idea.
As K364 said, judging controversies happen. A perception of unfairness hangs around them.
And Ken revealed himself to be a Nintendo fan, when he asked if Luigi had possibly met his WaLuigi.
My wife and I stared blankly at each other and I actually ran the video back and turned on the captions to see what that word was. Care to explain for non-Nintendo fans?
In the Nintendo universe going back to Donkey Kong in the early '80s, there are multiple recurring characters -the most famous of which is Mario, who was later given a brother Luigi. Mario wears a cap with an ‘M’ on it.
In some later game – probably Mario Kart, a racing game – “evil twins” were introduced. Mario’s evil twin wears a cap with an upside down ‘M’…ie, a ‘W’. So his name is: Wario. An upside down L isn’t a letter, but the powers that be at Nintendo called the evil version of Luigi …Waluigi. Sure, why not.
Per Wikipedia, Wario first appeared in the Game Boy game Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, and his name is a portmanteau of of Mario’s name and the Japanese word warui, meaning “bad.” There is no source for the latter assertion but in that context the name Waluigi makes sense.
To be clear, L and R in Japanese are the same sound. Hence Waluigi is a portmanteau of Warui + Luigi.
And Waluigi was invented to be Wario’s partner Mario Tennis.
So it’s some pretty clever wordplay….in Japanese.
Martha’s win really shocked her. She had been on the original daytime show with Art Fleming (1972?), winning $40 and a set of encyclopedias. This time she won with over$30,000. Good for her; I hope she can make a run of wins.
Anybody not get FJ? I thought it was easy, but my husband didn’t get it and neither did two of the players.
Ooh ooh, I didn’t! I stupidly chose Charles Lindbergh even though by 1951 nobody gave a shit about him anymore.
EZPZ for me, Mrs. Cretin was stumped. Go figure.
Somewhat embarrassingly, I guessed Thomas Edison. Turns out he died in 1931, so if he’d been walking around in 1951, I wouldn’t have blamed the paparazzi for taking a few pictures!
I got it pretty easily. The mention of New Jersey was intended to help, but I think I had it before I made the connection to Princeton.
I remember the first time I saw that picture thinking it was a fake. I had never heard about the paparazzi.
But IMHO, the most famous picture of him is Philippe Halsman’s. He took it in 1947 and it was used on a postage stamp in his 1966. I happen to own a signed (by Halsman), numbered print of it.
I figured out that it was Einstein but if they had a list of pictures I don’t think I’d pick the right one.
I hadn’t heard that paparazzi were what made Einstein adopt that expression, either.
As soon as I read the question I had a mental picture of that photo; I think I first saw it as a prop in the Barbra Streisand movie On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.
Last night, the champion twice (!) answered the category “one named rock stars” with two-named rock stars. Once, sure, but twice?
And in final jeopardy, the clue was:
These 2 rivers share the names of countries, end with the same 4 letters & both join up with the Paraná River.
Not one of the three had the names end with the same four letters! (I had two that had the same letters, just too bad that neither was a river, and one wasn’t even a country. Oh my!)
For whatever reason, I nailed this answer immediately, even though I have never heard of the Paraná River, and didn’t know that those two countries also shared names with rivers.
I thus was surprised that none of the contestants got the correct answer.
I suppose the best way to approach that clue would be to forget about the river aspect, and try to think of two countries whose names both end with the same four letters. If you can get past all the various -stan countries (this is where “Paraná River” helps–it sounds Spanish, and thus not likely to be in Asia), then Paraguay and Uruguay are the most obvious possibilities.
I didn’t get it either, because I didn’t think fast enough, but that’s the approach that would have worked.
And this is exactly where I started. I thought it had to be in South America, and then the two countries followed quite naturally.