Earworm! 
I laughed
This was standard for Alex Trebek before covid.
The Jeopardy! podcasters joked in one episode last year that if they were to bring it back Ken would have to learn to walk backwards and be careful not to fall off the raised part of the stage the podiums, players and Ken are on. I guess he was able to master that.
I guess that’s what I was getting at. We’ve moved on. Maybe they should put the lecterns back together. We’ll never have pandemics again. 
One of the contestants today told a story of riding the Ferris wheel in Vienna and quoting Orson Welles’s speech from The Third Man. Ken said he did the same thing, and it might just be the two of them.
I’m here to say there’s at least three of us.
Well, damn, I just found an e-mail in my spam folder inviting me to an audition. I already missed it.
And he mentioned that goddamn zither music,
I don’t think you should be too upset. If you hate zither music that much, there’s just that one movie you have to avoid.
That’s…a good point!
In Today’s (Monday, Jan 6 - second chance week 2 ep 1), there was big commotion when Drew Goins (J! Archive - Drew Goins) correctly answered a Taylor Swift question.
Some googling shows that 1) DG is a journalist who was written about TS and 2) Did not answer a TS question in his first game.
Was that mentioned in today’s interview? Not sure how else the audience would know to be exited.
Brian
Yes, the interview segment covered how his brother had prepared a practice board that was entirely about Taylor Swift the night before the taping of his original appearance, which he kind of rushed through to get to other last-minute studying he wanted to get in.
Good to see Ben Chan back in the JIT
Unfortunately he did not win
It was also interesting to see the minimum daily double bet ($5)
Brian
I can’t believe he thought Garfield was a Democrat and/or forgot about Grover the Good.
I was glad to see Ray Lalonde win yesterday.
It is a bit annoying that they’re doing this long series of tournaments. Previously, for example, the Tournament of Champions was a two-week event, with a two-day final competition round. Now the final competition was a best-of-seven series, preceded by nine quarter- and semi-final games. And now of course the invitational tournament, with the second chance and champions wildcard competitions earlier this year.
I may have had the same complaint last year.
I was quite proud of myself for correctly answering the final question.
And I was shocked that Ben didn’t know the answer.
You know I get a little annoyed at these posts. There’s a lot of things people don’t know that “everyone knows”. Or maybe I should post every time I get a triple stumper?
Ahem, given that little rant…
I know this isn’t really the thread for it, but I’ve started watching Celebrity Jeopardy! and it turns out the SNL parodies are not that far off. My god but they are dumb. Not for not knowing something “everyone knows”, but for not understanding the clue. And what passes for a “celebrity” these days saddens me. Podcasters? Srsly?
Of course everyone has different sets of knowledge crammed into their brains. Contestants can do quite well without knowing much about history, and even though I don’t have a clue about most of the pop culture stuff, I usually get about two thirds of the Jeopardy questions. (At home. With the aid of my pause button 
)
But we were talking about Ben Chan. I expected him to nail that question.
Garfield was president almost 150 years ago (and is remembered today almost solely for having been shot). Is which party he belonged to really something that should be common knowledge?
Garfield actually wasn’t a bad guess. He was elected president in 1880, right before Cleveland, who was first elected in 1884. The Republican party dominated politics for about a decade after the Civil War ended, but the Democrats won back the House in 1874 and the Senate in 1878. Garfield’s election was the first by popular vote, and his victory in the final count was just 1,898 votes ahead of the Democrat, Winfield Hancock.
For some obscure reason, I seemed to remember that Cleveland was a Democrat, so that was my (correct) guess.
What’s funny is I thought I had absolutely no idea on FJ, Presidential facts are not in my wheelhouse, and yet I randomly guessed Wilson & Garfield! Maybe I wasn’t as far off as I thought.