And go best two-out-of-three against Reagan, especially since he has nothing against vulgar displays of power.
I didn’t see the episode, but if the question was (in Jeopardy-speak, of course) “What’s the name of the major world created by the second best selling author in the English language?” I’d have gone with Middle-Earth, which I think it’s safe to say is far more famous. Was the category ‘Things beginning with D’, or something?
OK, well that one I would have totally gotten. The version earlier in the thread, mentioning “second best selling author”…I would have totally guessed Middle Earth.
Yeah…looking back at my cite for that, I find I skipped the part of the sentence that said “…at his peak.” Seems the ranking was for a couple of years, not lifetime.
My bad.
(So who’s the stupid one now, huh smart guy?)
Me, too. Because one of Dickens’s books is the best selling book in the English language, followed by Lord of the Rings.
And, while I have read the first four books of the series (and am still working on the fifth), I only knew the answer because of this board. I think I’ve posted about it, and how I thought the first book wasn’t as good and only continued because everyone raved about later books.
Reagan has done very poorly on game shows since 2004.
I didn’t know Discworld
that’s an obscure nerd thing; I would think anyone is “stupid” for not knowing it
Never heard of Discworld or the author.
It wasn’t Waterworld?
Didn’t he buy two entire print runs himself? (A large garage.)
I would have never guessed Discworld. Put me down as another that is more than a little surprised that Pratchett is the second best selling author. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has actually read one of his books. I see them in the stores, but they didn’t seem like something i would like so I never bothered.
I had the episode recorded and just watched it. The prompt was “This Terry Pratchett ‘world’ sits on elephants that stand on a great turtle.”
Pratchett is a good author, but nowhere near one of the best-selling. For those curious, you can see the list here. The best selling top 5 are Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, Barbara Cartland, Danielle Steele, and Harold Robbins.
Thanks for the correct text. It looks like Pratchett’s name was mentioned, which should have made it a little easier to guess.
I linked to the same list in post #13. Authors have to have at least 100 million books sold to be included; Pratchett is not on it. His own wikipedia article lists his total sales at about 85 million. By contrast, Agatha Christie has sales of 2-4 billion (with a b), Barbara Cartland 500 million to 1 billion. Much as I love him, Terry isn’t anywhere near that level.
Note that silenus has since conceded that Pratchett being the second-best selling author applied only to a couple of years, not to his career as a whole.
Oh I missed that. According to Wikipedia he was actually the best-selling author in the UK in the 1990s, pretty impressive.
I too would have answered Middle Earth to that question. To the actual question, I’d have had no idea, despite having read a lot of sci fi and a little fantasy (mostly due to thinking it was sci fi, with the exception of Ursula Leguin.) I could name a lot of fictitious worlds, but not that one.
People who are involved in anything can easily be mislead into thinking they’re universal. Back in the 80s my wife’s best friend, a smart cute woman in her late 20’s, happened to sit next to the guitarist from Nirvana, on a flight. It was the height of their fame and they’d had a series of top hits. He couldn’t believe that she hardly knew who they were and didn’t know any of their songs. But heck, she was a newsie, not a music fan. She could have named anyone in the administration then or for the past 8 years, and probably would have been equally surprised by any American who couldn’t name the press secretary.
When everyone we’re surrounded by knows something, we tend to overgeneralize and expect everyone to also, but it just ain’t so.
I can’t name a single current NFL qb. Sue me!
I’ve heard of Discworld but knew nothing about it. Now I know about the elephants, turtle, and author’s name, but that’s all. I don’t think that qualifies me as ignorant.
Of course, everybody knows who played electric piano on Get Back, right? I mean, everybody!
Excellent post, and you sum up everything I was trying to say.
I was on Jeopardy! (I played well, finished with $23,000… and came in last). I met eleven other contestants. And you know what? There wasn’t an idiot in the bunch! ALL of them were smart, personable, highly likable people.
ALL of them passed two difficult written tests. ALL of them went through multiple oral rounds of the game (as did Damien and every other “stupid” contestant you’ve ever seen). I have no doubt that, on any given show, almost any of us could have won and almost any of us could have looked like blithering idiots.
ALL of us have blind spots, depending on our age and our backgrounds. ALL of us have categories we just don’t know anything about. I don’t know much about country music, so if the final question had been about a Kenny Chesney tune that had hit #1 on the country charts, I’d have whiffed. And millions of Southerners would be smirking, “EVERYBODY knows that song!”
To many SDMB regulars, Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams are deities, and it’s unthinkable that most people have never read anything they’ve written. But ask those same regulars to name the heroine of Fifty Shades of Grey, they’d probably draw a blank (I know I would). And millions of housewives would snort, “That’s the best selling novel of the 21st century! What a moron!”
The game is up on Jeopardy Archive if anyone wants to have a look. The Pratchett clue is $2000 under “Land of Enchantment”.
Yipes. I haven’t even heard of two of them (Cartland and Robbins.)
That’s actually a really easy phrasing of the question/answer (“This Terry Pratchett “world” sits on elephants that stand on a great turtle”), but the dollar value suggests that it isn’t exactly common knowledge. Like I said before, sans the SDMB, I would not have known the answer/question to that.
I know of Barbara Cartland solely because I worked in a public library when I was in high school, and shelved a lot of her books. She wrote historical romance novels which seemed to very old-fashioned and incredibly popular with the reading public (based on how many the library owned, and how frequently I had to reshelve them). She published, according to wikipedia, a whopping 723 novels, and left behind 160 unpublished manuscripts at the time of her death! She published 23 novels in 1983 alone.
As I’ve mentioned in another thread, I started reading Pratchett largely because a woman I was dating at the time was a fan. Apart from that, I have my doubts as to whether I would have heard of him either.
Watched it last night. That guy was, indeed, a doofus. And he just had to go and get himself back in the hole just seconds before FJ.