I was watching tonight’s (June 14) Jeopardy, and I think Final Jeopardy may have been incorrect.
I’m not sure if this was a rerun or not, but the final category was “Fiction”. I’m about to reveal answer and question, so if you don’t want tonight’s Final Jeopardy spoiled for you, stop reading now.
The answer was (I’m going from memory here, so I’m probably paraphrasing) “This 1953 novel includes the following recipe, 'Three measures of Gordon’s, one of Vodka, shake it until cold.”
The answer, of course is Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, the first James Bond novel. The trouble is that the recipe is incorrect, or at least incomplete. The recipe, as written by Fleming is as follows:
I could see myself over-thinking things, and the small but significant differences in those two versions of the recipe causing me to think, “Oh, it can’t be Casino Royale, it must be something else that coincidentally uses a similar recipe.”
Am I being too picky, or is Jeopardy just plain wrong here?
My guess, between the choices you laid out, is that you’re being a little picky. Like you said, the recipe is from the book, just incomplete. I do think they should have been a little more diligent though.
I watched it (and got the answer, though I haven’t read the book). As I recall, the clue said something along the lines of This novel first gave a recipe as three parts gin, one part vermouth. I.e., it wasn’t in quotation marks, so didn’t need to be verbatim.
At last I don’t think it was in quotes. My wife says she specifically remembers that it was NOT in quotes, so I think it’s fine in that case.
Tomorrow, one should be able to look here and find today’s questions.
Well, maybe I am being picky, and maybe not being in quotes excuses different phrasing, but I think leaving out the Kina Lillet entirely is rather glaring. Surely leaving out an entire ingredient means it’s no longer the same recipe?
If I leave the mushroom out of my mushroom omelette, then I haven’t got a mushroom omelette, have I?
I’m not sure that the missing ingredient from the Final Jeopardy clue is as important as the mushroom in the mushroom omelet. (Then again, I’m not a consumer of alcoholic beverages, so my opinion may not count for much).
And I had no idea until the first answer which hinted at Bond appeared, at which point I thought “Duh!”
So I vote, you are being picky. Especially since the information which the contestants needed to come up with was the name of the novel, not the name of the drink. (or the ingredients of the drink–had the question/answer been reversed, then it would be cruel but reasonable to demand that the Kina Lillet be included).
I think the clue was fair; I got it right away and I’m not very bright. The anchor of the clue isn’t all the specifics, it’s that it gives you enough to know the drink is a shaken martini. So you know it’s a martini, and that the book was written in 1953; what famous shaken-martini-drinking character would have first appeared around that time? James Bond is probably the most famous martini drinking character ever. It’s a fair clue; the martini and year of publication is enough to lead you to Bond, and then you just have to know Casino Royale was the first Bond book.
According to J-Archive, the clue did not feature any quotation marks, so it is not a direct quotation, nor was it implied to be one. Since most people (including myself) are more familiar with the movie Bond to the book Bond, the clue as used is meant to infer the famous movie-Bond quotation “Vodka martini- shaken, not stirred.” So, in my opinion, it’s not as egregious as, say, “This cartoon character introduced in 1949 has the middle name of Ethelbert,” which had a reference to something that didn’t appear in any cartoons he starred in, but in a '70s comic book story- even though I did get that one right, despite the fact I’m not a…super genius.
I didn’t know about the Jeopardy archive and a it turned out I was complaining about a question I thought incorrect but it turned out on careful reading, it wasn’t.
I guess this just a matter of interpretation, then. I don’t look at the ‘Answer’ part of a Jeopardy game as a ‘clue’. I think it’s an answer to the question.
Q: What is Casino Royale?
A: It is a “1953 novel (which) contains the famous recipe 3 measures of Gordon’s, 1 of vodka; shake it until it’s ice-cold”
Only it doesn’t. That’s not the recipe that’s in the book.
But if, as you say, it’s a ‘clue’ and not an answer, then fine. I guess it works. I mean, I knew the answer … er, question … they wanted, as did one of the contestants, so … fine I guess.
I don’t think this was a very appropriate clue. (And although I would like to think of the clues as answers–that is the show’s conceit, after all–too many of them just don’t work that way.) To me the problem is just what mobo85 (Doperus nonsupergiusii) identified to defend it: they altered the recipe to evoke the more familiar line from the movies. This has two problems. First, it makes the question much, much easier. By making it sound more like a shaken vodka martini, they allowed anyone with a passing knowledge of pop culture to make an educated guess that would turn out to be correct. That would be fine in a first-round Jeopardy clue, but the Final Jeopardy clue is supposed to be challenging and rely on real knowledge, not pop culture familiarity. Even worse, by changing the recipe they not only reward ignorance, they potentially punish knowledge. As thwartme pointed out, a contestant who actually knew the recipe from the novel might eliminate Casino Royale as a possible answer, since it is reasonable to expect that a clue in Final Jeopardy will be a precise as possible.
Speaking from the clue-writer’s POV – how the hell would you get the entire recipe on the teeny square available for the text? I vote for “gist version for reasons of brevity yet clarity.”
Simple,you replace “shake until it’s ice-cold” with “half a measure of Kina Lillet.” Perfectly clear, easily recognizable to anyone who knows the novel (or the recent movie) but at an appropriate level of difficulty, and it neither misleads nor lets a nitpicking contestant challenge it as inaccurate.