I really liked “Mr. Rodgers”. I tuned in to be amused, but was surprised by how well he kept the game moving.
But my hope is that when someone takes over the job permanently, we’ll all say “Wow, SO much better than any of the temporary guest hosts!”
Yeah, so far Ken’s the best, IMO.
No offense, but wtf is a “sackbut”, is my first reaction. If that’s your idea of “easy”, then what on earth do you consider “obscure”?
(I did NOT mean to withdraw the last post, just edit it and kept hitting the wrong link!) 
I dunno. Give me some choices.
Amazing how fast we can go from fighting ignorance to embracing it.
If anyone is embracing ignorance here, it’s you:
When a category comes up that I know nothing about, I pay attention and try to learn something I didn’t know. Apparently you can’t be bothered.
If you gain utility from it, it’s time well wasted. For me, it does less than nothing, and I in no way feel deprived.
Agreed.
You’d better hope there’s not another war. I’ve seen the documentaries. Foreign and domestic personnel are differentiated by the asking of sports related questions. Such questions as: Who had the most homeruns in the 1998 Superbowl?
Do you know what a poronkusema is?
Funny how you wear your own ignorance like a badge of honor while ridiculing others for the same thing.
Both sports trivia and musical instrument trivia are equally meaningless outside of trivia games. Knowing more about one or the other doesn’t make you a better or more intelligent person.
Well isn’t this the motto of The Straight Dope:
“Straight Dope Message Board Your direct line to thousands of the smartest, hippest people on the planet, plus a few total dipsticks.”
I’d actually argue that sports knowledge is more likely to be useful than knowing the name of the precursor to the trombone. The main reason I would remember the latter is just the funny* name. If it wasn’t for that, I’d just call it “the early version of the trombone”—and I was a music major in college. The sports info is more likely to be more modern, and to be things that I might want to know to be able to talk to people. People into sports trivia seem to be more common than those into Renaissance music trivia.
*In a Beavis and Butthead sense, of course.
How were Elrond and Galadriel related?
How do you pronounce “piobaireachd”?
So you are being willfully ignorant? I see.
If you honestly don’t know people who enjoy both sports and jeopardy, then you might want to get out more (when it’s safe to do so). From what you’ve said so far in this thread, it seems like you lead a very narrow life.
And why do you suppose that they have so many sports related categories on Jeopardy?
My first reaction, too. Plus, it has a funny name. (heh heh he said “butt”. cool, Bevis.)
Trivia is a funny thing. There is such a thing as too obscure. Some great examples have been given. There’s the other kind of trivia, like “how many square miles does NYC contain”, or “what is the second deepest shipwreck ever discovered”, or “what is the percentage of oxygen needed in atmospheric air below which combustion is not supported”? While I wouldn’t be surprised someone knows this, you can easily stump even TOC players with these minutae-level trivia.
You’ll note that many Jeopardy! answers are thinly disgused “easy” questions, some even provide the answer or at least a serious hint, within the wording of the answer.
And how many ways the same question can be elicited by many forms of the same answer, in different categories. For example, category, Babylonian Kings. The answer, “a sculpture from King So-and So is on display in this Parisian museum.” You can be pretty sure of the correct response without even knowing Babylonian kings even existed.
And pop music. When they have modern bands, I am as lost as terentii in sports categories. But I don’t blame society.
The categories that bother more than most are the ones about brand logos, brand names, or advertising slogans. Too many of them and I start to “conspiracy theory” that these categories are thinly-veiled commercials, or “training” for people to pay more attention to commercials.
I do now!
I didn’t realize there was a need for a word for that.
Hah! That’s a trick question. The 1998 Superbowl ended in a 0-0 tie when a last second three point attempt by Lance Armstrong was disallowed because of leg before wicket…
Ouch!
Remember that one game, where there was a sports cartegory, and no one rang in on any of the five? Just silence.