Heidi’s revenge
As I understand it, a blog is where you blow off steam about stuff that you probably won’t be mad about for a whole month….things that if written as a column would make you appear to have anger issues that need to be treated.
Sort of like the stuff you read in newspapers about developers.
Well, I’m that mad now and nobody will much care. Friday, Sept. 4, will go down as the most disappointing football moment of the year for me, no matter what else happens. The disappointment was that when I turned the TV on to watch Jeopardy, I was the Tampa Bay Bucs warming up in preparation to losing to the Texans.
It was sort of like when the network left a football game to show the movie Heidi, except in reverse…and much worse. At least you got to see some of the football game. There was no Jeopardy at all.
Normally, I would simply take that as a sign that God wanted me to go to a bar…but this case was special. My wife and I had built our week around Jeopardy.
It was the Tournament of Champions for the last two weeks, with previous Jeopardy winners coming back to compete against each other for what would amount to pocket change in the NFL. That ought to show us where brains rate, but if it doesn’t, what WFTV did, does.
The station quite simply pulled the plug on the Super Bowl of quiz show brains. This is real smart stuff…not fourth grade stuff, not Regis Philbin playing trivial pursuit with morons. We’re talking history, physics, world events, potent potables….ATOMIC WEIGHTS! How could you not love people who know that corundum is harder than obsidian and that the information came from the Moh’s Scale?
I watched Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday as it came down to the final three, including the Fabulous Larissa, a graduate student with apparently no ego, lots of personality and a smile that would make you send her money if she loses. Her opponents include a regular kind of guy in the middle seat and a brainy sort who looks like he might be a little ate up with himself.
On Thursday, she took a beating right up until the end and then in a gutsy move bet it all and moved ino the lead by knowing that Chester Arthur was the last president to serve without a vice president. (I wonder how many college graduates on the Tampa Bay Bucs would have known that?)
So, it was all set up for the showdown…the champs play a two-game competition, carrying over the money from the day before. I rushed home from school, stopping only briefly at the Tiki Bar Commiseration in the Form of Cold Beverages Hour to go over the challenges of the school week.
We ate early, put the cat out. Poured a glass of wine for Laurie, screwed the cap off 12 more ounces of liquid commiseration for me and turned the TV on to watch the final, final. If we had owned Larissa jerseys we would have worn them. If I had a Larissa flag I would have hooked it to my car window and would have shaken my Larissa shaker at people going down the road.
At the Tiki, I might have taunted some of the tank top and beer belly crowd by saying Larissa would kick Tim Tebow’s rear end if they went head to head on Eighteenth Century French Literature. If there was a Heisman Trophy for brains, she would have four of them.
Neener neener.
We were wired and inspired, ready for some BRAIN BALL….
And we got the Bucs and the Texans. We did synonyms and antonyms this week in school. NFL would be an antonym for Jeopardy.
Worst of all, there was no explanation offered. No little headline running across the bottom of the screen saying Jeopardy will be seen later, Jeopardy was seen earlier, there will be no Jeopardy because we didn’t know the answers…nothing. Just an airhead in a necktie talking to another airhead in another necktie about what they expected to happen in the game (there would be some running and when that happened there would be some attempted tackling….like we didn’t already know that).
It was stupid and insulting. So there. Now I am over it.
Hey, I love football…on Saturdays and Sundays….or on Friday nights if you have a local high school to support. But I spend all week trying to tell a room full of fourth-graders that football isn’t everything, that brains really, really do matter in society. In fact, I tell them, brains matter more than football or basketball. I say it over and over again. I even had some of them interested enough in Jeopardy this week to go home and turn it on and try to guess answers.
They were actually starting to admire smart people. All three Jeopardy contestants were the kind of people we are desperately trying to turn our fourth-graders into. Role models for reading, understanding, comprehending. Most of the people on the average NFL game are more or less representative of what we warn our fourth-graders that they might turn into if they don’t study and get an education. Spitting, knuckledragging, monosyllabic boorish brutes who tend to get arrested a lot, mess with drugs, cheat on spouses, mistreat dogs and occasionally shoot themselves in the leg.
And then the kids turn the TV on Friday night and find out what really matters.
Oh well. Try to turn those negatives into positives. Maybe we could make a Final Jeopardy question out of this. The answer would be “Being Smart if More Important Than Playing Football”…the proper question would be “What Is a Lie Our Teacher Told Us?”
Loading ...
