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Playing Games
Jan. 15th, 2021 04:33 pmHaven't watched any Ken Jennings guest hosting Jeopardy! this week. We did watch a COVID caper movie with Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, which was pretty good if you suspend enough disbelief. The other two in the room seemed less interested in it than we were:
Technology can also be a fun game. This morning, I had a phone-in hearing with about 10 other cases at the same hour, where you are asked to mute your phone until your specific case is called. One idiot on the call ::waves:: thought that turning off the external speaker would also mute the sound on his end (pro tip: it doesn't), but a bunch of other people missed their turns because they forgot to UNMUTE their phones when their cases were called. If this is gonna be the way we do things from now on, the next generation of telephonic technology is going to have to include a mute button that looks something like this:
But the real game reference was to something from, where else, my distant past.
----
Commenting on somebody's Facebook post, I made a stray reference to a game show, which took me down this rabbit hole:
The game turned out to be a 70s CBS show called Joker's Wild, the first to be hosted by Jack Barry after the much earlier quiz show scandal he was involved in (and semi-fictionalized in the 1994 film of that name). I stopped watching game shows by college days, but heard this story from my eventual roommate there, who was from Massachusetts.
He'd been friends earlier with a wag by the name of Kevin Smith. (Not the Silent Bob one.) Kevin was a few years older and was at UMass in 1976, when Jimmy Carter was fighting in the Democratic primaries. Sad to realize that George Wallace was still a viable Democratic party candidate back then.
Anyway: Massachusetts had one of the earlier primaries after New Hampshire back then; "Super Tuesday" was two elections away, so all eyes were on the Bay State. Pollsters were everywhere, including the UMass dorms. Kevin got a call from one of them. Rather than going with Jimmy or Mo or Scoop, he went with his heart and told the pollster he was supporting Jack Barry for the Democratic nomination.
If you remember the game, it involved pulling a slot machine-like lever that would bring up dollar amounts or Jokers or, in Wheel of Fortune BANKRUPT style, a devil that would cost you what you'd won. Kev thought this would be a more effective system of presidential governance than Gerald Ford's post-Nixon clumsiness. "Should I negotiate with the Kremlin? JOKER, JOKER, DEVIL, better not! Continue the wage-price freeze? JOKER, JOKER, JOKER! Dayum!"
After the past four years we've lived through, this makes perfect sense.
But it gets better. As with many college dorm setups of the era- Cornell's worked this way, too- room telephone numbers were consecutive with the rooms themselves. Kevin knew this- AND knew his phone was on the low end of the sequence. So he immediately ran down the hall and convinced all his friends to answer the pollster call they were about to (and did) receive by expressing their support for Jack Barry. They were only too happy to oblige.
Scoop Jackson won that primary. Jimmy came in fourth, behind even George Wallace. Modern totals do not recall the placing of Jack Barry, but somewhere in the Gallup archives, there's an anomaly nobody has ever been able to understand- until now.
Technology can also be a fun game. This morning, I had a phone-in hearing with about 10 other cases at the same hour, where you are asked to mute your phone until your specific case is called. One idiot on the call ::waves:: thought that turning off the external speaker would also mute the sound on his end (pro tip: it doesn't), but a bunch of other people missed their turns because they forgot to UNMUTE their phones when their cases were called. If this is gonna be the way we do things from now on, the next generation of telephonic technology is going to have to include a mute button that looks something like this:
But the real game reference was to something from, where else, my distant past.
----
Commenting on somebody's Facebook post, I made a stray reference to a game show, which took me down this rabbit hole:
The game turned out to be a 70s CBS show called Joker's Wild, the first to be hosted by Jack Barry after the much earlier quiz show scandal he was involved in (and semi-fictionalized in the 1994 film of that name). I stopped watching game shows by college days, but heard this story from my eventual roommate there, who was from Massachusetts.
He'd been friends earlier with a wag by the name of Kevin Smith. (Not the Silent Bob one.) Kevin was a few years older and was at UMass in 1976, when Jimmy Carter was fighting in the Democratic primaries. Sad to realize that George Wallace was still a viable Democratic party candidate back then.
Anyway: Massachusetts had one of the earlier primaries after New Hampshire back then; "Super Tuesday" was two elections away, so all eyes were on the Bay State. Pollsters were everywhere, including the UMass dorms. Kevin got a call from one of them. Rather than going with Jimmy or Mo or Scoop, he went with his heart and told the pollster he was supporting Jack Barry for the Democratic nomination.
If you remember the game, it involved pulling a slot machine-like lever that would bring up dollar amounts or Jokers or, in Wheel of Fortune BANKRUPT style, a devil that would cost you what you'd won. Kev thought this would be a more effective system of presidential governance than Gerald Ford's post-Nixon clumsiness. "Should I negotiate with the Kremlin? JOKER, JOKER, DEVIL, better not! Continue the wage-price freeze? JOKER, JOKER, JOKER! Dayum!"
After the past four years we've lived through, this makes perfect sense.
But it gets better. As with many college dorm setups of the era- Cornell's worked this way, too- room telephone numbers were consecutive with the rooms themselves. Kevin knew this- AND knew his phone was on the low end of the sequence. So he immediately ran down the hall and convinced all his friends to answer the pollster call they were about to (and did) receive by expressing their support for Jack Barry. They were only too happy to oblige.
Scoop Jackson won that primary. Jimmy came in fourth, behind even George Wallace. Modern totals do not recall the placing of Jack Barry, but somewhere in the Gallup archives, there's an anomaly nobody has ever been able to understand- until now.