I’m impressed! I managed to get to Scrabble club — and home — without finding out the outcome of tonight’s game!
Your third and final set of semifinalists are:
Paul Nelson
Keith Whitener
Jason Keller
J! round categories:
AFI LIFE ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS
COATS OF ARMS
LITERARY WHOSE WHAT?
GREEN VEGGIES
GADGETS
YOU’RE “PERFECT”
It was Keith and Paul with most of the buzzer luck early on and Keith got to play the opening Daily Double, under AFI LIFE ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS $600. Scores were:
Keith $2,600
Paul $1,600
Jason -$200
Keith went for the True Daily Double. His clue: In 2006 Mike Myers wore a kilt to honor this recipient. I knew it right away, and Keith seemed close, but his incorrect response put him back to $0!
By the time the opening break rolled around, everyone was out of the red! The scores were:
Paul $2,400
Keith $1,000
Jason $800
Coming out of the break, Jason picked up some buzzer mojo and picked up the pace a little bit. There were a quite a few Triple Stumpers in this round, the writers picked up the difficulty a bit! (I was glad to see that!)
At the end of 30 clues, the scores were:
Jason $4,800
Keith $2,200
Paul $800
DJ! round categories:
SCIENTISTS
DRUMMER FOR THE BAND
MONOLITHS
GOOD CAUSES
EARN YOUR LETTER
ANCIENT ANGKOR
Paul started out by choosing not to hunt Daily Doubles. Jason decided to hunt himself, though (whereas Keith enjoyed to dive in straight for the bottom of the category.) It was Jason who found the first Daily Double, under SCIENTISTS $1600.
Scores:
Jason $7,200
Keith $3,400
Paul $800
Jason bet $4,000. His clue: His “The Galvanic Circut investigated mathematically” received so much “resistance”, he resigned his post at Cologne. Took me a few seconds to get the tease-out metric here, but I did. Jason nodded and got it too; his score moved to $11,200 — and the hunt continued.
Keith did quite well on the DRUMMERS category (getting $2000 through $800 in reverse) to build up his score and retake the lead — but made the blunder of moving back into SCIENTISTS! It didn’t end up costing him, though — as by the time the game moved into MONOLITHS $1600, Keith got to play the final Daily Double!
Scores at this point:
Keith $14,600
Jason $12,000
Paul $800
His bet: $10,000. Whoa. His clue: 19th century down under explorer Ernest Giles called it “the remarkable pebble”. He got it immediately and with one fell swoop, his score went up to $24,600. Well done. Well done. Well done!
By the end of the Double Jeopardy, this game completely belonged to Keith. As the finishing touch, he saved the final DRUMMER question, the $400 one, to complete his runaway and the running of the category. Alex even expressed surprise that Keith didn’t finish it earlier!
Scores going into Final Jeopardy!:
Keith $34,200
Jason $13,200
Paul $4,000
FJ! category: ITALY
FJ! clue: The Italian word for “shadow” is used as a local variation on the name of this region midway between Rome & Florence
Paul 4000 – 2000 = 2000
Jason 13200 + 0 = 13200
Keith 34200 – 0 = 34200
Of course, Keith’s response was met with a “I hope Rachel is the name of your wife!” and uproarious laughter from the audience. I didn’t get this Final; the best I could do was “Tuscany”.
So, my semifinal predictions went 0-for-3. Thus, I’m not making any predictions for the Finals! I have a feeling that this final is going to be quite epic! Jeanie’ll be blogging it! See you soon!