Since I have a maximum of about 11 readers for this
blog, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I was once a contestant on Jeopardy.
I’m not proud of it; and since I didn’t win, I only
had the ugliest couch in Christendom to show for it (which I ditched when I
left Virginia for Washington, enough being enough). And I certainly don’t
think about it, ever.
But while putting together today’s post on Ovid for National Poetry Month I was reminded of another famous Roman poet, and his
masterwork, which I read for a humanities course at Scripps College. I’d
already had an Ancient module—Greek—but I enjoyed that so much I went back for
more with a lecture course on Roman culture. The Aeneid was part of that, of course, and that’s what brings me to
that irritating experience on a game show.
(As an aside: can someone tell me why MSFT Word’s
spellchecker accepts Aeneas but not Aeneid?)
I have enough of the Puritan poker up my butt to fervently
believe you can’t/shouldn’t get something for nothing, and I have to say that
I find all game shows cringeworthy in their appeal to contestant greed. I’d
never have touched Jeopardy with a barge pole but my friend Jan (who’d tried
out and been rejected) kept insisting that with my compendium of trivial knowledge, I’d be a shoo-in.
Well, reader, I did make it to the taping and I
did get chosen to play. I don’t recall the category (classical lit opening
lines?), but the answer was, “Arms and the man I sing”, and I buzzed first
with the question, “What is the Aeneid?”
Fine. But that complete plonker Alex Trebek, whose
ego is so huge I don’t know how he gets it through the door, wanted to show
off. He asked if I could recite it in Latin and I said I couldn’t. I read it
in translation. (And, BTW, “Arms and the man I sing” is only one
translation, by John Dryden; but it’s pretty famous.)
So he smirked, “Arma
virumque cano,” like he should get the Nobel Prize in literature.
So that’s why Ovid won out over Virgil for today’s
poetic entry.
I suppose you’re going to ask, so I’ll go ahead and tell you: I won the final jeopardy round on the answer “The number of
children in the Cunningham family on ‘Happy Days’”. The question was, “What is
three?” I was the only contestant to get it right and I only knew it because a couple of weeks earlier I’d been channel surfing and came across a syndicated episode
from the first year that had an older brother named Chuck. I’d bet everything
on my answer, but it wasn’t enough to beat this one guy who was a complete
juggernaut, thus validating my belief in not getting something for nothing.
We live in a bizarre old world when knowing the
number of Cunningham children and the opening line to one of the great
classics carries equal weight in any kind of contest.
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