Gaming the classics

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.