{"id":7445,"date":"2016-05-17T09:38:23","date_gmt":"2016-05-17T16:38:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=7445"},"modified":"2016-05-20T09:43:31","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T16:43:31","slug":"franzen-upchuck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2016\/05\/17\/franzen-upchuck\/","title":{"rendered":"Franzen Upchuck"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The Observer<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Why I Almost Committed Suicide Watching Jonathan Franzen on Jeopardy<\/h1>\n

A three-time Jeopardy champ nearly loses it seeing a slightly more famous writer at the game-show podium<\/h2>\n

Neal Pollack<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a\u00a0Jeopardy!\u00a0<\/em>champion<\/a>. I won three games in September of 2013. This didn\u2019t happen during \u201cPower Players Week.\u201d I\u2019m not a power player to anyone but that one guy in Pittsburgh who bought my band\u2019s album in 2004, and also the editor of this newspaper, who wanted me to review Jonathan Franzen\u2019s appearance on\u00a0Jeopardy! Power Players Week.\u00a0<\/em>So here goes.<\/p>\n

On\u00a0Jeopardy,\u00a0<\/em>Jonathan Franzen knew all the answers. Of course he did. He\u2019s Jonathan Franzen! They gave him a category about Birds in the first round. He got those questions right, of course. That\u2019s like giving me a category called \u201cJerkin\u2019 It.\u201d There was also a Shakespeare category. Mr. Franzen knew those answers, too, though he didn\u2019t ring in to answer that the Tamer of the Shrew was named Petruchio, an answer that I, sitting on my couch in my underwear while smoking a joint, knew immediately. \u201cI should have known that,\u201d Franzen said, fake-demurely.<\/p>\n

Curse you, Franzen!<\/p>\n

Then came the moment\u00a0when Alex Trebek, the evil lord of knowledge, talks to the players. He and Mr. Franzen spent 30 seconds dissing Twitter, a doomsday scenario, a meeting of the ubermenschen\u00a0that shattered my soul forever. \u201cDo you think in our society, Twitter is trivializing importance?\u201d Alex Trebek asked Jonathan Franzen. Even typing that phrase\u2014\u201cAlex Trebek asked Jonathan Franzen\u201d\u2014hurts my heart. Believe it or not, Mr. Franzen did, and then talked about how it was impossible to form a counter-argument on Twitter.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at The Observer<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Observer Why I Almost Committed Suicide Watching Jonathan Franzen on Jeopardy A three-time Jeopardy champ nearly loses it seeing a slightly more famous writer at the game-show podium Neal Pollack I\u2019m a\u00a0Jeopardy!\u00a0champion. I won three games in September of 2013. This didn\u2019t happen during \u201cPower Players Week.\u201d I\u2019m not a power player to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news","category-mirth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7445\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}