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Nice to see so much affection for "Cheaper by the Dozen." I have yet to forgive anyone involved with the dreadful alleged remake starring Steve Martin. I was surprised to see Nell fall apart, but I guess that's the way it goes. Maybe she didn't like the categories? Producers discourage FJ "shoutouts" but I guess she was over it by then. I know to say "king" in French, but otherwise had no hope in FJ. I know about some shows I don't watch because I read an article or see friends talking about them. I really don't recall hearing anything about "Succession" except that maybe I've read its name a few times. 2/3 players knew it and it's won several Emmys, so I can't complain nobody's ever heard of it, but the viewing figures seem quite low (1.7 million viewers across all platforms was a "record high" for them, per Deadline). The media landscape seems so fragmented these days. What I did gather from a little Googling is that the show is EP'd by Adam McKay and Will Ferrell. That doesn't sound like my cup of tea. I guess I'll remain happily in ignorance.

The Ringling Museum in Sarasota is well worth a visit. In addition to the mansion shown in the clue, they have a nice circus collection and a large generalized art museum, among other things. Another favorite bit of history came up with the Pierce-Arrow, which is the car the Gilbreths drove in "Cheaper by the Dozen." I don't remember how I came across it but I absolutely loved that book! The state portmanteau category was clunky, but "safar-arizona" seemed like it should just have been wrong, on a show that splits hairs between Barry and Berry. Re "Hearst Castle," I assume there was a stopdown to determine whether it was in time or not, and the judge then decided it wouldn't be fair to let someone else ring in? Both those moments seemed sloppy. I liked Nell. She reminded me of a less manic Zooey Deschanel. I wonder why she didn't wager just a little more on that last DD, but in the end it didn't matter. I reckon she could go quite far.

I wonder whether Stonewall alone would have been accepted. I think it probably should have been. I've read a bit about it and I'm fairly certain it was contemporaneously called just "the Stonewall" by many of its patrons. I do the same thing regularly. On this occasion, I think you would have been OK. I found sheet music with "On" rather than "By" going back to 1868, and a music researcher friend's database shows its US copyright registration has "On." I think it was Strauss' Opus 314 - that might be the safest bet, but it's tough to remember.

Here, by the way, is a great recording of Strauss' "Blue Danube." Its original title translates to "By the Beautiful Blue Danube." This has been a favorite of mine for years. It often comes up in videos like "25 songs you've heard but can't name." That could be a fun audio category sometime!

"Jackie Gleason" gave me a good chuckle, not that I knew the correct answer. I know of Jackie Mason from noodling around reading about entertainers, but he looked older and less well in the photo in my mind, so I couldn't make the connection. "It's the fear of heights" laid out vertically was a nice subtle joke. And "Whose Line..." was one of my father's favorites. I remember asking him what he was watching one day, and when he responded with the title, I thought he was telling me to mind my own business! I thought about southern civil rights protests, then got briefly hung up on Minsky's because of the word "raid" and the mention of dancing, but I got a hold of myself and came up with Stonewall fairly easily. I wonder what event at Central State U Christian was thinking of. Sorry to see Jackie go, although I'm not a fan of starting at the bottom of the boards. I didn't mind her relatively flat affect, and assumed she just wasn't someone used to being in the spotlight. It made her seem a bit like an underdog to me. Maybe we'll see her again.

It was a fun callback to have the students use some of the words from Janine's Philly slang lesson. I think we got "oldhead" and "boul" in this episode. I don't think there's a weak link in the actors. If that's what he wants, I hope it's possible for William Stanford Davis, who plays Mr. Johnson, to be credited with the main cast next season. I'm definitely as cool as Janine and Jacob: I Googled "desking" to see if it was a real trend! The Free Dictionary has it as a collective noun for all the desks in an office. Urban Dictionary has something my grandmother wouldn't like me to repeat in mixed company.

I was so disappointed only Jackie got Josephine Baker! She was such a remarkable person, not only a captivating performer but also a civil rights activist and an operative of the French Resistance. I choose to believe the others knew her story but not that she had been inducted into the Panthéon. I wonder that too! I did a little quick Googling but different sources have different variations. It's probably safe. Maybe if I was what Michael Scott would call super-stitious, I would donate the value of that clue to charity or something, and hope the forces involved with the curse took notice. That too, of course! I didn't mention it since I thought it went without saying.

I enjoyed that as something unserious before bed. They seem to have fixed one of my principal complaints, hyper-critical judging, and for some reason the lopsided scoring system bothers me less when it's all going to charity. There's still very little going on for an hour, everything said about Jane and Randy is still true, the audience noise and reaction shots are still overdone, etc. Oh well, I guess it's not all so bad that I'll stop watching. Celeb format was fine. I only knew Kelly, since I don't care about football and can't recall coming across Jojo before. But they did all seem engaged and none too over-the-top, which is not always the case on these shows. I can hear but not always process well. Captions help, but I had to turn them off because they read "instrumental: [title]." I'm no accessibility expert but I thought there could have been some discretion exercised about how they were likely to be used in the context of this show.

If anyone else wondered about the Grand Duke's Birthday, that holiday was fixed based on the Grand Duchess Charlotte's birthday, January 23rd. It was preferred that the holiday be in good weather, so it was moved six months later, and has stayed there. The current Grand Duke is Charlotte's grandson, born April 16th.

Jackie is something else. I like a contestant who is willing to bet on themselves even when they're not under the gun. I assume she wasn't very confident in Egypt or her second wager might have been as high as her first and third. Her "All My Children" story was delightfully unexpected too. AMC was my mother's soap: now she has to subsist on "General Hospital." There seem to be clues about William & Mary, the monarchs or the institution, fairly regularly, and today we had Williamsburg! It could well be a sort of confirmation bias on my part, because I take special notice of each such clue and send it to my group of friends who attended W&M, but I sometimes wonder whether someone on the writing staff went there too. I haven't forgotten yesterday's promise, but I will make a neutral note that the latter part of "that brings us to the end of the Jeopardy round" was choppily redone in post-prod. The closed captions still had "single Jeopardy." I wasn't ever bothered by that myself, but it shows that the producers are monitoring feedback. And didn't Miss Mayim claim she'd only used it once? Hmmmm!

I couldn't really root for anyone by the end of this last episode. Nazli was too intense and ultimately a sore loser, the wrestler seemed like a nice enough guy but a dunce, and Sean seemed like such a schlemiel that I didn't even feel bad for him. "Takes one to know one" was such a pathetic comeback to Nazli calling them cowards for voting her out. If it was your intention to also make me feel a lot older than I did 10 minutes ago as I reconsidered this, you've succeeded beyond your wildest dreams. You monster! ;) I'm not much older than him but my childhood was really on the cusp of the mobile tech revolution. We were slow adopters in our house, so I'm probably not a good judge of what was available when. I do remember one day in middle school when I got sick and had to lie down in the infirmary. A friend lent me their iPod Video and I watched "Desperate Housewives" on the tiny screen. I thought that had to be the very height of technology in our world.

Hooray! I’ll take that win! I sure didn’t find it on the boards today. ;)

I thought so too, but feared it would sound dismissive if I threw that in after remarking on how disappointed I was that she was there.

1845 made me think of westward expansion for Friday's FJ. I ruled out Helena because I thought Billings was the capital (wrong!). I guess I would have tried Olympia, expecting it to be wrong. Right at the beginning, I thought of Pacifica, a small city near here which was obviously wrong. Why I didn't try our other big ocean is beyond me! I wasn't very engaged with the game today. I hadn't read the forums in a few days and didn't know to expect Mayim. The unpleasant surprise definitely affected my level of interest. I won't spend all week complaining about her, Scout's honor, but I don't like the job she does or the ongoing uncertainty / lack of resolution in a show that was consistent for so long. That there had to be a change couldn't be helped, but I think we are well past when things should have been firmed up again. There was an odd moment in the Gulf of Tonkin clue when the scores briefly displayed were all wrong, reflecting Jackie's winning total and Amie's consolation prize. I assume they had to retape something there, but it's just sloppy, and they have the resources to do better.

God is punishing us.

I don't think "lampshading" Murray's absence is as fun a running joke as the writers seem to. It already seemed like the character was less present before the big scandal. Just let him be in the other room unacknowledged or whatever. It's not necessary to show Beverly call the Marriott and be unable to reach him. Nobody is laughing. The Dynasty bits were cute. It did seem like a bit of a missed opportunity for a cameo or two. Pamela Sue Martin had a fun role in the pilot of the CW's Nancy Drew after she played that part in the 70s: surely she would've bitten for a little Dynasty tribute. John James just spent a month in Serbia playing Joe Biden in a movie about Hunter's "scandalous business dealings and lifestyle" featuring Gina Carano as a Secret Service agent, for God's sake: you wanna tell me that guy wouldn't turn up for $1.99 and a warm meal? (Not that he's the one I would've wanted to see, to be sure.) The soaps of "1980-something" seem like one of the last topics they haven't touched, and I guess I wanted a little more.

I know earnestness is out of fashion, if it was ever in, but I really hate it when the celebs spend more time preening and attempting humor than trying to play the guessing game. I definitely think Adam was on something. Jesus! The concertmaster was the most interesting to me because I know that world. I ruled out #1 after she said it wasn't possible to pick out one bad note from a hundred players, and I agreed with Sherri that #3's Beethoven's 5th was a little too basic, while "whatever I'm working on at the moment" is the kind of diplomatic pablum you might expect from someone really in that role. Is Mama growing on me? I thought "...and you didn't like chicken?!" was genuinely funny as delivered. On completely the other end of things, I kept thinking that I would've loved to see Kitty Carlisle or one of the other blue-bloods they used to have, just to stare down that concertmaster and give him the third degree. I didn't think so either. Maybe "willing to look like a jackass in costume" is a more important qualification than vocal range.

I wondered whether he asked for conspicuous credit. I feel like we often get those types of "familiar faces" on the show without that kind of acknowledgment, which makes it feel like a fun little Easter egg to me too.

RE the "plain _____ means unexciting" clue, to paraphrase something I read on Tumblr or somewhere, how fortunate we are to live at a time and in a place where vanilla, once a fabulously expensive spice and definitely not flavorless, has come to mean a sort of dull default!

That's certainly possible. Guinness does more corporate and other partnerships than I'd ever realized. They do a "most _____ steps in 60 seconds" record with the pros from the British "Dancing with the Stars" every year on their companion show, complete with uniformed adjudicators: I've always wondered whether Guinness would entertain attempts from other dancers to break those records later. Less innocuously, John Oliver did a piece on the autocratic former president of Turkmenistan, which took a tangent into Guinness' partnerships with repressive regimes to publicize unusually specific records achieved by their rulers on behalf of the countries. He proposed to bake a large cake to break one of those records, but Guinness told him they wouldn't certify the attempt because they are a brand for families and children and the request was too pointed and mean-spirited. As Oliver said, his talk show must not have been a brutal enough dictatorship to satisfy Guinness' high expectations. He baked the cake anyway, showed it off on air, then gave most of it away to the hungry.

I was thinking about that Diana Ross guess earlier and maybe it's not as bad as I first thought. As has been mentioned, she did release an album in 2021. Suppose I didn't know much more than that my mother was a fan of the Supremes in the 60s. I wouldn't know they were discovered as high schoolers and did their first single in 1960 when Diana was 16. Maybe I would have briefly seen a few clips of their TV appearances, in which their styling seems mature beyond their years, perhaps even by contemporary standards. It might not be wild to guess she was, say, around 30 in the middle of the decade, which would make her 87 today. It still isn't 95, but it's not so far off. I must be in a great mood, to be making all these excuses for young people who don't know more on this count! Hey, speaking of the Supremes, remember the head of Motown? What was his name again? Something Gordy? It rhymes with... never mind! ;)

I thought Jane looked really nice in her sparkling outfit with the pearls. My award for stupidest answer of the episode goes to "Doug Emhoff is the first person with the title Second..." "in command!" I know not everyone had the benefit of a comprehensive civics education, but curiosity about what's going on in the world, or basic sentience, is free. It's certainly not a show 20-something ravers follow, but it seems pretty ubiquitous anyway. I've seen Wheel parodied many times and often see general media headlines about one or both hosts. And he was never home sick from school watching daytime TV? Maybe I'm being extra hard on him because he just seemed like such a doofus! That brings me back! I used to giggle at the "casual" tableau they would arrange the players in for an opening pan across their supposed 9-way conversation, but the alliances were no joke. I think they were trying to emulate shows like "Survivor" a bit. It sure would be interesting to know whether they still interact beforehand.

I missed Tony Bennett, despite every opportunity to know it was him. I read he collaborated with Lady Gaga recently but didn't know that had included a second album, after the one they did 7 or 8 years ago. I think my mind was probably looking for a solo album anyway. At least now I have something to listen to! I was curious: Cher's last album is from 2018. It looks like it did quite well. I didn't know she had recorded that recently. I mostly just see her tweets. She is only 75, but that didn't stop anyone with Diana, so why not? There could've been worse random guesses.

I found a few interesting things in dental history timelines online. It seems that allowing the hygienists to sit rather than stand while performing their duties was considered a major change in itself, apart from what the almost entirely female workers wore while they did it. Making pants an option was apparently in part to facilitate the modest use of a stool. Diana Ross is going to be plenty mad when she finds out she's aged 20 years! She did release an album in 2021, so that wasn't totally out of left field. Her daughter, Tracee Ellis Ross, seems to have a wicked sense of humor. I wonder if she'll see it and say anything. I'm not sure what that "on tomorrow's Jeopardy" bit added. Except in very rare circumstances, the challengers will be unknown quantities to 99.9% of viewers. Surely there aren't many who would decide whether to watch day to day based on how they liked the looks or hometowns of the players? I think the show risks looking silly if they do too much sports-style hype.