MrAtoz

Classic Doctor Who is also on BritBox, if you happen to subscribe to that service. "The Crusade" story, however, is one with missing episodes, so it may not be available anywhere. Out of four episodes, only two still seem to exist. A lot of old Doctor Who is like that.

It wasn't Doctor Who, was it? I mean old-school, black-and-white, OG Doctor Who from 1965. They did a 4-part story about the Third Crusade, with Julian Glover as Richard and Bernard Kay as Saladin.

Not the way Ken pronounced it! He said something like "Salla-DEEN," which is probably closer to the way the man himself would have pronounced his name (Salah al-Din), but not the way it's usually been said in the west. I got it right, by the way, largely because I had watched Terry Jones's TV documentary about the Crusades some years ago (yes, that Terry Jones, the Monty Python guy), and have been fascinated by Saladin since then. Despite being Muslim, he was kind of appealing to medieval Christians as something of a model of courage and chivalry, which would explain why Dante would mention him in The Divine Comedy.

I didn't think of Hawaii 5-0 either. My only guess was The Rockford Files, only because Tom Selleck had a recurring role as a rival P.I. to Jim Rockford, so I thought there was a connection between the two shows. Although Selleck's character on The Rockford Files was not Thomas Magnum.

For those who may be wondering about it, the "Santa" in Santa Cruz means "holy." The city name translates as "Holy Cross." The English word "saint" ultimately derives from the Latin sanctus, meaning "holy." Most of the Romance languages use the same word, be it "san" or "sainte" or "santo," to mean both the adjective "holy" and the noun "saint" (e.g., a holy person).

I think the really poor wager was Deb's. They should have bet only $1,801 (enough to just exceed Devin's pre-FJ score). With that bet, Deb would still be champion, even if Ben had gotten it right. I knew the Dickinson quote (it's one of her better-known poems), but couldn't quite pull it out of my brain.

For Final Jeopardy, I said (with great confidence!) Randy Newman. John Williams didn't even enter my mind! Newman's only got 22 Oscar nominations--still a lot, but not as many as Williams. I had thought Newman's father was also a musician, but he was a doctor. Three of Randy Newman's uncles were also film composers, which is probably what I was thinking of.

Nope, not just you. This is a real guy, an ordinary human being who, so far as we know, has done no harm to anyone, who is being compared to one of the most evil men in history for no reason other than that he wears a mustache. "Uncomfortable" is an understatement.

Headlines were longer in those days. This is not a link to the precise headlines that the clue quoted, but it shows how long headlines, sub-headlines, and sub-sub-headlines could get.

The NFL quarterback thing is obviously a joke, but I do think that she has a slight resemblance to John Oates--minus the mustache, of course. I've got no real problem with Lisa, apart from the occasional weird guess.

The equal sign with a slash through it means specifically "is not equal to." There are multiple types of inequalities in mathematics. < and > (i.e., "less than" and "greater than") are what are called "strict inequalities," in that equivalence is completely excluded. There are also "less than or equal to" and "greater than or equal to" (whose symbols I can't make on a keyboard). These inequalities are not considered strict, since equivalence is a possibility. All of these, as well as =/=, fall under the heading of "inequalities." It wouldn't have affected the outcome of the game, but I feel like Alex's answer should have been counted as correct. See here for a more detailed explanation.

Yes, I'm quite sure that I remember telling you all about a guy I knew in college who pronounced "hw" very distinctly, and (because he was interested in marine life) was always talking about sperm hwales.

I could swear that we've discussed the "wh is pronounced hw" thing before, but I may be thinking of another message board. I can recall being explicitly taught, in elementary school back in the 1970s, that the digraph "wh" was to be pronounced "hw." I no longer comply with that instruction (if, indeed, I ever did). "Whine" and "wine" are perfect homophones for me, as are "weather" and "whether" or "Wales" and "whales" or "which" and "witch."

K is actually strikeout, not just strike. The three letters seen in a row on a scorecard, though, are R, H, and E, for Runs, Hits, and Errors. Certainly the most significant of those is Runs.

Mulder didn't say it was Alex Trebek. It was just someone who looked incredibly like him.

I knew Friar Lawrence anyway, but I'm doing a production of Romeo and Juliet right now, so it was especially easy. Although our Friar Lawrence is Mother Lawrence--feminism in the house, ya'll!

Those meal subscription services like Blue Apron or Hello Fresh are also pretty frequent podcast advertisers. I remember one podcaster that I listen to starting an episode with, "Hey, have you heard about Blue Apron? Well, you never will on this show, because we're 100 percent ad-free!" It's common enough that he could make a joke about it.

I know it's been a few days, but to return to the question of Malala's surname, has anyone seen the poster for the upcoming movie "Stranger at the Gate"? It says, right at the top, "From Executive Producer Malala." I would say there is evidence that she is using her first name alone as her professional name, at least some of the time.

I've been trying to think if I've ever heard anyone actually call the show by its full title "SpongeBob SquarePants," and I don't think I have. Everyone, and I mean everyone, just calls it "SpongeBob."

They've accepted just "Malala" before, and there was some controversy about it as I recall.

One of my college English professors is a friend of Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried, and has written a number of books and articles about him. So FJ was easy for me.

If anything, this series is downplaying Dan's past as a horndog. We see him now as the lonely widower, fondly reminiscing about his wife, and off hand I can't recall any references to his lecherous past. Gurgs's assumption that he and Gina had a sexual history is the first indication we've had, I think, that Dan has any kind of reputation for his sexual proclivities. As the Wendie Malick episode showed, he's awkward about even asking somebody out for dinner these days. The parade of weird cases, and everyone in court playing Bingo (sorry, Binga) based on it, felt very original series. Gurgs got the best comedy in the end scene, both the "Did you hit the jukebox" line, and also the wisecrack about the werewolf lady ("She's got her own stuff going on").

It's also possible that she wanted to have a wider forum to publicize the story. Unfortunately sometimes someone will get singled out for public ridicule and abuse, for no particular reason except that people suck. Jeopardy contestants are not immune to that. Sadly, there are a fair number of contestants, especially female contestants, who can tell stories about receiving unkind comments about their appearance, their weight, their voices, their intelligence, their personalities, etc. Claire's experience is particularly nasty, but a lot of folks who have been on the show have had similar experiences to one degree or another.

That was Gary Anthony Williams, who I remember from the most recent version of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?", the version hosted by Aisha Tyler. I didn't recognize him at first, because he's lost quite a bit of weight since then, but he's always funny.

If you believe the Sun, Jeopardy fans are in shock, or furious, at least once a day!