MrAtoz

I'm not sure I agree with that. There are some facts that I know, and could answer easily. But I'm also aware that those facts are pretty obscure to most people, and that the only reason I know them is that I have a particular interest in that topic. I can know the answer to a question, but still acknowledge that it would be a hard question for a lot of people.

Something else people may not know: you can write your wager, but then if you change your mind, one of the contestant coordinators can hit a button somewhere on the podium that will erase it, and you can write a new wager. When you are absolutely, positively sure of your wager, they will hit another button that locks in the bet. You can't change it after that. That's how it worked in 2018, at least. I assume it still does.

It did. As I recall, one of the occasional complaints about Alex was that he would sometimes say "No" in a tone of voice that pretty much said "That's almost right, but not quite." Thus giving the other contestants a big hint about what the right answer was.

I'm not sure when I ran across the fact that "proof" means twice the alcohol by volume percentage. I don't drink much, either, and if I hadn't read the meaning of "proof" at some point in my life (and remembered it), I probably would have had no clue, either.

Sodom and Gomorrah are always mentioned together, but if you read the whole story leading up to the destruction, Sodom is the city that's more prominent. Lot lives in Sodom, the angels come to visit him in Sodom, it's the men of Sodom who come to Lot's house and demand that he send the angels out to them. Lot and his family flee from Sodom when the fire and brimstone come down. Sodom is where everything happens. Frankly, it's weird that Gomorrah gets destroyed as well. As far as we're told in the Bible, Gomorrah didn't do anything!

His history is worth looking up. MacBeth's actual life is way more interesting than the story Shakespeare told--though admittedly, there were fewer ghosts and witches.

I wonder how many people don't realize that MacBeth was a real guy?

The only thing I can think of that might be cheating in Wordle is somehow finding out the correct word in some other way, e.g. copying off someone else. But considering different possible combinations before you enter them? Of course that's allowed. How else would you do it? Enter five letters at random and hope for the best?

Tom Baker did play Sherlock Holmes once, in an absolutely terrible BBC production of Hound of the Baskervilles. I had pre-guessed Sherlock Holmes for FJ before I even saw the clue, so it was easy.

One other fun fact about the musical: Irene Ryan (Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies) was in the original production, in the role of Pippin's grandmother. She had a song called "No Time At All," about being old but feeling young. In the lyrics, she mentions that her lovers call her "Granny," which always got a big laugh from the audience. It was the last role she played before she died.

"Corner of the Sky" is a song from the Stephen Schwartz musical Pippin, which is (very loosely) based on the life of Charlemagne's oldest son, Pepin (sometimes called Pepin the Hunchback). The name Pepin, as you probably know, was all over Charlemagne's family line, with his great-grandfather, his father, two of his sons, his grandson, and his great-grandson all having that name. The name is spelled "Pippin" in some sources, especially English and German sources. Hopefully they would have accepted "Pepin" if anyone had said it. But the fact that the clue quoted a song from the musical makes me think that "Pippin" was the answer they expected.

Or didn't know that "The J. Edgar Hoover Building" referred to FBI headquarters? There's no telling how various people's brains will approach a clue. It's easy to seize on "notorious" and lose sight of the other hints. If you know Washington D.C. geography, that would have ruled out Watergate. Watergate is next to the Kennedy Center, along the Potomac, a pretty fair distance from the Hoover Building.

The clue, with its reference to "Corner of the Sky," was definitely pointing toward "Pippin." Wikipedia identifies "Pippin" as an alternate spelling of "Pepin." Encyclopedia Britannica lists of the Carolingians with that name under "Pippin," and gives "Pepin" as the alternate spelling. I'd call it a wash.

"Pre-Code" is the way I always hear it phrased when talking about old movies. The "Hays" part is just sort of taken for granted. The scene of a man dangling from a clock is certainly famous, but as @SomeTameGazelle says, I'm not sure it's famous in such a way that most people would connect it to the name Harold Lloyd. Be honest: before hearing the clue, did you know that the title of the movie it comes from is Safety Last? Do you have any idea of the general plotline of that movie? At one time, I might have guessed that the guy hanging from the clock was Buster Keaton. He was the one known for wild physical comedy. So I'm not sure I can get too upset at folks for not getting that one. To save you some Googling: Safety Last has that old standby plot, which was probably a cliché even back then, where the hero lies to his girlfriend about how successful he is, and when she shows up at his job he has to be pretend to be the big boss, even though he's really only a lowly salesclerk. He ends up on the clock because there's something about if anyone can climb the building as a publicity stunt, they'll get $1,000, something something, reasons.

I'm another one of the people who grew up using "anxious" to mean "eager," or "looking forward to something." I remember in about third grade or so, I had a teacher who insisted that it meant "worried or nervous." I wasn't having any of it; I figured it was one of those weird things that teachers say sometimes that don't make any sense. I used it that way as long as she was my teacher, so as not to get bad grades. As soon as I moved on to the next grade, I proceeded to ignore what she had tried to teach me, and resumed using it to mean "eager." 😀

Well...some of us do.

True. The temperance movement is often portrayed today as a bunch of puritanical scolds, but they were trying to solve a genuine social problem.

Wow, there's tough Final Jeopardy clues, and then there's that! How on earth was anyone supposed to figure that out? There's absolutely no way into the clue, and everything that seems to be a hint really isn't. A show associated with the moon landing? Nope. A show about a character whose name starts with D? Nope. A show that has something to do with cement, or perhaps general building and construction? Nope. Terrible clue. Absolutely terrible.

I was a bit surprised that all three contestants guessed Byron. Not only did he die way too early (1824), but he was a pretty scandalous figure, unlikely to be buried in Westminster Abbey. He did eventually get a monument there, but it wasn't until 1969. Tennyson, on the other hand, was Poet Laureate, much admired by Queen Victoria, and thoroughly respectable. Just the sort of guy who would get a spot in Poet's Corner. He was also a Lord, so he fit the "Baron" part of the clue. On top of that, the clue even quoted one of his better known poems. I found it a pretty easy FJ.

That's funny; I heard him pronounce it with a final "k" sound, and wondered if anybody here would complain about it! G and K are basically the same sound; it's just that the former is voiced and the latter unvoiced. Voiced sounds can become unvoiced when they're influenced by other unvoiced sounds around them. I wonder if the natural vocal rising that happens when you make something a question would tend to make the voiced G sound drift towards an unvoiced K sound? As far as "meme" goes for FJ, I got it immediately. It's one of those things where the original, technical meaning has been overlooked or forgotten by a lot of people. So many people nowadays think that "meme" means "a picture with some snarky text," but that's not what Dawkins had in mind when he coined the term. There was an episode of The Big Bang Theory where Amy (Mayim's character) and Sheldon tested the theory of memes by starting a rumor and tracking how quickly it spread. @shapeshifter, Armand did say "sacristy" correctly. Unfortunately he didn't phrase it as a question, and in Double Jeopardy they don't give you a reminder about that.

This always seems to be the case. The disembodied voice-over always mentions "Didn't bank any money for the team" as a negative, even as Jane berates them for not accumulating as much money as they might have. You can't have it both ways! Is it good to bank, or isn't it?

I was unfamiliar with that particular album, and so didn't even know it was Tom Petty. But there is exactly one quote from a Union admiral that is at all famous: "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead." "Damn the torpedoes" sounds much more badass than "Full speed ahead," so that's the part that's gonna be a rock album title. A lot of people have been mentioning Union generals, but the clue definitely said "admiral." That was a very important hint.

They can indeed:

Here's the text of the clue, from Jeopardy Archive: "With a knack for predicting plays, he's been a success in the broadcast booth like he was behind center." The category was TV Factoids, so no hint there. On the other hand there a couple of sports hints in the clue itself: "broadcast booth" tells you that he's a sportscaster, and "behind center" tells you that he used to be a quarterback. As far as the "first cousin" response, the clue specifically said it was a "2-word family relationship." The word "first" is the one that includes the 3 letters in a row (r-s-t), so it was necessary, and "cousin" alone would not, and should not, have been accepted.

I asked about this on a forum that includes a bunch of scientists and other smart people. If I understand right (no guarantees of that!), scorpion pincers are biologically different from their legs. For one thing, they're attached to the scorpion's head, not its abdomen. From what I understood, crabs' claws are specialized legs. Scorpions' claws are more like specialized antennae. P.S. This message is a good example of why I would not want a keyboard to enter my FJ response. Every time I typed the word "scorpion" in this post, I spelled it "scropion," and only noticed because a red line appeared under it. Those kind of mis-typings are very common, particularly when you're typing fast, and hard to spot. It could easily lead to a bunch of right answers being counted wrong purely because of typos.