A. and I have been watching the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions. It’s from about a month ago, but we have Jeopardy set to record and watch it when we get a whim, or while eating lunch on the weekends. It’s been fun because we watched the bulk of this “season” (did you know Jeopardy had season just like other shows??), so we remember the returning champs! Three of them in particular just seem like the happiest people alive. They are a physics professor, an oncologist, and a urologist–not professions that I would expect to make people inordinately happy! So I’ve hypothesized that it must have something to do with Jeopardy. Your success on Jeopardy is proportionally related to the size of your smile while on camera.
Here they are in action. (WARNING: SPOILER ALERT. The first video tells you who wins the tournament, so if you don’t care to know, don’t click the link!)
Justin, Jay, and Joon are the particular ones I was talking about, but the rest of them look pretty happy, too! When Alex asked some of them what they did with their winnings from their run as champion, Joon said he and his wife had donated a large portion of it to charity. Someone else had saved a lot of it and used the rest to take his girlfriend to Hawaii, buy an engagement ring, and propose. These revelations led me to another hypothesis: I bet the winners on Jeopardy do some of the most reasonable things with the money they’ve won (when compared with winners of other game shows and/or the lottery).
Whaddya think? Have I got something here? I’m contemplating going back to grad school in whatever discipline that would be in order to spend my life studying data on Jeopardy champions. …Not really. But it’s fun to think about.
