Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (7 page)

 Oh, yeah: an island

 Defoe also wrote something called
Moll Flanders

Moll Flanders
had stuck in my head because when I first stumbled across that fact (I have no idea where), I made a little joke to myself, imagining Ned Flanders’s prudish wife from
The Simpsons
stranded with Crusoe on a desert island, gradually embracing a shameless life of wanton abandon. One taw-diddly-awdry mental image later,
Moll Flanders
was instantly fastened to
Robinson Crusoe,
and thus Daniel Defoe, for good.

I had inadvertently stumbled across several steps of the Eightfold Path at once, although it would take years before I understood how.

Later, I realized that those four facts are also almost half of everything
Jeopardy!
can probably ask about Defoe’s entire novel.

The writers can ask about virtually any topic, of course, but they’re limited by the brevity of the clues and responses. Using the typeface
Jeopardy!
prefers on its monitors, in fact, a clue can only contain just over 100 characters. Into that, they have to squeeze enough data to limit all possible responses to one, usually include a clear hint of some kind, and if possible even cram in a small dollop of humor.

So far, they have done this almost a third of a million times. I, for one, am impressed.

Robinson Crusoe
is a classic of English literature, spawning a whole subgenre of castaway works. But little of that fits into a twelve-second rhythm. In fact, here’s all of the remaining Crusoe-related material that (in my opinion) is concise enough to prove useful even in one of
Jeopardy!
’s advanced tournaments:

 Crusoe was from York

 The book was published around 1720

 It was partly based on a real guy named Alexander Selkirk

 He was on a Portuguese slave ship headed for Brazil

 The only book he had was the Bible

 Defoe wrote a sequel,
The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

That’s it. The end of the map. Beyond, there be dragons.

Of course, they can ask about anything
else
Defoe wrote, dig into his biography, combine titles in Before & Afters (as “Jackie Robinson Crusoe” perhaps), and riff on the endless derivative works ranging from
Lost
to
Lost in Space
to
Robinson Crusoe on Mars,
a cheesy old sci-fi movie featuring Adam West from
Batman.
(Think of it: I’ve never read the actual book. But the Batman-crash-lands-on-Mars version, oh,
that
I know really well.)

But now we’re no longer talking about Crusoe. Just related stuff.

You
can
study for
Jeopardy!
You just need to think like one of their writers.

You also have to be unhinged enough to try to boil down the entire canon of human knowledge into these convenient bite-size bits, gluing them in with (as you’ll see) a headful of explosions and nakedness.

Obviously.

Time slowed down at the podium.

Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe…

As described earlier, you can’t simply ring in at will. You have to wait until Alex has finished the entire clue, at which point someone offstage flips a switch, activating all three buzzers at once.

At the same instant the buzzers become active, a series of tiny, nameless lights near the game board flash, telling the players it’s safe to ring in. Jump the gun, and your buzzer is disabled for what I’d guess is about a half a second. This is an eternity in
Jeopardy!
time. Someone else will probably ring in before your buzzer works again.

Incidentally, these lights seem to have no official name. They are simply spoken of as “The Lights,” sometimes in the same hushed, mystified fashion used by UFO abductees. For clarity’s sake, I’ll invent the simple term “Go Lights” and use it from here on. (I also forfeit all right to poke gentle fun at “Signaling Device” ever again.)

The basic routine, then, usually becomes:

 Read the question,

 Figure out the answer,