Quiz Show: The Most Interesting Thing About Me

Online test is like 30 questions in 15 minutes.  You don't get to know your score.

You do well enough, you get invited to an in-person try out.  They hold those in various cities, and you have to get to the one closest to you.  I was luck I just had to jump on the train to get to mine.  (There are like 12 cities they go to, and I don't know how many people are invited.  I was in a classroom sized group of about 30, but there were groups before and after my tryout of the same size.) At the tryout, you take another test, and then you play a mock game -- this was 4 years ago, so the process may have changed some since then.

Even after all that, they  tell everyone in the room that they may be eligible for a taping, so wait for a call sometime in the next 18 months.

Then if you get the call, you have to make your way out to California, and pay for your hotel.  They had a discounted rate where they had a partner with the hotel, and they ran shuttles from there, but it still cost me about 1000 bucks just in travel and lodging (I was unemployed at the time so that was huge).

Then you go to the taping -- they do a week's worth of shows in a day, and I think a whole month's worth over the week.  Even there, you are not guaranteed being on the show.  they had an alternate come when I was there, but they let California people be the alternates so that when they were called back the trip wasn't too bad.

You play some practice games to get used to the board and the stage and the buzzer, and so that they can get your mark with the camera.  Then you go back and names are drawn for the games.  I was drawn first, and never got into a groove.  Got second, but nailed the final answer.

Prior to the taping, they ask you for a lot of prompts for the contestant interview.  No one is interesting in 20 seconds, especially when the most interesting thing about you now is that you were on a major television quiz show.

I got second and won 2K.  It was nice, but I hated the time frames.  The initial test was in January, then the call for the second test was in like April for a May test.  Then I was called the next February for filming about a month later.  The episode didn't air until late July, and then I didn't get the money until that November.

It was worth it, but it is one of those things that a lot of people are interested about but I have over-told the story.  It makes me feel like a band with one hit song.  

Reading the collection of "Hyperbole and a Half"

Hold on.  Is this just the blog, but put in book form?

I have no idea.  My wife saw that her friends had a copy of this, and then she needed to have a copy of it.  It might have some new stuff though, since my wife, as she read it would comment about how she hadn’t read a section.  And she laughed.

I have only read one of the blog-stories that are included in this book, and that was the cartoon about the author’s fight with depression.  I haven’t faced what she has faced, but the way she described it helped me understand some people I know in a better way.  That was worth the money alone, you know, paying for something you can get free on the internet (support your local artists in the global village, etc).

I  then read them in one sitting and laughed and laughed. 

I have a feeling that Brosh can actually draw, but her style is deliberately primitive.  The way she illustrates the weird hatted-tadpole that is the authorial stand-in in these comics shows she understands the human  body.  Don’t let the “bad” drawing of the occasional nasty language dissuade you from reading these tales. Brosh is a keen observer of the human condition, and is someone to keep an eye on (in the anticipatory sort of way, though perhaps in the not trusting with the glassware sort of way as well).

 

Zealots Need Not Apply:Reading Reza Aslan

I read this over Christmas. I thought, “Since we are celebrating the man’s birth, we should have a look at his life.  I really enjoyed Aslan’s portrait of Jesus, and it made me think deeper about faith and religion and life. 

Aslan shows that the New Testament was a constructed document, and he looks at the historical context of the life of Jesus.  We learn that Jesus wasn’t the only prophet and miracle-man plying his wares on the Mediterranean shores, but he tries to understand why Jesus endured when his contemporaries did not. 

The simplistic answer is that he was the one true son of God, but there are other figures that are part of Jesus’s narrative who get subsumed into the greater structure of the story, particularly here John the Baptist.  He had competing followers after the crucifixion with the followers of Jesus.  In the familiar telling, he was a harbinger of the Christ, and not a Burger King of messiahs.

When this book came out, it was highly controversial, and in fact that was the main reason I picked it up.  I really don’t see why it was if you can be open-minded about the history of the man so many in this world follow and revere.  I can see that it comes down heavily on Paul, and the New Testament as we have it is pretty Paul-centric. If anything it should challenge you to think deeper about your faith, and see Jesus for the man he was.