Why? That’s stupid. He’s just a guy on a game show, what does that have to do with football?

But, if you insist upon your quixotic quest to find out my Super Bowl opinions, here are some helpful resources. I wrote a piece for Grantland on the ten best Super Bowls of all time from a trivia buff’s perspective. And then the Newark Star-Ledger interviewed for an article on Tom Brady’s perfectionism. The reporter said he tried to track down Bo Derek, but settled for me instead. Yup, if you’re writing a piece on type-A quarterbacks, make sure you get the coveted Bo Derek or Ken Jennings interview!

Some paper in Massachusetts also wanted my prediction for The Big Game, as NFL lawyers insist that I call it at all times. I can’t find a link to the story yet but SPOILERS I told them 37-20 Pats. I just hope I don’t throw off the Vegas line too much with my authoritative opinion.

I’m going over the new and corrected pages for the Maphead paperback this morning (out in April!) and I’m happy to say that all the errors everybody caught will be fixed. I couldn’t do it without you, typo-finders. You are the OCD wind beneath my wings.

There will also be a smattering of new material in the paperback: to wit, a reading group guide (discussion questions and suggested activities, including map-themed cocktails!!!) and an “Are You a Maphead?” quiz drawn from the live geography quiz I was doing at Maphead readings.

Speaking of maps, here are a few links you might find interesting. I’ve probably posted some of them on Twitter, but not here.

• NASA’s new map of America’s trees
• Most of the Maphead bit on upside-down maps focused on Australians, but there’s another market as well.
• Thanks to Panoramio: a heat map of the world’s most (and least!) photographed places.
• And I’m the Random Bonus Fact on today’s Disalmanac podcast with some super-fun geography trivia. Check it out, you might learn something.

Congrats to my friends Brian and Jess, who MovieCat! game just won “Best Trivia Game” from the 2011 Best App Ever Awards! If you’re a movie trivia fan with iPhone or Android and $2 to burn, MovieCat! is a crackup. And, for those living in Seattle, their live monthly trivia nights are quite possibly even better.

I’m working with these guys on a trivia project right now that I’m pretty excited about. More details to come, when we’re a few months closer to seeing it in the App Store–or, you know, whatever the hell the Google App Store is called.

In other news: last year, reader skullturfq posted an interesting bit of trivia about President John Tyler on this site’s message boards. I’d never heard it before, and repeated it on Twitter. mental_floss blogged about the factoid yesterday, which went viral and today resulted in a New York magazine interview with the elderly gentleman in question! I wonder why they didn’t ask him for some favorite memories of his Grandpa.

I just realized that I never posted any pictures from last week’s few-inches-of-snow-that-brought-Seattle-to-its-knees! (Seattle is a cheap date for snow.) Between Dr. King’s birthday and SNOWPOCALYPSE the kids were home for an entire week, which is as awesome as it sounds. I took them sledding every day and that helped the cabin fever. Normally I’m pretty alert about my kids and strangers, but here I let them sidle up to a strange nude man with a mustache.

WORDPLAY WEDNESDAY! Can you think of a common word with two pairs of double letters (like toffee or ballroom) that becomes another common word if you remove one of the duplicates in each pair (like tofe and balrom, um, don’t?) I can only find one–are there others?

Edited to add: There are indeed, as a Perl script discovered.

Your maphead trivia fix of the day, via reader Larry Braden and the Futility Closet blog: what do North East, Pennsylvania and Northwest, Virginia have in common? Answer here.

Speaking of the highways and byways of this great land: I didn’t do a whole lot of bookstore events for Maphead, but I will be doing a short tour for the paperback release, coming up in April! Details to come! If I’m doing a little reading/signing/candy-throwing-geography-quiz-show in your metropolitan area, I look forward to meeting you.

Here’s a surefire Pixar marketing idea I posted on Twitter the other day, in case you missed it.

Followup to Wednesday’s wordplay question about hidden world capitals: what three letters can you add to the front of a world capital to form the nickname for a famous, often-in-the-news American, 1940-2002? Edited to add: Solved (or “solved,” if they Googled!) on this thread.

Okay, we are hitting the freeway to spend the weekend in beautiful Portland. After all this snow, I’m looking forward to some good old-fashioned rain.

To show our solidarity with the anti-SOPA movement, this blog will have no interesting content today. In fact, we’ve been opposing SOPA in this vein for months!

But here’s a little trivia/puzzle thing instead. Who are these famous people and what do their names have in common? Can you add anyone else to the list?

Edited to add: Solved collaboratively on this thread.

There’s a list in my book Brainiac of celebrities and historical figures that are on the record as trivia buffs: William Rehnquist wrote a “trivia question of the day” for his clerks, Tom Hanks watches Jeopardy!, and so on.

But our friend Katja pointed out a new one at dinner the other night: her son is researching the presidents, and did I know that JFK was a trivia buff? I did not!

The anecdote is in many Kennedy bios, including Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life. Apparently, Kennedy’s Choate classmates report that the future president, as a teenager, never missed Information Please, the first megahit radio quiz show. Apparently he was just as good as any of the show’s elite adult panelists–one schoolmate remembers that he himself could only answer 10% of the questions correctly, while young Kennedy knew 60% of them.

So the guy is a game show nerd in high school and winds up having sex with Marilyn Monroe, which would be a first for trivia buffs! (Just having sex, I mean. Not the Marilyn part.)

Caitlin, last night, for the first time rocking the “Andy Capp.” Or is the “Hee Haw”? “Lockhorns”? “Neighbor on Bewitched“?

She didn’t want me to post that, so here she is this morning petting the dog. As you can guess from her hair, the curlers were too uncomfortable to sleep in and lasted about ten minutes.

Take a one-syllable word. Add one W. Amazingly, you now have a two-syllable word–but it’s a synonym of the original word! What is this sorcery, Ken?!?

What are the words?

Edited to add: No answer five hours later! That’s rare. But maybe not surprising, since there’s a little trick. The above description is accurate, but the final word is more than one letter longer than the original word. The final word is nine letters long, in fact.

Edited again to add: Confusion, then answers, then a follow-up question to be found on this thread. ErWenn was first.

It’s starting to look like my next book will be out in January! Um, January 2013. Yeah, I know, but that’s just how publishing lead times work. Hopefully “books” will still exist at this time next year. And it’s not like I’m done writing either, so I need to knuckle down over the next couple months and get…’er….effectuated! (To quote my favorite comedian, Stephen Fry the Cable Guy.)

Title is TBA, but the concept is the one I knocked around here on the blog a while back: why am I always telling my kids authoritative, factual things that may or may not be true? I was on Jeopardy!, for crying out loud. Seems like I should know whether or not it’s bad to chew ice, crack your knuckles, sit too close to the TV, or swim right after eating. But I don’t. I just parrot the same old-wives’-tales my parents told me and hope my kids don’t call me on it.

So this will be a trivia book for moms and dads, not to mention kids hoping to discredit their clueless moms and dads, by getting to the bottom of these ageless mysteries. My goal is a nation where every child can run around without a scarf in the winter, scissors in one hand and a Tootsie pop sticking out of their mouth, picking their nose and eating toothpaste all the while, with their eyes crossed.

A couple weeks ago in this space, we learned that CLIMAX is the only common English word that becomes a world capital (LIMA) when you remove its first and last letters.

Similarly: what’s the only common English word that becomes a U.S. state when you remove its first letter and its last letter?

Edited to add: “Overmonth” and “biowar” and the actual answer discussed here. The first solver was robxlii.

I took the most important part out of this (newish) corporate logo.

What’s the company, and what’s missing?

You could mix up the letters A, N, and T to make a few different words. If you were doing a crossword, you might see “worker insect” (ANT) or “light brown” (TAN) or “slave leader Turner” (NAT). But not every combination of those letters is a familiar crossword entry. ATN, NTA, and TNA aren’t words.

Can you name three letters whose every combination is a word? Some might be familiar foreign borrowings or proper names (like NAT, above) but all are familiar crossword entries. None are abbreviations or acronyms. I can only think of one set of letters that makes six words. Are there more?

Edited to add: Solution and near misses here. Bill was first in.

Based on the description in my book Maphead of the St. Valentine Day’s Massacre, an atlas-based armchair “road rally” run every January/February, several people have asked me how they too can play.

Well, it’s not particularly easy to Google, but there is a website. Jim Sinclair, a.k.a. “the Old Maltese,” keeps the site up-to-date with instructions, entry information, etc. This year, his flagship event, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, costs $55, and he accept entries until February 14. (Entries must be completed before March 5.)

Go go go.

I wanted a chapter in my book Maphead about location-based gaming, suspecting (and this turned out to be true) that your average GPS gamer was some kind of map geek at heart. Geocaching, with its five million or so practitioners, became the focus of the chapter, but there have been dozens of other attempts to get other games off the ground (so to speak). The Degree Confluence Project is one of the best-known: over 12,000 people have visited one of the places on the Earth’s surface where integer lines of latitude meet integer lines of longitude, and recorded their visits at confluence.org.

Mark “Scout” Steger was an early geocacher whose website catalogs other attempts to jump-start alternatives to geocaching: a photography game called Shutterspot, a virtual capture-the-flag game called GeoVexilla, etc. (When I was writing Maphead, Steger was a great resource for helping me track down other early GPS gamers; sadly, he didn’t like the finished book much.) Geodashing was an attempt to do “geocaching without the training wheels,” as one player told me. In geodashing, there is no physical cache–players are trying to get as close as possible to a randomly chosen point on the Earth’s surface, and the quest only lasts for a month. This minimizes possible environmental damage and annoyance to landowners–always bugaboos for geocaching–but it also seems to have minimized the game’s popularity. Steger’s games are played by dozens of players, to geocaching’s millions.

The difference may have something to do with the fact that the hobby of geocaching is now essentially run by a 60-employee for-profit company, Seattle-based Groundspeak, Inc., which has done a savvy job of organizing and marketing the game. But it may also have something to do with the “training wheels” themselves. At the end of every geocaching run is an actual “treasure”–a valueless find, perhaps nothing more than a magnetic key container or a tupperware filled with plastic army men, but a find nevertheless. You have arrived, you are somewhere. It feels a little less arbitrary than a geodash to nowhere.

Because there’s something physical to look for, beyond just a graticule of invisible coordinates, there’s also a chance to exercise the oft-neglected “hunter” part of our hunter/gatherer hindbrains. This is hunting for people who cried as kids when Bambi’s mommy died–there’s your quarry under the rotten log, but it doesn’t leave a corpse to field-dress once the hunt is over.

The Wikipedia entry for “location-based game” gives the distinct impression that the field now belongs to a series of hopeful-but-mostly-unsuccessful mobile apps, some of which garner some media attention as novelties before fading away. There must still be a market for limited-time mass GPS events of this kind, but if there are successful ones, with the possible exception of this Russian game, I don’t know of them. Readers?

(I’m quite charmed by some of the attempts at location-based games listed on the Wikipedia page, by the way. Two favorites: Pac-Manhattan, a game of Pac-Man played against actual “ghosts” on the New York street grid, and Situationist, a game in which your phone instructs you to interact with also-enrolled passersby in unusual ways like “compliment them on their haircut.”)

Kirkus Reviews listed their ten favorite book covers of 2012–and Maphead made the cut! I had nothing to do with the cover of Maphead, but truly it is a beautiful volume. Let’s take one more look.

Isn’t that nice? If you haven’t seen it up close, hint hint, it’s worth a look. At not in one of those library bindings where the jacket’s all sheathed in plastic and I don’t get a royalty when you read it.

Wordplay Wednesday! (On Thursday.) (Night.) What’s the only common English word that becomes a national capital when you take away its first and last letters?

Edited to add: Quickly solved by themanwho (with other, not-so-common suggestions) on this thread.

BULLETIN! I’m not updating this blog as much as I should!

FLASH! But I was on OutFront with Erin Burnett last night talking Maphead stuff. (Actually we taped it the day the book came out, but I finally got a slow enough news day to make the air!) I pointed out to Erin that she had decided to “camel-case” the name of her show, and she liked that lot because she’s into camels. As demonstrated by her Twitter avatar.

NOTICE! My weekly “Maphead” column for Conde Nast Traveler continues as well, most recently on the tricky matter of the “African quadripoint” that probably isn’t. Looks like the column will continue through February at least.

UPDATE! And I’m still doing weekly “Debunking” for Woot, today on the subject of the three (not three) kings (not kings) who visited the baby (not a baby) Jesus.

COMMUNIQUE! I wasn’t on pace to hit 20,000 Twitter followers before Christmas, but I made it with room to spare, mostly on the strength of this, this, and this and some very nice retweets from Nate Silver, Eli Braden, Julia “@TweetsOfOld” Suits, and Pastor Rick Warren, of all people. Boy what a Christmas guest list that would make.

ADVISORY! I am running out of synonyms for “notification!”

Finally, the long-delayed companion to my Slate piece last week about my love of globes! I guess I can claim I was waiting for the Golden Globe nominations to come out today, except that doesn’t make any sense. (Also: screw The Help!)

(Please do not screw the help, however. Hollywood sickos.)

It’s nice to have a little cardboard globe for your living room or office, but here are five globes that are absolutely worth flying to see.

The Biggest Globe

You have to go all the way to Yarmouth, Maine, to see the world’s biggest rotating globe. The 42-foot-tall “Eartha” belongs to DeLorme, the mapping and GPS company whose “Street Atlas” products I enjoyed for much of the 1990s. Time passes faster on Eartha than it does here on regular Earth: the giant globe makes a full day’s rotation every hour.

Hitler’s Globe

Remember in The Great Dictator, when Chaplin’s Hitler-like character does that awesome ballet with the inflatable globes? Well, it’s all true! Not the dancing part, but Hitler did love hisself some globes! The Volkswagen-sized “Columbus globe” was placed in custom stands for lots of high-ranking Nazis, but the one from Hitler’s New Reich offices in Berlin is still missing. The one pictured above, with an American bullet hole in Berlin (BURN!) is from his Munich office.

The Globe You Can Go Inside

Most globes are hollow, or just contain booze. Not so the “Mapparium,” which (pictured above) contains happy multicultural tourists! The three-store stained-glass sphere is the biggest draw at Boston’s Mary Baker Eddy Library. It’s the only place in the world where you can see the whole world in perfect perspective without spinning a globe–you just have to spin your head. (And spin all you like! Christian Scientists don’t believe in exorcism!) Don’t go there for directions, though. The map hasn’t been updated since its 1935 creation, so it’s still full of C. Montgomery Burns-ish destinations like “Siam” and “Bechuanaland.”

Perry White’s Globe

Great Caesar’s ghost! What would the Daily Planet be without an actual planet? The Planet lobby seen in the Christopher Reeve Superman is actually the Art Deco lobby of The News Building (then the Daily News Building) in New York, on 42nd Street between 2nd and 3rd. Hopefully you won’t run into Rex Reed on your way into the building like Clark and Lois did, in one of the great WTF movie cameos of all time.

The Globe You Can Go On Vacation In

The United Arab Emirates’ eccentric “Rainbow Sheikh,” Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan, owns a bizarre car collection in the middle of the desert outside Abu Dhabi (in a custom-built pyramid of his own devising, naturally.) The big draw is the ginormous Dodge Power Wagon built at 64x actual size (and drivable!), but as a geography nerd, I prefer the Globe Trailer, a motor home in the shape of the Earth, miniaturized to exactly one-millionth its actual size. It’s like the stair-car from Arrested Development, but for map geeks!

Sorry for the sparse update-itude lately…sickness is sweeping through our house like some kind of sweeping plague of sickness! I’m still on Twitter, I guess.

While you wait: Wordplay Wednesday!

What do these four words all have in common (more or less)? Can you think of other examples (more or less)? I can’t.

ANGERED
PARENTAL
STATEMENT
EVIL

Edited to add: Answer and some other good suggestions (like AYE and RAISE) on the messageboards.

The second series of Julian Fellowes’ critically-fondled upstairs/downstairs Brit-drama Downton Abbey won’t be seen in the U.S. until early January, when Masterpiece Theater will finally get around to airing it. (Second bizarre factoid: Masterpiece Theater is still on!) That’s so late that British viewers will already have seen a new Downton “Christmas special” by then. That’s so late that the second series actually hit DVD in the UK a couple weeks ago.

Which is how I managed to see it! (Thank you, region-free DVD player! You’re like BitTorrent with a much better picture.) Herewith: a spoiler-free capsule review of “Series 2″ for American fans.

The best news: this is no spectacular self-destruction, as some critics have alleged. The second series is as compulsively watchable as the first, with all your favorite sketches back again: Two Schemers Languidly Smoking, Irish Chauffeur Thinks The Revolution Is Coming, The Maggie Smith Zinger Power Hour. Yes, it’s soapy, but face it, cat ladies: Downton Abbey was always a soap. Just because it had hunting dogs and a dressing gong didn’t necessarily make it highbrow. There is one appallingly florid jump-the-shark moment in episode 6, in the brainwashed-amnesiac-twins vein, but it almost worked for me as a sly homage to American daytime soaps. With that one glaring exception, all the grinding wheels of plot tend to encompass the type of actual living and dying and class conflict that you want on your fictionalized World War I homefront.

Fellowes avoids one of my least favorite second-or-third-TV-season trends: having put all your characters through their paces once, introduce a flock of brand-new characters that reduce the original cast’s screen time to next-to-nothing. Remarkably, the second season of Downton has almost no new major characters: one replacement, and then two other new visitors to make the various love triangles work out right. But Fellowes keeps all the balls of his 18 (!) returning cast members (so to speak) in the air remarkably skillfully. Everyone gets an arc.

Fellowes does seem to be increasingly besotted with his core eighteen, however. He’s got an endlessly, cushily soft spot for his creations. They’re not allowed to be completely vile or Machiavellian anymore: now everyone must have his reasons. The inexplicably unscrupulous Season 1 characters (the scheming Mrs. Danvers Twins, for example) come off best; they’re now better explained and motivated. But previously sweet-and-sour types like the awkward middle daughter and Cousin Dame Maggie are a lot less interesting now that we’re clearly meant to root for them all the damn time.

There are still occasional pauses when the breathless shuffle of plotlines takes a break for some nice moment of period texture hallucinated by Julian Fellowes after a bottle of absinthe and too many viewings of The Remains of the Day: a butler measuring place settings with a ruler, someone seeing their first gramophone. This is what I wanted more of, I guess. Dead oversexed Orientals being scandalously dragged from bedroom to bedroom in the dead of night–meh. Seen it. Maggie Smith never having heard the word “weekend” before: priceless.

Today on Slate: I confess my love for that stodgiest of home-decor accessories: a globe of the world. In this space tomorrow, I’ll run a follow-up piece that didn’t work out on Slate due to photo rights issues: a list of my favorite globes around the world.

Wordplay Wednesday! What do these words have in common? And can you think of others?

FLUTE
TERBIUM
FOX
ZETA
PRUSSIA

Edited to add: Answers, and other suggestions like METHANE, TERN, and REAR, on this thread.

Here’s a helpful list of how much some people and things would weigh throughout the solar system.

Freddie Mercury, on Mercury: 61.6 lbs.

The Venus de Milo, on Venus: 101.5 lbs.

Eartha Kitt, on Earth: 125.0 lbs.

Warren Moon, on the Moon: 36.1 lbs.

A Mars bar, on Mars: .042 lbs.

The Jupiter 2 from Lost in Space, on Jupiter: 2,600,400 lbs.

A Saturn SL sedan, on Saturn: 2596.1 lbs.

Your anus, on Uranus: 0 lbs. (The anus is just an orifice, and weighs nothing. The surrounding tissue is the rectum. On Uranus, your rectum would weigh 0.6 lbs.)

The Neptunes, on Neptune: 380.2 lbs.

Pluto the Pup, on Pluto: 6.0 lbs.

Driving by a small Seattle theater this week, I was delighted to see them holding a special event. Brad Pitt and/or Aaron Sorkin fans take note!

Upon reflection, I’m not 100% sure what a Moneyball poster sale would be. Is it for collectors who are still missing one of the three lobby one-sheets for Moneyball? I hope it’s a Moneyball-style poster sale, because I’ve been hoping to unload some of my higher-paid posters in exchange for some newer, less famous posters with a higher on-base percentage.

Before I forget: I wrote a little something for MapQuest.com! Yeah, I guess as part of the AOL shift in direction, they are now doing content. Anyway, it’s a tour of some of the world’s coolest and kookiest New Year’s customs, complete with map.

I keep getting surprised by the amazing perspicacity of the Internet, as personified by Google’s auto-complete functionality. No matter what question or need you have, you can find not only the answer, but reassurance that many, many other people have sought the same knowledge before you. This morning, I was wondering if there was any way to force hard linebreaks in Twitter. (Would it have made this tweet a little funnier? Maybe so.) I knew as soon as I typed something like “twitter line” I would see the phrase I wanted–and sure enough, there it was: “twitter line breaks,” top result. Others had been here before. (Most Twitter clients, including the website, ignore line breaks, in case you were wondering.)

I was never more amazed than last night. Mindy and I had just finished watching Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy–the six-hour 1979 miniseries with Alec Guinness, not the forthcoming Gary Oldman film. (It’s aged surprisingly badly, by the way. Non-fans of the Smiley books need not apply. Sorry, my parents’ generation.) There was, I thought, an implication in the last couple episodes that two major characters, old Oxford chums named Bill Haydon and Jim Prideaux, shared not just a friendship but a romantic attachment. (Their relationship turns out to be a crucial plot point.) Mindy, watching the exact same scenes that I had, didn’t get the same vibe, her gaydar no doubt demolished by the preceding six hours of foppish, Wodehousian upper-class Brits.

So we Googled. I started to type “haydon prideaux lovers,” with no inkling that this was a popular or important topic. I got no further than “haydon prid…” when Google took over. Voila: “haydon prideaux lovers” was the second result.

Maybe some people miss at least the illusion of original thought in research, but I welcome our new textbox-filling overlords. These tools, from Google auto-complete to smartphone spellcheckers to Twitter “trending topics,” let us experience the thoughts and interests of the human race as if they came from a single mind, and benefit from that collective intelligence.

And no matter how esoteric or even taboo the thing you’re searching for, you can see evidence of forefathers and fellow travelers all around you. You’re never alone anymore.

Nobody ever remembers the first game, but the anniversary of the day I lost on Jeopardy! in 2004 is cause for massive celebrations in this country every year, and parts of Canada as well. Today marks seven years. Where does the time go?

Mostly I like November 30 because it gives me a chance to see this picture a lot. I don’t really know what that face is that I’m doing there, but it’s fun to count the chins. They seem to recede into infinity, like some kind of fractal.

Just heard that my various publishers have gone back to press for yet another printing of both Brainiac and Maphead, which is always nice to hear for the holidays (AKA the only time of year most Americans ever actually buy a book). If you’re thinking about getting one as a present for the brainiac/maphead you love, just contact Steve Winter at Seattle’s Third Place Books: swinter@thirdplacebooks. He will hook you up. I was in their fine establishment just the other day and his hooking-you-up abilities were abundantly on display: a tall stack of purchased books waiting for me to sign and possibly draw dragons in.

Wordplay Wednesday! There are four and a half three-syllable words in Merriam-Webster’s 11th that end with the letter “-isk.” Why four and a half? Because the fifth word has two possible pronunciations, only one of which is three syllables.

One of the words was obscure enough that I didn’t know it myself. How many can you name?

Edited to add: Solved on Twitter and the message boards in simultaneity! Answers here.

My son and I had a blast with some friends and the Emerald City Comicon last year, immortalized in this blog post and everywhere else on the Internet where they like pictures of Wil Wheaton.

Somebody at the convention must have heard I was there, so they asked if I wanted to do a little ad for this year’s con. End result: this!

Actual end result: three different people coming up to me this weekend and complaining that they had to hear my annoying spiel four times from a thirty-foot version of me before the damn movie would start.

The Seattle Times mistakenly seems to believe I live on Seattle’s posh Eastside, but I forgive them, since they include me and Maphead in this piece on local authors making best-of lists.

The San Francisco Chronicle also included Maphead in their holiday gift guide, recommending it among other travel books. I’m sure it’s the only book on the list where the author never gets further from home than Chicago.

And LibraryThing interviewed me about Maphead as well. People keep asking me what my favorite map is, and I have no idea. Does anybody have any suggestions?

If your holiday vacation plans include Seattle: please enjoy the rain. Also, please enjoy this “Seattle for Map Geeks” guide that I recently wrote for CBS, including four points of geographic interest in the Emerald City.

Now that I look at some of the other “Best of” pieces, I think I may have misunderstood the concept a little bit: they wanted local content, which probably means I should have picked some off-the-beaten-path stuff that even locals wouldn’t know about (like my second destination, the “Seattle Centroid”). Instead, two of my four picks are big tourist attractions, and a third is right next to one. But hey, Seattleites’ loss is your gain.

Oh, I don’t think I ever linked to this Roger Craig video, where he explains some of the software tools that helped him win the recent Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions. Full disclosure: Roger also let me monkey with his cramming site in the weeks leading up to the Watson match, and I thought it was a huge help getting me back in game mode. In fact, one of the testimonial quotes at the end of the video comes from me. Sigh, if only I’d been playing Tom Nissley and Buddy Wright instead of Brad Rutter and an evil supercomputer. And found all the Daily Doubles.