Well, I figure I can milk at least one more blog entry out of GSN’s Grand Slam this week. I had a little riff on Bourne Ultimatum in mind, but Mindy told me it wasn’t funny. So how about a Grand Slam FAQ with all the questions they didn’t ask in those annoying halftime interviews?

A: Okay, whatever.

Q: Why, oh why, didn’t you use your switches at the end of the second and fourth rounds of your Victor Lee match? You could have run out his clock!

A: Because I had no idea what I was doing up there! As you probably saw during the Olmstead-Kitt match, you have to crane your head a bit to see your scores, and I just wasn’t watching them closely enough. Also, every time I meant to switch on Victor during that match, I got mixed up and said “pass” instead.

After the Sunday airing, we were sitting around talking about switches, and we came to the same conclusion that poster Zach Baker arrived at here: switches are a mug’s game. The only possible advantage is to the switchee, who may know the question and answer it almost instantly. Otherwise, the switchee should always just “switch back,” which eventually lands the unwanted question back to the switcher. (Or just “pass” it–now you’re a switch up on your opponent and you really can stick him or her with an unwanted question somewhere down the line.)

Unless you need them to run out the clock on somebody, just don’t switch. Is this analysis right or am I screwy?

Q: Can the contestants read the questions when the folks at home do?

A: Only on certain math-heavy and letter-manipulation-heavy questions. No General Knowledge questions were displayed for us. I noticed right off: this makes it a vastly different game than Jeopardy!

Q: Speaking of those letter manipulation questions–I thought you were supposed to be good at crosswords and stuff. What happened on the anagram questions?

A: Yeah, I thought the anagram stuff would be easy money, but I could have stared at “SKATE HOUND” for quite a while before I saw “KATE HUDSON.” Even watching the same questions at home, I still couldn’t see/remember the answers (though I did see JERRY GARCIA and BATON ROUGE right off the bat, so maybe it was just a panic thing/mental block due to the game-clock pressure). I thought Victor was eerily good at these, though. Or maybe everybody can do them and I was just eerily bad.

Q: Spelling backward? How’d you do that?

A: Cranium, baby. I’m also really good at sculpting recognizable animals out of oily, stinky, purple Plasticine.

Q: Why can’t we see the Questioner? Who is it?

A: He’s outed in the closing credits roll (probably in tiny narrow letters, while a Without Prejudice promo plays next to him): NY1 anchor Pat Kiernan. I had lunch with Pat one time, pre-World Series of Pop Culture, when Michael Davies really wanted him to be the co-host of our proposed Comedy Central show. He does an amazing job on Grand Slam, at a pace that would give even Alex Trebek a coronary. Must be something in the water up there in Canada. Fun fact: the Questioner on the British Grand Slam was Nicholas “Young Sherlock Holmes” Rowe.

Q: There was a British Grand Slam? Was it the same?

A: The format was virtually identical, right down to the set and staging–see these clips from the UK final. The biggest difference was the £1,000 buy-in: contestants actually put up their own money to play, and the winner kept the pot. You’ll also notice that the word and number questions are a good bit harder in the British version–in the UK, shows like Countdown still test those skills, whereas the US bracket was almost entirely trivia types. The British winner was a math teacher and Scrabble champ. In the US, most of us were having a hard enough time doing two-digit subtraction in our heads.

Q: Poor Amy Kelly got Ruttered! Whose idea was it to put on a Lingo champ?

A: GSN’s. Lingo is a GSN show. You do the math. I mean, you do the “Numbers and Logic round.”

Q: What is “Dr. Kevin Olmstead” a doctor in?

A: Environmental engineering. I don’t know whether it was Kevin’s idea, or television’s, to always refer to him by the full title, but I dig it. It makes him sound more like a Universal monster-movie mad scientist.

Q: Did Victor Lee ever try to trash-talk you, Twisted Misters-style?

A: No, that was just for the VH1 cameras. You can read about his World Series of Pop Culture and Grand Slam experiences on his blog, Victor Sells Out.

Q: What will Arrested Development and Superbad star Michael Cera look like in thirty-five years?

A: Ed Toutant. (What, am I the only one who sees this?)

Q: Speaking of Ed, are you really supposed to swallow the final ‘t’ in his surname, French-style, like the Grand Slam hosts kept doing?

A: If you are, I’ve been saying it wrong for a long time. Sorry, Ed!

Q: So, the hosts. Ken, you seem like a smart enough guy. Why would Dennis Miller use “the mask of Nefertiti” as a simile for an “ugly pummeling”? Wasn’t Nefertiti beautiful?

A: You got me. I’m also not sure why Ed and Leszek used their switches “more adroitly than Captain Bligh in foreplay.” Mindy’s family and I were puzzling over this and two schools of thought emerged: the “he meant Captain Hook” school and the “Bligh was a disciplinarian, therefore he may well have beaten sex partners with a flexible rod called a switch” school. Since neither one makes much sense, I may fall back on a third theory, which I’ll call “Dennis had a drink between each round.”

Q: So you didn’t like Dennis Miller?

A: Actually, I thought he did exactly what they wanted. I’ve read a lot of game show diehards whining about how Pat should have just hosted as well, but I actually like the contrast between the deadly-serious Voice of (Canadian) Doom and the smirking TV types in the booth. It made the sports-event vibe work, which I’d never seen on a quiz show.

I have to give props to Dennis for not poking fun at the contestants. Mostly he’s riffing on the questions themselves. Sure, he’ll occasionally laugh at a bad answer, but there’s a fine game-show tradition of that going back to You Bet Your Life. Never does he take cheap shots about how the contestants look like nerds (even when they do), live in their parents’ basements (even when they do), etc. If anything, he tried to wring humor out of exaggerating their intellect, game show prowess, etc., making them seem larger than life and actually sort of…cool. Good luck finding another stand-up who would do that.

Okay, he did call Ogi Ogas “the only Tolkien character to advance this far in the tournament” but that was actually sort of funny.