Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

This Just In: Wolf Blitzer bombs in front of a national television audience

And he wasn't even on CNN. Shocking:
In a scene seemingly taken from the “Saturday Night Live” parody, the “Situation Room” host had trouble with a number of questions on an episode of “Jeopardy! Million Dollar Celebrity Invitational Tournament” on Thursday, landing at a score of negative $4,600 at the end of Double Jeopardy.

Wolf flubbed questions about a type of pasta, King David and Jesus’ hometown, an accused person in court, the word “excerpts” and 1850s economics.
Blitzer actually said, "What is Jerusalem?" when Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek recognized him to provide the answer to the question about Jesus' birthplace. Blitzer evidently doesn't do much caroling at Christmastime, or he would have known the correct answer is Bethlehem (as in, O little town of.... Maybe that's becaue he's always cooped up in the Situation Room.

Some of Blitzer's other flubs follow. These first two, the like Jesus' birthplace answer, are from the Three E's category, for words with three e's in them:
Answer: An accused person in court, along with his counsel
Wolf: What is a defendant? (One E too few, Wolf. Try defense.)

Answer: Selected some material from a larger work
Wolf: Annotated. (He didn’t even have the “what is” in there. And that’s not what annotated means, and it only has one E. So, three-fer.)

Finally, to the clue “The 1850s saw a bad one of this 5-letter word that refers to an economic crash and the fear-driven rush to sell,” Wolf responded, “What is a crash?” This, friends, is how you wind up $4,600 in the red at the beginning of Final Jeopardy.
The episode (for now) is available for viewing online, if you want to watch The Tonight Show's Andy Richter breeze through whole categories while Wolf struggles to get points in edgewise. Even Desperate Housewives star Dana Delany (who portrays Katherine Mayfair) outperformed Blitzer, who found himself further behind but more embarrassed as the show stretched on into its second half.

Blitzer sure provided a fine demonstration of how it's a lot easier to read a prompter than it is to think on your feet.

No wonder he's the Most Trusted Name in Pointless Blather.™

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