They’re never as easy as you think they are, but I don’t think these are very hard.

1. What word for a part of the body can be split down the middle into two halves, each containing the same set of letters? The only difference is that, to make the second half, the third letter of the first half has been moved to the very front of the second half?
2. Name two military ranks that both begin with a word for a punctuation mark.

That is all.

Though I forgot about it yesterday, this is the week that GSN begins re-airing my 2004 Jeopardy! run, weekdays at noon Eastern. They even invited me down to appear on their live morning interstitials yesterday to talk about stuff, but I couldn’t make the timing work.

Four years, somehow! I guess maybe this run will remind some viewers of that magical, nerdy summer when people were actually having occasional Jeopardy! conversations over the cubicle walls at work, or during morning commute-time radio programs. And rushing home to watch every night, or changing the channel in bars so that everyone could watch a quiz show? I guess. I was pretty insulated from any of that, unless someone at work said, “Hey, they were talking about you on the radio again this morning!”

For me it had all happened months ago, and kept under a very large, Sony-mandated hat. I mostly remember relief that every night meant one fewer night of secret to keep. It wasn’t for another month or so that the real craziness started…sleazy semi-journos calling me up pretending to be Sony publicists in hopes of getting me to say how many games I’d won and stuff.

I also remember that on tonight’s show, I get a little cocky and make a huge FJ bet and get an easy question. Then I (SPOILERS!) blow it. That was about it for me and big Final Jeopardy! wagers.

Anyway, people are always asking me when Jeopardy! is going to put out a DVD of those 75 games (thirty hours of hot game show action! it can’t miss!) so here’s your second chance. Get those TiVos and DVD burners ready! Remember, it’s not copyright violation if you don’t get caught!

For a while over on the message boards, everyone was posting “picture puzzles” with stolen Internet photos and a “What comes next?” or “What do they have in common?” theme. At the time, I remember I kept coming up with dozens of ideas for these, but I never got around to posting any of them.

But today I don’t really have anything else to write about, so here’s one I just came up with. What do these eight famous people have in common? Two much harder follow-ups: once you see the theme, can you name all eight members of the list, even the ones with not-so-famous faces? And can you find a pic of a Hollywood couple that both belong to the list?

From one of Caitlin’s favorite bedtime books, on Winnie-the-Pooh opposites:

I’m afraid that cracks me up every night…which, I know, says more about me than about the book.

But it does give new meaning to the phrase “Hundred Acre Wood.”

No post yesterday, mostly because I didn’t get back from the Radiohead show until about 2 a.m. It had been raining all day Wednesday, so my friend Earl and I (Earl of Chapter 1 of Brainiac fame) were anticipating the worst. We were fully girded and ponchoed for war. Then the skies miraculously cleared just as we got to the venue, and it turned out our seats were covered anyway. Oh.

Then it started to rain again as we were in the line/mob waiting for shuttles after the show. Our enthusiasm was sagging like Thom Yorke’s left eyelid, but we did eventually make it on to a bus, and even more eventually to our car, and finally back home. I’ve seen blog accounts by others who were still sitting in traffic just outside the venue at 2:30 a.m.–over three hours after the second encore ended!–so on the whole I’d say we got off easy.

I had meant to post a little response to Ron Rosenbaum’s silly piece in Slate yesterday about the evils of puzzle-solving–even before the message boards starting agitating for a takedown.

Let me say first of all that Rosenbaum’s attitude in the piece is obviously being exaggerated for comic effect–he noticed a few goofy/annoying things about puzzle people, and by stretching those to article length, he gave a lot of attention to an “issue” he probably, in reality, cares very little about. And, oh, the huffy, serious letters he must be getting from crossword lovers! I can’t bring myself to read the Slate “Fray” responses because I just know it’s going to be a shooting gallery in there.

I do sympathize. I myself have spun some dopey observations into a blog post just because it momentarily amused ne to do so, and then had to put up with angry emails from idiots convinced that I hated Alex Trebek, or the fat people in Wall-E, or whatever.

But I only sympathize a little, because Rosenbaum’s piece really doesn’t really defend its odd thesis (I think puzzle people are annoying!) very well, or make me laugh, and why on earth is it three Slate pages long? I think it’s just plain goofy to assert that puzzle people clearly don’t read much, or think about real-world problems, or they wouldn’t be doing puzzles so damn much–as if puzzles are a substitute for literature or or philosophy or issues. I bet it’s pretty easy to demonstrate that puzzle-solving as a hobby correlates strongly with reading a lot, problem-solving skills, etc. These are people who read and think a lot. And that makes them good at this puzzle stuff too, so that’s what they occasionally do over a cup of coffee or on an airplane. To unwind. Not because real art or life or whatever is too tricky for them.

I also think it’s funny how he thinks he’s talking to US about THEM, those puzzle weirdos. Dude, you’re writing in a “smart” on-line news/culture magazine for slightly hip nerds, or slightly nerdy hipsters, and you’re dissing the Sunday Times crossword and NPR quiz shows? You are talking directly to THEM! And they’re going to start throwing tomatoes. You’re done.

So, I swear, I had an idea for a post this morning about how you parse the (vulgar but vivid) phrase “I need to piss like a race horse.” In other words, is it “I need, like a race horse, to piss,” or is it “I need to piss in the manner of a race horse”?

I Googled the topic for guidance–and found this blog post! The thinnest idea I’ve ever had for the blog, and it was already used! Two years ago! The Internet is officially full. I give up.

Thank goodness for Wordplay Wednesday. A couple movie-related questions:

1. Take the name of a 1990s science fiction film, one that was Roger Ebert’s favorite movie the year it was released. Now change just one letter–in fact, just add a single stem to one letter–and you’ll get the site of a big movie festival. In fact, it’s a place where I once sat next to Ebert himself in a screening.
2. What famed movie director has a first name that sounds the same as the name of an animal preceded by the noise that animal makes?

Edited to add: Solutions were here within minutes.

I just got my comp copies of mental_floss magazine in the mail, which means the new issue is about to hit “newsstands,” whatever those are.

It also means the new issue must have an installment of my 6° of Ken Jennings column–otherwise they don’t send me copies! Researchers who have been working for years to discover a connection between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and coleslaw can rest easy. It’s all taken care of, and–spoiler warning!–it involves extinct dwarf elephants (no extra charge). Here’s the original draft, if your curiosity is whetted. (If, on the other hand, you’re just hungry for coleslaw now, I can’t really help.)

Coleridge to Coleslaw

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a great Romantic poet, but maybe a lousy role model: he produced some of his best work while blissed out on a once-popular opium-and-alcohol mixture called “laudanum.” (Kids: just say no to 18th-century drugs!) In 1797, for example, he woke from an opium-induced dream and scratched out the famous opening to his poem “Kubla Khan”: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree…” but was only 54 lines along when he was called away by a nameless “person on business from Porlock.” By the time Coleridge got rid of the unwanted visitor and returned to his work, his memory of the dream had vanished, and he had to leave the poem unfinished.

In 1274, the explorer Marco Polo visited the real Kublai Khan in China, staying for seventeen years and bringing back fabulous tales of the emperor’s great wealth. In one (possibly exaggerated) story, he records that the Khan became fixated on a ruby owned by King Sendernaz of Ceylon, a ruby nine inches long and as thick as a man’s arm. Kublai offered the king an entire city in exchange for the ruby, but the king wasn’t selling.

Ruby was also the name of a celebrated painter whose bold abstract canvases sold for as much as $25,000 apiece and put eager collectors worldwide on 18-month waiting lists. But, as it turns out, Ruby would have painted for peanuts: she was a four-ton Asian elephant at the Phoenix Zoo. Zookeepers noticed that Ruby, as a teenager, liked to doodle in the dirt with a stick, so they replaced the stick with a paintbrush and were amazed by the work that resulted. By the time Ruby died in 1997, the zoo had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling her art.

Insular dwarfism is a genetic phenomenon that causes members of an isolated population to shrink in size from generation to generation. The most famous examples are the skeletons of dwarf elephants that have been unearthed on Crete and other Mediterranean islands. These Pleistocene pachyderms look just like modern elephants—except that they’re roughly the size of a pig. The 2003 discovery of miniature human-like remains on the Indonesian island of Flores has raised no small controversy—are these the bones of regular old Homo sapiens with a medical condition, or could prehistoric Indonesia have been peopled by a whole new species: tool-using little people the size of hobbits?

In 1976, a Georgia artist named Xavier Roberts first crafted the needle-molded fabric dolls he called “Little People.” In a stroke of genius, he started selling the little soft sculptures, complete with personalized adoption certificates, from a Cleveland, Georgia store he made over as “Babyland General Hospital.” By the time the toys were licensed to Coleco in 1982, they’d been renamed Cabbage Patch Kids, and by Christmas 1983, their adorably puckered little faces were causing riots in department stores nationwide. Xavier Roberts’s name is still stamped on the left buttock of every Cabbage Patch Kid sold.

Shredded cabbage salad is eaten all over the world, from the Dutch koolsalade, which lent American coleslaw its name, to spicy Easy African kachumbari. One place that coleslaw hasn’t caught on, however, is China. When KFC was expanding into China in the 1980s, they found that their traditional American side dishes didn’t sell there, so they replaced mashed potatoes and coleslaw with local faves like bamboo shoot salad, spinach soup, and rice porridge. Of course, they also found out that they’d mistranslated their slogan, “Finger-lickin’ good!” into Chinese as “Eat your fingers off!” so that may have been part of the problem.

So I never got the hotel Internet connection to work in L.A., hence the TOTAL NEWS BLACKOUT!!! But I made it there, I made it back, the TV pilot got taped, and if anything ever comes of it, I’ll let you know.

So, thanks to Dylan and his Phelps phetish, I’ve been suckered into compulsive Summer Olympic-watching for the first time since Atlanta. Who do you think have more exotic and heart-rending health problems: the parents of Olympic athletes, or the children of NFL quarterbacks? Hard to say. I’m waiting for the official medical study in JAMA.

Here’s my wholly unfounded Olympic conspiracy theory. Every “medal count” list I’ve seen from Beijing in the U.S. media is ordered by total medals. Conveniently, this is the only metric by which you can say the U.S. is leading China (currently up 39-22 in golds).

My memory is that, when I was a kid, the medal lists were always ordered by gold medals won, not total medals won. Is this true? Did this change recently, in order to keep “U.S.A.” at the top of the list despite the new Chinese dominance?

Our little Utah trip has turned this site into something of a black hole, from which nothing–not even content!–can escape. But we’re back now, with no casualties. There wasn’t even much kicking and screaming on the plane flights. Well, a little kicking, but no screaming. Sorry, elderly lady in 19C.

My new theory about flying with kids is that it’s like running away from a bear. (Don’t think I’ve posted this before; apologies if I’m senile and inadvertently recycling material.) In case of a bear attack, you don’t need to be the fastest camper. You just have to not be the slowest camper. For obvious reasons. The second-slowest camper is probably going to be fine, unless the bear is a particularly fast eater.

And so it is on a crowded airplane. You don’t have to be the best-behaved infant. You just have to not be the worst. That way, someone else’s shrieking little darling can absorb all the hostile vibes and dirty looks.

Here are the little second-worst-flyers playing at a Utah dinosaur museum. Pictures courtesy of Aunt Faith. (”Aunt Faith” sort of sounds like a creepy Jack Kirby New Gods character, but it’s really just my sister-in-law.)

Even indoors, these pictures really capture the inherent…brownness of Utah in the summer.

I’d like to promise that the blog will really be crackling this week to make up for the downtime, but I’m flying to L.A. tonight for another TV thing I don’t think I can talk about, so that’s where I’ve disappeared to, in case I disappear.

I forgot to bring any CDs on our little Utah trip, so we’ve been listening to a lot of public radio in the rental car this past week. Just like when we used to live here.

But yesterday I turned on the radio to the local NPR station and heard only a single sentence. That one sentence was such a perfect summation of public radio that I reflexively hit the power button again and turned the radio off–I knew I wouldn’t be able to beat it.

Here’s what I heard, word for word:

“But today it isn’t only modern dancers that are using ancient Incan calligraphy as a metaphor!”

It isn’t? Why wasn’t I told?!? See, you can’t make this stuff up.