This past Friday on a date at Batch Gastropub (first date in a while) I showed up a little early so I got a beer and leaned back against the wall and watched Wheel of Fortune and without suggesting that I’m normally some bag of hot intellectual shakes I was a bit surprised, as a Word Person, to see how much I sucked at it, and to remember how many times I’ve made that observation in the past.

            Like I’ll ask you for instance to please consider this thirty-second clip, one of my all-time internet favorites, and you’ll have an idea of how bad I am at Wheel of Fortune.

            What also felt unjust is that my date sowed up just as Jeopardy! Was opening and so I had to turn away from the TV.

            There was a thoughtful and beautifully weird piece in The New Yorker last week about Jeopardy! And Wikipedia, one of my favorite New Yorker pieces of the year, talking about Alex Trebek’s death and recent memoir, called And the Answer Is…, and also about a new book of essays addressing the 20^th anniversary of Wikipedia.

            Apparently Trebek made $10 million a year for 46 days of work. Trebek maintained that the show would prosper with or without him but it’ll be interesting to see if that turns out to be true. I think it’s true but I’d be down to see them test it by hiring Gilbert Gottfried.

            Reminds me of a late interview the writer Jim Harrison gave shortly after his wife’s death where he says to the interviewer, “I still talk to her. You would too after 50 years.”

            That sentence grabbed me.

            Much later in the night my date said to me that she once had sex on an ATV.

            I said, “While it was moving?”

            It was dark in my bedroom but I could see by the moon that she gave me such a look.