Transcript 05/24/12 - Dan Feinberg

[BBTranscriptTeam]

Dan Feinberg
Los Angeles, CA

Dan is newly engaged and living the dream by being on Millionaire. Dan's fiancee, Rachel, is in the audience, as are his mom and dad, Gayle and Allen. Dan knew Rachel in high school, but they only started dating after college, getting engaged about four years after that. Dan and his dad love watching Millionaire; his dad is a big trivia buff.

Topic Tree (Unrandomized)
10: Cat Intelligence Agency
9: More Than a Secretary
8: Publishing Firsts
7: Signs of the Times
6: Observe and Report
5: Museum Act
4: A Long Week
3: Female Skincare
2: Techie Talk
1: Sit Down

Topic Tree (Randomized)
2: Techie Talk
6: Observe and Report
4: A Long Week
3: Female Skincare
8: Publishing Firsts
7: Signs of the Times
10: Cat Intellegence Agency
1: Sit Down
9: More Than a Secretary
4: A Long Week
5: Museum Act


Question #1 - Level 5: Museum Act
What actor is the subject of a Florida museum that holds a canoe from the movie "Deliverance" and a helmet from "The Longest Yard"?

A: Tom Selleck B: Chuck Norris
C: Sylvester Stallone D: Burt Reynolds

Answer/Value/Bank

D: Burt Reynolds
Question Value: $3,000
Bank: $3,000

Question #2 - Level 4: A Long Week
If you loved someone "Eight Days a Week," how many days of love would that be per year, in a non-leap year?

A: 365 B: 371
C: 416 D: 524

Answer/Value/Bank

C: 416
Question Value: $7,000
Bank: $10,000

Question #3 - Level 9: More Than a Secretary
A senior member of U.S. Congress, Michigan's John Conyers employed what famous woman as his secretary from 1965 to 1988?

A: Nancy Pelosi B: Coretta Scott King
C: Rosa Parks D: Madelyn Albright

Spoiler

Dan is relatively sure it's not A or D, so it's between A and C. He's leaning towards C, but he
jumps the question.

Answer/Value/Bank

C: Rosa Parks
Question Value: $500
Bank: $10,000

Question #4 - Level 1: Sit Down
A person with a ringside seat is most likely enjoying a close-up view of which of these sporting events?

A: Golf tournament B: Baseball game
C: Boxing match D: Bicycle race

Answer/Value/Bank

C: Boxing match
Question Value: $10,000
Bank: $20,000

-- Commercial Break --


Dan is an attorney with some law school loans to pay off and a honeymoon coming up.


Question #5 - Level 10: Cat Intelligence Agency
What was the name for the CIA's failed experiment in the 1960s to use a domestic cat as a spy?

A: Acrobatic Kitty B: Analytic Kitty
C: Atomic Kitty D: Acoustic Kitty

Dan jumps the question.

Answer/Value/Bank

D: Acoustic Kitty
Question Value: $25,000
Bank: $20,000

Question #6 - Level 7: Signs of the Times
A Capricorn who is eating corn in Capri on his birthday is in which of these places during which of these seasons?

A: On a peninsula in summer B: In a city in fall
C: On an island in winter D: In a desert in spring

Answer/Value/Bank

C: On an island in winter
Question Value: $100
Bank: $20,100

Question #7 - Level 8: Publishing Firsts
The publishing giant Simon & Schuster was started by two men who in 1924 published the world's first what?

A: Phone book B: Crossword puzzle book
C: Cookbook D: Horoscopes

Dan asks the audience.

ATA

A: 35% B: 43% C: 17% D: 5%

Dan was leaning towards

Spoiler

phone book

. He goes against the audience and with his gut instincts, and leaves with "total winnings" of $1,000.

Answer

B: Crossword puzzle book

[SportsFan68]

Question #5 - Level 10: Cat Intelligence Agency
What was the name for the CIA's failed experiment in the 1960s to use a domestic cat as a spy?

A: Acrobatic Kitty B: Analytic Kitty
C: Atomic Kitty D: Acoustic Kitty

Dan jumps the question.

Answer/Value/Bank

D: Acoustic Kitty
Question Value: $25,000
Bank: $20,000

JTQ 1

Question #7 - Level 8: Publishing Firsts
The publishing giant Simon & Schuster was started by two men who in 1924 published the world's first what?

A: Phone book B: Crossword puzzle book
C: Cookbook D: Horoscopes

Dan asks the audience.

ATA

A: 35% B: 43% C: 17% D: 5%

Dan was leaning towards

Spoiler

phone book

. He goes against the audience and with his gut instincts, and leaves with "total winnings" of $1,000.

Answer

B: Crossword puzzle book

JTQ 2

[MarleysGh0st]

Question #2 - Level 4: A Long Week
If you loved someone "Eight Days a Week," how many days of love would that be per year, in a non-leap year?

A: 365 B: 371
C: 416 D: 524

Answer/Value/Bank

C: 416
Question Value: $7,000
Bank: $10,000

Terrible question! A year is set based on a astronomical event, while a week is an arbitrary definition. If we redefine a week to be eight days, a year would still be 365 (and a fraction) days!

If they wanted to ask "How many weeks are there in a year? Multiply that by eight." they picked an awful way to phrase that.

[Snaxx]

Remember "The Feinberg Method"? Just thought it would be fun to mention it.

[TheConfessor]

Question #2 - Level 4: A Long Week
If you loved someone "Eight Days a Week," how many days of love would that be per year, in a non-leap year?

A: 365 B: 371
C: 416 D: 524

Answer/Value/Bank

C: 416
Question Value: $7,000
Bank: $10,000

I probably would have figured out the answer they wanted on this one, but it's just plain wrong. The answer is A, since there are 365 days in a year, which is just a physical fact, independent of any arbitrary new definitions of the number of days in a week. A day is how long it take the Earth to turn on its axis and a year is how long it takes for the Earth to go around the Sun. The Earth rotates 365 times per orbit around the Sun, regardless of how you break that time up into months or weeks. Sometimes the goal of the game is to give the best wrong answer.

EDITED TO ADD:
I see that Marley was making the same point as I was writing this.

[TheGlowingPotato]

Sometimes the goal of the game is to give the best wrong answer.

64% of the people agree with you....

[minimetoo26]

Question #2 - Level 4: A Long Week
If you loved someone "Eight Days a Week," how many days of love would that be per year, in a non-leap year?

A: 365 B: 371
C: 416 D: 524

Answer/Value/Bank

C: 416
Question Value: $7,000
Bank: $10,000

Terrible question! A year is set based on a astronomical event, while a week is an arbitrary definition. If we redefine a week to be eight days, a year would still be 365 (and a fraction) days!

If they wanted to ask "How many weeks are there in a year? Multiply that by eight." they picked an awful way to phrase that.

Agreed. At first, I thought they were asking something along the lines of "If each week had 8 days instead of 7, how many weeks would a year have" but the answers were way off from 46ish. All this was testing is if you knew there were 365 days in a year, 52 weeks in a year, and could add the two together, coming close to one of the answers given. And get paid $7000 for your trouble.

[TheConfessor]

Sometimes the goal of the game is to give the best wrong answer.

64% of the people agree with you....

If you're referring to my experience on the show, only 22% voted for the glowing spud, which would have been my best wrong answer. But all's well that ends well.

[Kazoo65]

1. Easy. Burt Reynolds is from Florida.

2. A math question-I JTQ.

3. I knew this one cold. Rosa Parks lived in Detroit in her later years (and died there). This ties in with the final question we were asked at trivia night on Wednesday-which every team got wrong. It is: What state has the two longest-serving members of the House of Representatives-one who's been there 46 years and the other 55 years? The answer is

Spoiler

Michigan.

Spoiler

We said New York. When the correct answer was revealed, there was a collective groan from all the teams that were still playing.

4. easy.

5. You have gotta be kidding. I had no idea and guessed Atomic Kitty. This is a real WWOQ. It's JTQ time.

6. easy. If you know that Capri is an island, the rest is pretty simple to figure out.

7. I guess he doesn't do crosswords.

[MarleysGh0st]

Dan Feinberg
Los Angeles, CA

Dan is newly engaged and living the dream by being on Millionaire. Dan's fiancee, Rachel, is in the audience, as are his mom and dad, Gayle and Allen. Dan knew Rachel in high school, but they only started dating after college, getting engaged about four years after that. Dan and his dad love watching Millionaire; his dad is a big trivia buff.

So if dad is the trivia buff, why isn't he standing at the Hot Podium instead of Dan?

Too many gray hairs, huh?

Question #2 - Level 4: A Long Week
If you loved someone "Eight Days a Week," how many days of love would that be per year, in a non-leap year?

A: 365 B: 371
C: 416 D: 524

To continue grumbling about this horrible question, a year is not exactly 52 weeks long. Particularly since they made a point of specifying a non-leap year, we should expect that an artificially inflated year with these arbitrarily inflated weeks should be 417 days long.

[earendel]

Dan Feinberg
Los Angeles, CA

Dan is newly engaged and living the dream by being on Millionaire. Dan's fiancee, Rachel, is in the audience, as are his mom and dad, Gayle and Allen. Dan knew Rachel in high school, but they only started dating after college, getting engaged about four years after that. Dan and his dad love watching Millionaire; his dad is a big trivia buff.

So has dad tried out for the show?

Question #2 - Level 4: A Long Week
If you loved someone "Eight Days a Week," how many days of love would that be per year, in a non-leap year?

A: 365 B: 371
C: 416 D: 524

Answer/Value/Bank

C: 416
Question Value: $7,000
Bank: $10,000

8*52 = 416. It's a matter of being able to do the math in one's head.

ETA: Sometimes it's a good idea not to overthink the question. Marley and theconfessor are correct but the question writers didn't stop to think about the difference between the referents "week" and "year".

Question #3 - Level 9: More Than a Secretary
A senior member of U.S. Congress, Michigan's John Conyers employed what famous woman as his secretary from 1965 to 1988?

A: Nancy Pelosi B: Coretta Scott King
C: Rosa Parks D: Madelyn Albright

Spoiler

Dan is relatively sure it's not A or D, so it's between A and C. He's leaning towards C, but he
jumps the question.

Answer/Value/Bank

C: Rosa Parks
Question Value: $500
Bank: $10,000

For me the choices would have been either B or C, and more likely C than B.

Question #5 - Level 10: Cat Intelligence Agency
What was the name for the CIA's failed experiment in the 1960s to use a domestic cat as a spy?

A: Acrobatic Kitty B: Analytic Kitty
C: Atomic Kitty D: Acoustic Kitty

Dan jumps the question.

Answer/Value/Bank

D: Acoustic Kitty
Question Value: $25,000
Bank: $20,000

I'll JTQ also. I would have been torn between C and D.

Question #7 - Level 8: Publishing Firsts
The publishing giant Simon & Schuster was started by two men who in 1924 published the world's first what?

A: Phone book B: Crossword puzzle book
C: Cookbook D: Horoscopes

Dan asks the audience.

ATA

A: 35% B: 43% C: 17% D: 5%

Dan was leaning towards

Spoiler

phone book

. He goes against the audience and with his gut instincts, and leaves with "total winnings" of $1,000.

Answer

B: Crossword puzzle book

Slam dunk on this one.

[MarleysGh0st]

Question #2 - Level 4: A Long Week
If you loved someone "Eight Days a Week," how many days of love would that be per year, in a non-leap year?

A: 365 B: 371
C: 416 D: 524

Answer/Value/Bank

C: 416
Question Value: $7,000
Bank: $10,000

8*52 = 416. It's a matter of being able to do the math in one's head.

ETA: Sometimes it's a good idea not to overthink the question. Marley and theconfessor are correct but the question writers didn't stop to think about the difference between the referents "week" and "year".

There's overthinking the question on the contestants' part, but there's also underthinking the question on the writers' part. In this case, they were so eager to build a question with simple trivia and simple math around a bit of pop music fluff that they muddled what they were asking.

And, yes, I did understand what they were asking, but I'd have made a point of explaining why this was a bad question, before "asking for clarification" while stating what I thought they were trying to ask.

All of which would endear me to TPTB, I'm sure, and maybe they'd edit that all out from the tape. But at least the studio audience would be my witnesses.

[littlebeast13]

Sometimes the goal of the game is to give the best wrong answer.

64% of the people agree with you....

If you're referring to my experience on the show, only 22% voted for the glowing spud, which would have been my best wrong answer. But all's well that ends well.

Actually, only 12% voted for the best, right, wrong answer, but who's counting?

lb13

[TheConfessor]

64% of the people agree with you....

If you're referring to my experience on the show, only 22% voted for the glowing spud, which would have been my best wrong answer. But all's well that ends well.

Actually, only 12% voted for the best, right, wrong answer, but who's counting?

lb13

Yeah, you're right. I remembered it was 64-22-12-2, but I momentarily forgot which was which. The two lowest results were for the underground vegetables, potato and carrot, which I assumed would be harder to see if they were glowing.

[littlebeast13]

If you're referring to my experience on the show, only 22% voted for the glowing spud, which would have been my best wrong answer. But all's well that ends well.

Actually, only 12% voted for the best, right, wrong answer, but who's counting?

lb13

Yeah, you're right. I remembered it was 64-22-12-2, but I momentarily forgot which was which. The two lowest results were for the underground vegetables, potato and carrot, which I assumed would be harder to see if they were glowing.

Well, it hit me when I was able to recall the percentages for both notorious answers that I had completely forgotten what the other two distractors were at all. Now I gotta dig up the question in my long-buried original notebook and find out what that other distractor was....

lb13

[TheConfessor]

Actually, only 12% voted for the best, right, wrong answer, but who's counting?

lb13

Yeah, you're right. I remembered it was 64-22-12-2, but I momentarily forgot which was which. The two lowest results were for the underground vegetables, potato and carrot, which I assumed would be harder to see if they were glowing.

Well, it hit me when I was able to recall the percentages for both notorious answers that I had completely forgotten what the other two distractors were at all. Now I gotta dig up the question in my long-buried original notebook and find out what that other distractor was....

lb13

I'll save you the trouble. It was cabbage.