wehappy3

Hi Ken!!

I have a question that I'm sure you've been asked a million and one times. I have a Jeopardy audition coming up in three weeks, and I'm SUPER excited about it. I also have a day job and a toddler, both of which preclude extensive studying time.

My question: If you could only study 5 things while preparing for a Jeopardy audition, what would they be?

(Not necessarily five categories/topics, although that works as well if there are any topics that you felt like were absolutely essential. I'm looking at studying category titles so that I can become better at word association/pre-guessing possible clues, studying the Pavlovs, etc. I'm also already working on practicing buzzer timing as much as I can.)

FWIW, I tend to be strong in literature, history, and geography. Not so strong in pop culture, music, opera, or Broadway.

Both of those first two are at the top of my list to review, but after years of playing pub trivia, I have both of them down pretty well. In particular, the Animaniacs Presidents song is one I memorized years ago, which has come in handy for many Jeopardy episode viewings and pub trivia questions. There is one small error (it omits mention Cleveland's two non-consecutive terms) but overall if your kids didn't have this song in their rotation when they were younger until you wanted to gouge your eardrums out with an icepick, you either failed as a parent or did something really, really right.

Good call on the strong categories. I feel like I need to hit areas I'll get stuck on, but I honestly don't think I'm ever going to care that much about opera or 1970s disco tunes. lol.

Again, thank you SO MUCH!!

I spent some time in Transylvania about a dozen years ago with a former roommate and his family (who lived there.) It's absolutely gorgeous, but most of it is very, very rural, and even the cities (I spent time in Dej and Cluj, as well as at a small cabin in the boonies near a tiny town called Baile Homorod) were not what I was used to here in the states. Some things that stood out to me:

1) Some people still used horse+wagon as primary transportation, and not for religious reasons (like Amish here in the states.) Overall, the visible poverty was much, much worse than the visible poverty here in the US. It's also a different kind of poverty, so I feel like I shouldn't compare, but it was very striking to me.

2) Roads were terrible. A 100 km drive that might have taken an hour at home took closer to 2.

3) Infrastructure overall was rough. My roommate's parents had high-speed internet, but it was literally from an ethernet cable run down the outside of the building from a neighbor's apartment. The sewer system frequently backed up in both places we stayed (family houses, not hotels) and water pressure was inconsistent.

4) A lot of people still lived in old Communist-era apartment blocks that were only slightly more spacious than a college dorm. Even newer houses looked old after a few years.

5) This is something I've noticed in quite a few countries, not just in Romania, but I feel like we in the US take for granted that we don't have/need a tall wall around our house and an iron security gate. Those things are very common even in nice areas in much of the rest of the world.

6) The treatment of and racism against the Roma population... well, I know that's not just an issue in Romania, but I felt like it was much worse, or at least more noticeable, there than anywhere else I've traveled (21 countries so far.)

7) Overall it was just... very provincial. Hay was sometimes hand cut with scythes (I saw this being done) and almost always stacked loose rather than baled. People outside of cities still had bucket wells with long lever-like poles for the buckets. Entire families would come up from the lowlands (it was summer) with a truck or horse-drawn wagon full of watermelon and park alongside the road, then just camp there for several days until they sold all of the watermelon. Rural women would go into the forest early in the morning, pick wild berries, then stand at the roadside and sell them in beach buckets like a kid would use while playing in a sandbox. You'd buy the berries and provide your own container so they could reuse their sand pails.

Those are the things I remember, anyway. All that said, I don't want to be negative about it, because I really enjoyed my time there. But I'd just spent a week in Hungary prior to spending two weeks in Romania, and the difference was jarring.

My son is 3 and just had his Twinkle graduation! I love hearing from other Suzuki parents about how their kids are doing--I can't wait to see that same growth with him. <3