Watching Alex Trebek

 I watched Jeopardy! faithfully for years, often not missing an episode for many months at a time. For a couple of years in the mid aughts I'd post the Final Jeopardy! clue in the Rants &

Raves section of Craigslist, when that section was a lively, pre-social media venue for anonymous posts. I'd have the answer on top and the reader would have to scroll down far to see the question, so they could try to answer it themselves. People would write to thank me for doing this. Once, someone politely requested that I also post who won, the current champion or someone else, so I added that to the bottom. At the time, Craigslist would let you post in more than one city, so I posted in my own, which is Philadelphia, and New York. 

When television went digital in 2009 I got a government-issued voucher which enabled me to buy a converter so I could watch on my aging television set. It worked fine until one day while watching something the little green light that indicated it was on faded out. It reminded me of robots dying in science fiction movies. Although streaming wasn't a thing yet, I didn't bother replacing the converter or my television. It's best to read more, and there was always the internet and radio for current news and Netflix discs for movies. 

I moved and now have a working television but I don't have cable and the aerial reception is iffy so I rarely turn on the television unless I'm streaming movies and shows from Amazon Prime or Netflix. I was long out of the habit of watching Jeopardy! but I began watching it again after learning of the death of the show's host  Alex Trebek, of pancreatic cancer November 8, 2020. 

I liked him. I'm old and fussy about language. (If you say you "could care less" about something, I will tell you that you've just said the opposite of what you meant to.) I liked that Alex pronounced words correctly, words like "sophomore." He'd make it a three-syllable word. I read that young people are amused at the way he pronounced "genre," but he says it the way I do, with the "g" like the second g in "garage." He and I also say "houzes" instead of "housses" for the plural of "house." I don't mind that language changes over time, but it's better when it changes to make it more efficient opposed to changes due to ignorance. "All right," for example, should be spelled "alright," as with "almost" and a few other words like it, and "alright" is becoming accepted now. The same goes for the use of "hopefully." 

Watching the show airing since Trebek's death is at times heart-wrenching. Just last week, for example, he said, brightly, "Can you believe it's just two weeks until Christmas?" When you hear that now, you hear hope in his voice. 

Yes, I know some will say it's hard to feel too sorry for someone who made millions of dollars a year doing a job he loved and dying at eighty, but when you see a person directly and they're not doing something evil, you can't help feeling for them, at least a little. A thing I read about the final shows he did that makes watching them hard for me is that he'd said in the last weeks of them waves of pain would hit him, going from level two to ten, and he had to struggle to keep himself functioning. (Chemo hurts a lot.) I watch him in these final episodes, knowing from personal experience that duty can sometimes trump discomfort, and wonder whether he was feeling pain at that moment.