Jeopardy! recap for Tue., May 15 – The second round of the Teachers Tournament continued with the following contestants:

– Claire, high school Latin from Lexington, KY, who will be using her grant to get more Latin books;
– Rachel, elementary special education from Trumansburg, NY, who attends circus school; and
– Judy, 8th grade English from Fortescue, NJ, who learned the value of protest and that it’s cool to be smart.

Rachel had $7,800 when she found DD3 while trailing Claire by $5,400, but instead of going for the lead, she only bet $2,500. This proved costly as at the end of DJ, Rachel finished with $15,900, just $100 behind Claire at $16,000, while Judy was in third with $7,600.

DD1 – IT’S ONLY AN ALLUSION – The name of this duo Alice meets in “Through the Looking Glass” refers to a pair so alike they’re near indistinguishable (Claire won $3,000)

DD2 – THE KING’S ENGLISH – The third English king of this name was the first born in England; the first two were born in Lower Saxony (Judy lost $2,000 on a true DD.)

DD3 – WORLD CAPITALS – You need to use 2 hyphens when spelling the name of this Caribbean capital founded in 1749 (Rachel won $2,500)

FJ – U.N. LANGUAGES – Of the six official U.N. languages, it’s the one written in a cursive form only

Everyone was correct on FJ, so that $100 difference in the scores at the end of DJ proved decisive, as Claire added $15,801 to win with $31,801. Note that Rachel made a huge overbet of $10,000, when the percentage play would have been a very small wager to shut out Judy.

Triple Stumper of the day: No one knew the author of “The Thin Man” was Dashiell Hammett, and in the “Big Mouth” category, the lyrics to the Smiths song didn’t lead them to “Bigmouth Strikes Again” (for some reason, Alex didn’t offer a Morrissey impression).

This day in Trebekistan: When introducing the “I Need A Vacation!” category, Alex added “Don’t we all?” I suppose we do, even those who work four days a month as Alex does.

Correct Qs:

DD1 – Who are Tweedledum and Tweedledee?
DD2 – Who was George?
DD3 – What is Port-au-Prince?
FJ – What is Arabic?