The Critical Role of Mrs. Jeop

After the game is completed, it needs to be proofed. Traditionally, before our son, Philip a/k/a Lil Jeop, went to college and before he started playing the games, this was done at the dinner table as a family treat. The two of them would compete with one another over the answer. When Phil is home, this still continues, though I write fewer games and I write them more slowly now, so this is not very frequent. Sometimes when Phil realizes he's heard a game he just won't answer when playing.

The key is to read the game aloud, because this helps me find about 90% of the typos and the poorly phrased questions. I mark them and . . . honestly the one thing I hate is then going back and fixing them. There was a long time when I had a pile of edited games sitting on the dining room table and I'd forget to make the corrections in the actual game until almost game time, and then I'd have to hunt around to find the right one (God forbid I should actually title them or anything), a panicky scramble I apparently preferred to, say, simply making the corrections right after I marked them.

The thing about Marjorie is that she doesn't like playing the games online, because she doesn't get into strategy of bagging or anything and hates to have to type under a tight buzzer (though no one could call my buzzers tight these days). But her knowledge of certain things is tremendous (trust me, she'd have killed everyone who played the 1586 game) and her knowledge of other things, like the casts of movies I know she's never seen, is surprisingly good. On the other hand, the first time we heard this line in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,", "I know nothing of these early sixties sitcoms of which you speak," we looked at each other and cracked up. Marjorie grew up without a TV and late night TV in particular was a mystery to her. She saw some afternoon TV at a friend's house, but in the evening no. Popular music past 1975 isn't exactly a high point in her knowledge either. So sometimes I'll just simply say, "there's no way in hell you're getting this" and I'm right about 99% of the time. She can make a pretty damn good educated guess, though, since she's basically heard me read every single game I've ever hosted, and that goes back a ways. As Sherlock Holmes might say, she knows my methods.