Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Jan. 11 - I'd like to buy a clue, Pat...

Today I learned that I still don't have the answer to an ages-old question, at least for me.

I was watching Wheel of Fortune tonight. Hey, remember waaaaay back when Wheel first came on and you could go shopping with the money you won? Once you solved a puzzle, they would give you a total and then the camera would pan over a rotating set filled with prizes - furniture, jewelry, trips (usually they'd frame a photo of the destination and caption it), all of which had price tags on them. And they'd have the camera shot of the contestant in one corner, naming her selections, as if she was actually hovering over everything herself. I wish they still did that.

Tangent. Sorry.

As you probably know, you get money for each consonant you guess correctly in the puzzle. But you have to "buy" vowels - they deduct a pre-set amount of money from what you've earned. So you only want to buy a vowel if you need help figuring things out, right? Makes sense to me, anyway.

Then why on God's green earth do people who obviously know the answer still buy vowels? Come on, now. The topic is "Place" and the board says "L_ND_N, EN_L_ND" - do you seriously need the vowels to solve this (or at least figure out that the last consonant is a G)? Are you confused that it might be "LINDIN, ENZLOND" instead?

It's especially fun to see when people do that and then try to make up their losses with another spin - at which time they hit BANKRUPT and everything goes out the window. Then the next contestant with absolutely nothing in the bank spins one time, hits the $5000 space, calls out that G and solves the puzzle.

Am I missing something here? And am I the only Austin Powers fan who can't read the above phrase without internally saying "London, Eng-a-land"?

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