74. I Hear You're Hosting

[Eric Porter]

Thanks for the nudges! I only started today because I saw the link in your footer. I have trouble with these kinds of puzzles.

[MikeyG]

Thanks for the nudges! I only started today because I saw the link in your footer. I have trouble with these kinds of puzzles.

This one was a little bit avant-garde, admittedly. But thanks for solving - glad you see you on Pun of a Kind! Here's to more joyous solving!

[Qmark]

Just needed the first 2 nudges to help me to the finish line...thanks Mikey!

[HeadinHome]

Came looking for a Saturday morning challenge and realized I had missed this one last week! So glad I found it cuz that was fun! (Didn’t use the nudges)

[MikeyG]

Puzzle #74 answer: KEN JENNINGS

Correct entries: 51





Thanks, @BrennerTJ!

You didn't need to answer in the form of a question in this meta, but if you didn't check the clues, you might be in jeopardy!

Thanks to 10-Down (which serendipitously came up on fill and was not originally intended in the puzzle!), we are clued to the fact that a synonym for "host" is "emcee." That, coupled with the "I Hear" in the title, signals that MC is an important combination.

And we can see a lot of them in the clues, some of them more well-hidden than others ("Morphological contest" as opposed to some pun for BEE might be the most forced, haha). When we take the 10 answers to these "MC" clues, we get

BARB-EASE-BEAU-ABE-BEE-SEA-GNUS-MANN-PEAT-HUR

It certainly doesn't look like much, and unless there's some well-known BEBA B. SGMPH I don't know about, the initial letters won't help either! Per the title, we have to go Mad Gab on this one and sound out the words (I tried to make this as identical as possible; ABE was originally HAY with the clue "Manger content," but I didn't even like the early "H" sound there).

BARB-EASE-BEAU = "Barbie's beau" = KEN
ABE-BEE-SEA-GNUS-MANN-PEAT-HUR = "ABC newsman Peter" = JENNINGS

And we have our answer KEN JENNINGS, the phenom-turned-host who initially won 74 consecutive games (puzzle number connection!) on the show. I was in high school at the time, and even my non-game-show-aficionado friends knew about it.

When I started tutoring, however, perhaps that was a distant memory - few of my students even into my first couple years remember that outstanding run. Some did tune in to see James Holzhauer's outstanding, "all-in" run in 2019.

When Alex Trebek passed in 2020, I was in mourning for someone who was a part of my childhood for decades. Even that day, some of my students were a bit more nonplussed, but it hit me hard, doubly so that it happened during the chaos of the pandemic.

Nobody, as I'm sure Ken himself would concur, could fill Alex's shoes but, at the same time, even Alex said repeatedly Jeopardy! is not about the show but about the contestants and the pursuit of knowledge. Even with that, it's important to have someone who cares deeply about the game at the helm, and how wild it is that a mild-mannered software engineer would grow into a role so quickly, so admirably.

And after all that, to shoehorn in an analogy, puzzles without solvers are useless, and I thank all of you for consistently solving these metas over my first three years of construction. Keep on solving puzzles of all kind, have a very happy Thanksgiving, and I'll see you on Saturday for the three-quarter-century-mark puzzle!

Mikey G

[KayW]

A beautiful tribute to both Alex and Ken. And yet another clever, creative, and most fun-to-solve meta. Thank you Mikey for all the puzzles!