With apologies in advance if this has already been discussed (the "search forum" function doesn't seem to want to work).
WWTBAM is rerunning its 2006 College Week shows from last November this week. I remember seeing them when they were first aired, but cannot recall if it hit me then as it did today, but it hit me today like a ton of bricks!
It's Day Three and we have Zach Harrison of the University of Wisconsin-Madison as the carryover contestant. He's plowed right through to the $4,000 question up to this point, having burned only one lifeline (for some reason, at $2,000, he didn't couldn't remember that "orgo" is college-student shorthand for "organic chemistry" and asked the audience)! In any event, he forges ahead and gets to the $50,000 question without burning any more lifelines.
He uses Switch the Question at $50,000 on "What U.S. president is commonly credited with inventing the swivel chair?" and correctly answers the alternate question, "Iraq does not share a border with which of these Middle Eastern countries?" by a reasoned process of elimination. He then (successfully) uses his Phone-a-Friend at $100,000 on "The two official mascots of the 2006 Olympic Winter Games were Neve, a female snowball, and Gliz, a male what?" (His PAF, his dad, must have googled it, because he comes up with the right answer at the last second.)
With one lifeline left, he's then presented with this question for $250,000:
Of the planets in our solar system, where does Earth rank in terms of size?
A. Fourth-largest
B. Fifth-largest
C. Sixth-largest
D. Seventh-largest
He immediately uses the 50/50, which leaves B and C, which should have been the end of it. He says to himself (correctly) that Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter are all "definitely bigger." Given that there are only nine planets (I guess this was before Pluto got downgraded), that leaves five, which means that the ONLY POSSIBLE CORRECT ANSWERS are A and B. But, since the 50/50 has already eliminated A, the answer is clearly B! But does he say "B. Final answer"? No, he does not. Instead, he continues his ruminations, saying (again, correctly) that Mercury and Pluto are "definitely smaller," leaving only three. He then goes on to say that he wants to say that one of the remaining planets, Venus or Mars, is bigger than Earth, which, apparently, he believes would make the correct answer C. (Of course, if that WERE true, then Earth would be the THIRD-LARGEST, not the sixth-largest, which wasn't even one of the options initially presented!) But, apparently, he's used up his reserves of reason and logic. I guess he must have decided to take the chance that either Venus or Mars IS bigger than Earth, because he ultimately says, "C. Final answer."
I'll admit that walking with $25,000 is nothing to sneeze at, and losing $75,000 is pretty painful, but here we had one of the rarest of circumstances on WWTBAM: the 50/50 lifeline actually proved useful by leaving an obvioulsy wrong answer as one of the remaining options, and at the $250,000 level no less!
How much do you want to bet that his friends at school have been razzing him unmercifully about this gaffe for the past six moths!?
