Bear Flag Blog

I was at the gym on the elliptical machine, which meant that I had to choose between 'The Price is Right', some Maury Povich-like show, or ESPN. Normally it would be ESPN hands-down, but in this case they were discussing in detail Mark McGuire's steroid use, about which I could not care any less. So it was 'The Price is Right'.

Now, 'The Price is Right' is pretty far to the 'Wheel of Fortune' side of the game show spectrum, where 'Jeopardy' is for rocket scientists and nuclear parapsychologists, and 'Wheel of Fortune' is for people who get investment advice from their dog (who generally advises them to invest in commemorative plates and "U.S. Mint" gold-clad "1876" $10 coins, for only $19.95 each limit 6 per customer). Being closer to the 'Jeopardy' end of the scale, I found one thing about 'The Price is Right' particularly annoying.

Points are determined by how many people (of a sample of 100) answered a question in the same way that you did. Note the complete lack of 'accuracy' in that statement. It doesn't matter how good your answer was, what matters is that you can think the most common thought. If the sample group all thought that the Wright brothers made the first nonstop trans-Atlantic flight, well then that's 100 points for that answer and a big goose egg for Alcock and Brown.

What I want is a game show that also involves questions asked of 100 people, but where the contestant scores points for being correct, and the fewer people out of the 100 that also got the answer right, the better. Give the contestant three questions, say, of varying levels of difficulty, in a given category. They choose a level of difficulty, after which the question is revealed. If their subsequent answer is correct they get (100 less the number of questionees who answered the question correctly) points.

If they answer incorrectly, they get horsewhipped by Stephen Hawking in an "Aliens"-esque exoskeleton. No, if they answer incorrectly, another contestant can steal the answer or some such thing.

So, for instance, a contestant could face the following:
Geography:
Easy: Cheyenne is the capital of which U.S. State?
Medium: Which Canadian city of over 100,000 people is the furthest north?
Hard: Lord Howe Island is administered by which country?

There may have been a game show along these lines, given the quiz show craze of the 1950s, but if so I'm not familiar with it. Next contestant.