USA: Very Disappointing

Before the workload roof caved in on me (I'll write about that separately later), I got to watch the USA's final game in this year's World Cup this morning. Things have been too busy for me to comment on the results until now. While I think the referee was wrong on calling that penalty kick, it wouldn't have mattered that much, as the USA had to win the game, not draw. I'm very disappointed in the USA team, which was supposed to be better than that. Congratulations to Ghana for coming in as the assumed doormat of the group and instead moving on, while the #2-ranked Czechs also go home. (I don't see Ghana getting past Brazil, though.)

Ow

I decided to make pea soup, especially because the stuff I bought a few days ago for it (potatoes, carrots, etc.) would not have kept too much longer. But I learned the hard way that it's a bad idea to cut carrots with a large knife and a small attention span. I sliced my left index finger quite nicely with the tip of the blade. Dropping everything, I ran to the bathroom and washed out and cleaned the cut, then applied pressure to it for a while before bandaging it up. It could have been much worse, I reckon. As it is, it's just annoying, and the bandage on my finger slows down my typing.

Match Game on Game Show Marathon

I've been watching, sort of in spite of myself, CBS's Game Show Marathon, not so much because of the celebrities playing, but to see how well they recreated the classic shows. This week's show was Match Game, so of course I had to watch.

They did a pretty good job, getting the color scheme, the orange carpet, the general set design, etc. For some reason, it sounded like they used the actual theme music, but they used a remix of the "think" music that I'd never heard before and that I expect they composed just for this show. They were close, but not exactly matching, the typefaces and little details of the design from the original. Considering how many details they had to try and reproduce, I'm impressed. Like with all of the other shows they recreated in this series (except The Price is Right, for which the sets already exist), it seems like a heck of a lot of work to produce just one episode of the series.

I'm not sure why they used the Match Game '73 logo, including the '73. (That's a different version of the logo than what I'm showing as my user icon here and that we've adapted for use with Match Game SF.) I would have left the year off the logo entirely. Possibly this was because they were shooting to reproduce the exact '73 variation of the rules, which means they did not use the "Star Wheel" for the Celebrity Match, but allowed the contestant to select a panelist instead. On the other hand, they used the Match Game PM variation of three rounds in order to stretch the show out to an hour, so who knows? Maybe they didn't want to build the Star Wheel.

I think it was really great that in the #6 "Betty White" seat was... Betty White! The other celebrity choices seemed to fit their historical counterparts. In fact, I think that if they wanted to bring this game back, they could do worse than starting with this bunch. But they won't revive this show. Every attempt to revive it has failed, IMO because the show isn't nearly as edgy now as it was in the 1970s.

Still, it's pretty fun to play with the right panelists. I hope the chemistry clicks at Westercon. As it happens, yesterday, I bought a package of 500 large index cards for use by the panelists. We used up most of the cards that I had in stock during BayCon. I also, if I find the time, want to replace the "contestant score" and "panelist match" indicators with larger ones printed in color. Fingers crossed.