Game of the Week: Concentration

As a little child in my single-digit years, NBC's Concentration, hosted by Hugh Downs of later 20/20 fame, was easily my favorite game show: I was an avid daily fan, of course with elementary school eventually posing an insurmountable time conflict starting with first grade in the last half of 1962.  Each game is between two contestants, who take turns trying to match overturned blocks on the 5x6 game board.  With each match, the board gradually clears to reveal a rebus message. Rebus, a puzzle I encountered a lot as a kid, combines pictures and strategically-placed letters to reveal a real phrase...whichever contestant solves the rebus wins the game, along with his or her accumulated prizes.  What I liked the most about Concentration is what I like about just any game show, which is to be able to play along with the contestants and try to outguess them, in this case both as to the matching blocks and the rebus puzzle solution.  We also had a card game we called "Concentration"....without the rebus feature...in which the cards would be shuffled and then scattered face down covering the tabletop.  We'd then try to match numbers...whoever ended up with the most matches won.  I think Concentration would be a very popular game show were it resurrected with a dedicated host, much as what happened when Alex Trebek led Jeopardy!'s resurgent popularity after a several-year hiatus...interestingly it was brought back in 1987-91 with Trebek hosting it: they should have kept it going.  But for me, I'd be happy just watching reruns of the old Concentration episodes... 

Game of the Week: Jeopardy!

 

Jeopardy!, my all-time favorite television game show, is still on the air despite the recent tragic passing of its long-time host Alex Trebek from pancreatic cancer.  It's not the host, though...although I liked Trebek...that attracts me to Jeopardy!.  After all, for several years of my childhood from the mid-sixties into the early seventies, I used to enjoy watching it when Art Fleming hosted it.  It's essentially a trivia game between three contestants who have already been prescreened to demonstrate that they're not complete dunces.  Each round...there are two in each game...consists of six categories of topics, each with five answers of increasing monetary value.  The questions read as "answers" to which a contestant must formulate the appropriate question.  For example, an "answer" might be shown as "The most prevalent element in Earth's atmosphere" to which the correct question would be "What is nitrogen?". After the main part of the show is over there is a final Jeopardy answer for which the contestants wager in advance however much they want to from the money they've accumulated so far...the total money winner at the end gets to continue playing in the next episode.  It's fun for me to see how much I know and how I match up with the contestants...there are definitely some categories for which I am pretty ignorant!  For the past few weeks on the show's current run they have been featuring guest hosts, but I usually only have the opportunity to view it Saturday evenings, and at that time they're almost always showing reruns from when Trebek was hosting it.  May Jeopardy! endure for many more years and maintain its present dignified format and tone.  I've written about this show a couple of times in the past on this blog: click on the title to read the article: Jeopardy Wagering Strategies (8/3/14) and Quote of the Week...from Alex Trebek (11/13/20)....

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #50-46

Now I begin my final top 50 all-time favorite songs from my original list of 500.  Four of the five go way back into the past...and the other reminded me of it.  They're all superb in their own ways...you should give them each a listen...

50 TIME IN A BOTTLE...Jim Croce
In early 1974 this single by Jim Croce, who had died the previous summer in an airplane crash, was popular on the radio...I always liked it a lot and found it a good meditative song.  I also remember at the time...just a seventeen-year old high school senior...feeling that I was old and that so much of life had passed me by.  There's an old song by Bob Dylan with the words "but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now".  He got that right, and Croce I believe had the makings of a long, Dylanesque career himself had his own life not been so tragically cut short...

49 TIMEBOMB...Beck
Timebomb was a 2007 alternative rock singles release by this multiple-Grammy winning Los Angeles artist, not a part of his original Modern Guilt album (which I also recommend) also released that year.  It has a bubble-gum sing-song nature to it that Beck somehow makes work...and it brings a strange association to my mind: back in 1969 during the last half of my seventh grade experience at Nova High in Davie, Florida we had a bomb scare that lasted several hours, with students forced out into the surrounding field for hours without any relief under the hot, beating sun.  I don't think they ever found a bomb, but the experience just standing out there like that with no end in sight was unsettling (and memorable) enough...

48 EAST OF GINGER TREES...Seals and Crofts
A very beautiful, mystical track from the pop duo's famous 1972 Summer Breeze debut album, it evokes some pretty exotic and vivid imagery...and the background instrumentation is fantastic with its oriental overtones.  Because I liked their early '73 single Hummingbird so much I later bought the album, otherwise I might never have heard this wonderful piece that should be near the top of anyone's listening list.  Seals and Crofts made a string of singles hits for the next few years...I think my high school graduating class's theme song was their We May Never Pass This Way Again...

47 UP THE LADDER TO THE ROOF...the Supremes
Although Diana Ross had left the group by early 1970 when this song came out, the lead vocal sounds like her...ironically, although I thought (and still think) that she was/is great, Up the Ladder to the Roof is my favorite Supremes song. It was Jean Terrell, brought on to replace Ross, who sang lead on this optimistic, wistful song that was popular and a source of soothing during a turbulent period in my early teen-age years.  In 1983 I thought that Prince had ripped off the chorus melody to it with his Little Red Corvette...I seem, however, to be the only one who felt that way...

46 EYES OF A CHILD/FLOATING...the Moody Blues
From the Moody Blues' 1969 concept album To Our Children's Children's Children is this three-part piece, the John Lodge-composed and sung Eyes of a Child sandwiching the core song Floating, another Ray Thomas composition.  It's Floating that I like a lot here, but to get the full impact of it all I recommend you listening to it all together.  The first part of Eyes of Child sounds a bit like the band's hit Nights in White Satin while its closing part reminds me of their Just a Singer in a Rock n' Roll Band.  Floating is a tribute a child's vivid, powerful imagination...very sweet yet with a peculiar psychedelic bent to it...

Next week: #45-41...