Mike O'Connell

Word on the street is that Jeopardy! will air a “greatest of all time” tournament in January, the winner to take home $1 million. Participants will be the three players who’ve won the greatest amount of cash in the show’s history: Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter, and James Holzhauer.

Whoa. That’s murderer’s row. What a time to wish you still had “TV.” (TV? That old thing?)

Let the record show these gentlemen have already taken Jeopardy! for $10.7 million, but this is totally not about the money. This is war, and the combatants worthy of such a distinction. It’s sort of beyond anything we see in the “regular” sports, which have championship contests every season. This is, perhaps, a once-in-a-lifetime event, akin to a heavyweight title bout or Elvis television special.

This is the kind of thing I would totally buy on pay-per-view.

Think about it, Jeopardy!

One of the ways I demonstrate negative numbers to my students is to have them compute “plus/minus” numbers. As in, points scored (plus) and points scored against (minus). Obviously you want a big “plus” number, and the good teams have it. Bad teams have a “big” minus number. (Only the absolute value is big, kids; the numbers actually get smaller and smaller as you subtract.)

My hometown NFL team this season has scored, in total, 125 points in 10 games. That’s pretty awful. Worse is that they’ve given up 253.

(I’ll give you a minute.)

Yeah, negative 128.

Ouch.

Not the worst, however.

The Cincinnati Bengals (one of the worst franchises in sports history) this year have scored 147 points and given up 276.

Yup, it’s worse. Negative 129.

(This is tomorrow’s bellringer, by the way.)

So my local team is still not the worst.

Barely.

I had high hopes for Harry Connick Jr.’s new album, True Love: A Celebration of Cole Porter. After all, not many singers around today (read: people who are still alive) know who Cole Porter is, or can give his songbook the respect it deserves. Harry’s one of them, and still has the youthful cool cred to enlighten a 21st-century crowd.

Accompanying the album is a return to Broadway for Mr. Connick, a two-time Tony nominee though absent from the Great White Way since 2011. He’ll have his own show at the Nederlander Theatre in December featuring songs (and the orchestra!) from True Love.

Something tells me the show will be great. I’ve seen Harry perform a few times live and he is electric.

His studio album? Eh. Better than your average singer doing Sinatra karaoke (it’s hard not to hear it as that). It’s the music that’s great. Harry’s got enough respect in the music business that the best session players in the world want to record with him, so you can bet his bandmates are the cream of our top-flight music schools. And just as important… Harry can afford them. (When you play for the Yankees you expect to get paid.)

Bottom line: great tunes, solid arrangements, expert playing, but the CD lacks the magic of a live performance.

Guess I’ll have to see the show.

I’ve written about this many times, and for years it has been getting not only worse but more obvious: the Blue electoral tsunami rising through Northern Virginia, the kind of crest that tips an entire state. Yes, I live in that embarrassingly-blue sector. We’re rich and we vote like it.

But forget names and labels and parties and median family income. You know you’re in a wealthy area–and one that loves public spending–when bond measures totaling hundreds of millions of dollars pass by margins of four to one!

We keep the entire state afloat–might as well serve ourselves too.

That clinking sound you heard last night was members of the ’72 Dolphins making toasts following the Baltimore Ravens’ victory over a previously-undefeated New England Patriots. (And the snickering sound you heard was, well, me snickering.)

Yes, I realize the 49ers are still undefeated too, but isn’t it much more satisfying to see the Patriots knocked down a peg?

Just sayin’.