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What are you famous for?


Whitestripe

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3 hours ago, Xray the Enforcer said:

For various values of famous (or infamous): Nate, @Mr. X and I gave Ron Donachie (Ser Rodrik on the show) a spicy drink at the Chicago WorldCon that made his face go numb. The next WorldCon, Rory McCann (The Hound on the show) walked up to us and said "YOU!!!!! Ron Donachie warned me about you people!"  :lol:

That same drink made a photographer drop his camera into the ice bucket because he was uncontrollably keeling over.

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Just now, The Great Unwashed said:

Yes, yes I was.

That’s awesome! How’d you do? I’ve always kinda wanted to tryout but the thing stopping me is and has always been the part where you have to tell Alex something interesting about yourself.  I ain’t here to chat, Alex. Let’s get to the fucking questions.

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14 minutes ago, S John said:

That’s awesome! How’d you do? I’ve always kinda wanted to tryout but the thing stopping me is and has always been the part where you have to tell Alex something interesting about yourself.  I ain’t here to chat, Alex. Let’s get to the fucking questions.

Won my first match, lost the 2nd. I think I could have done better, but we were in front of a huge studio audience and I developed a bad case of stage fright lol.

Yeah, so you have to give like three options (at first) for Alex to choose from, and he picks one and asks you. I made up one thing entirely because I couldn't think of more than two. Luckily, he never got around to asking me about that one.

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10 minutes ago, The Great Unwashed said:

Won my first match, lost the 2nd. I think I could have done better, but we were in front of a huge studio audience and I developed a bad case of stage fright lol.

Yeah, so you have to give like three options (at first) for Alex to choose from, and he picks one and asks you. I made up one thing entirely because I couldn't think of more than two. Luckily, he never got around to asking me about that one.

Nice man.  I’m sure it is much easier sitting on the couch and yelling answers at the TV than it is in front of a full house with the knowledge that millions will watch at home.

There are days when I feel like I’m torching through categories (from my couch of course) and could possibly beat the contestants, but then there are other days when I’ll watch a whole episode and feel like I only knew like 5 clues in the whole damn thing and would clearly have gotten my ass handed to me by any of the three. Really a lot of variables, and it’s not at all uncommon to see a contestant face-plant so I’d be thrilled to win any match, even just the first. That’s a great claim to fame, IMO.

 

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12 minutes ago, S John said:

Nice man.  I’m sure it is much easier sitting on the couch and yelling answers at the TV than it is in front of a full house with the knowledge that millions will watch at home.

There are days when I feel like I’m torching through categories (from my couch of course) and could possibly beat the contestants, but then there are other days when I’ll watch a whole episode and feel like I only knew like 5 clues in the whole damn thing and would clearly have gotten my ass handed to me by any of the three. Really a lot of variables, and it’s not at all uncommon to see a contestant face-plant so I’d be thrilled to win any match, even just the first. That’s a great claim to fame, IMO.

 

Honestly, the buzzer threw me a bit my first match, so I had a few bad answers and missed opportunities. I had a quiz bowl background in high school, but you didn't have to wait to answer the question; you just buzzed in as soon as you knew it. But there, you get locked out for a bit if you buzzed in early. So getting the timing down was hard. Also, I played way back in the day, so I wasn't aware of all the game theory going on with it. I just saw it as a straight-up knowledge test.

2nd game, there was a woman just a bit faster and a bit better than me. I brain-farted on Final Jeopardy, but it didn't matter because she would have beaten me anyway.

And it's way bigger a claim to fame than I ever thought it'd be. I come from a fairly small town, and everyone there knew me and knew about it. Even 20 years later I'll run into someone who says something about it every once in a while.

ETA: Alex Trebec is every bit the same in person as he seems on TV. I've been really broken up about his diagnosis.

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When I was 14 I was at a high school party that got broken up and I lost my ride in the chaos. I didn't want to call my parents (I was supposed to have just been staying overnight at a friend's house), so I walked almost 20 miles overnight to get home. I got back mid-morning Saturday when my dad was out, and I pretended I'd just gotten dropped off. Never got caught.

I told some friends though, and the story spread.

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Not really a widely famous thing, but a close group of friends will never let me forget the time I discovered that a friend's rabbit had died at her 21st birthday party. I could have walked away and pretended that everything was fine, but instead I did the right thing and reported the demise of said bunny...

Every so often something triggers an Of Mice And Men reference and everyone has a laugh at my expense.

I didn't even pet the fucking thing, okay?

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Mine isn't as cool as Jeopardy (which I always dreamed of getting on), but I was on a short-lived game show in 1990 called Quiz Kids Challenge. The premise was to have a team of three smart kids (I was 13 at the time) compete against three adults to answer general knowledge questions.

They recruited me in fifth grade (they took a handful of students nominated by our teacher) and kept me in the process doing test shows for three years before they had a TV-ready product. One time we ran a mock episode with Marc Summers from Double Dare as our host, which was pretty exciting -- my best friend and I got autographs from him.

We shot a week's worth of episodes in one day. Me and two kids against a new crew of adults each episode. We won four out of five and would have won all if they'd credited my teammate for a correct answer: "variable" referring to the letters in algebra. They wanted us to say "letters" but variable is more technically correct! They later acknowledged that the answer was correct and gave us the $400 that question was worth, but if they'd given us credit in the moment, we'd have won the day and kept the money for that whole episode (you only get money if you win the episode).

That was also the fourth episode in one day and we were visibly tired. Our mothers in the green room started yelling at the PAs to get us some sugar and we rallied to win the fifth episode. I took my prize money, roughly $3000, and bought my first PC with that -- a 386DX/33 with a 14" VGA monitor. My brother talked me into getting the larger hard drive, even though I was like, "Come on, what am I going to do with 125 megs of storage?"

Fun fact, the director Paul Thomas Anderson was a PA on that show, and had a very similar-looking kid quiz show in "Magnolia." And I went to see that movie with my high school semi-girlfriend, who'd also been in the development of the show, before we ever met each other.

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In 7th grade a friend and I "ran away" with a bunch of weapons - we got in trouble for smoking weed in the school bathroom, they called our parents, so our plan was to go to a rave in Toronto with a ~20 year old drug dealer.  (Yes, I was a very very stupid kid.)  This mobilized the entire police department in my town to search for us throughout the night.  They found and arrested us the next morning.  You could definitely say I was famous for that until I left for college.  Since then?  I dunno, drinking, blacking out and making an ass out of myself I guess.

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Before I moved into sales I worked in a local paint store.  I got to the point where I could match any color in paint, stucco, or stain and got a good customer base from competitors relying on computers to scan for matches.

I still see painters i used to know and still get told that nobody can match colors anymore.

Kind of a niche form of famous, but closest I ever came to it 

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To my everlasting shame, I was on the front steps of St Paul's during Maggie Thatcher's funeral and appeared on the front page of several major UK newspapers, and on at least the second or third page of basically all of them.

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Years ago, back in Idaho, I was shooting in a local billiards league and became low key famous for a series of improbable shots.   Towards the end of the game and I'm faced with my last couple of balls stuck in a loose cluster of my opponents balls down at one end of the table.   The only way I could make legal contact was to shoot into the side rail to come out into the cluster and hope I hit one of my balls first.  This is known as a "rail first" bank shot, and it is far from ideal.  

Anyway, I pick a ball and call corner pocket (you always call something, just in case), and, miracle of miracles I make a clean hit and drop the ball!  My team cheers, but not for long.  I'd made the shot, but had barely disturbed any of the other balls on the table, so I am now faced with almost exactly the same shot into the side pocket.  I make my shot again and my team erupts!  On their feet chanting, "Goldberg, Goldberg!"  

So now I'm on the 8 ball and shooting well over my head, but my situation has barely improved.  I can see the 8 ball enough to make contact at least, but don't have a makable shot straight in.  My only option for the win is to shoot all the way down table and back for another rail first in the corner.   

By this point the whole bar is clued in, everybody's watching, and my opponent is looming over the table looking for a bad hit or just to be a dick.  I glance at my team captain to see if he knows what I'm thinking, and he just gives me a wink and a nod.  I call corner pocket, shoot down and back, and drain the 8.  

Thereafter* a rail first bank shot was known as "the Goldberg."  As in:

"Im stuck, what should I do?"

"Well, you could try The Goldberg."

"The Goldberg? Are you crazy?"

 

*entirely due to the persistent campaigning of my teammate Jack, who loves nicknames and catchphrases.  Thanks to Jack the name was picked up by several people at our home bar, and at least a couple of other league shooters.  Sooo, ya, low key famous.

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