One of the contestants last night on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is the wife of former major league baseball player Jack Aker. Here are his career stats (courtesy of Baseball Reference, which is back up, at least temporarily). Also, someone got to the million dollar question last night and phoned a friend who tried to look up the answer on the Internet using a search engine. The friend didn’t find out the answer in time, and ended up leaving with $500,000. After the show, I tried to see if I could find the answer using a search engine within 30 seconds, but couldn’t. (The question was, “What was Carol Brady’s maiden name?”)
I’ve gotten a number of messages from people confident in their search engine skills on the Carol Brady thing. Most people came up with the answer “Martin,” which is incorrect. Her maiden name is “Tyler,” “Martin” is her previous married name. It was in many ways the perfect question for foiling contestants who call someone sitting at a search engine prompt. I wonder if they test the high dollar questions against search engines in order to make it difficult for people to get the answer from the Web within 30 seconds.
The weekend incident where a Peruvian military aircraft shot down a plane carrying U.S. missionaries raises a number of tough questions. The order to intercept the plane, which was suspected to be carrying drug smugglers, was given by a Peruvian aboard a CIA-operated surveillance aircraft. How can the other members of the crew of the plane deny any responsibility for the incident? Is this how our drug war dollars are spent, randomly shooting down planes that might be smuggling drugs? How can we make any rational assessment of whether these programs are successful when they operate in secret (at least until they start killing innocent Americans)? Does the CIA ever get anything right? Ugh, this pisses me off.