This Tacoma attorney might not know who Beavis & Butt-head are, but he still won big on “Jeopardy” Wednesday night.
Who is Mike Malaier?
Malaier knew his trivia well enough to beat the other two contestants in the long-running game show in which players must phrase their answers in the form of a question.
Malaier got off to a good start with a question about Hans Christian Andersen but almost flubbed it with another answer about Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors by calling it the House of Horrors. Host Alex Trebek let him slide on that one.
Malaier nailed questions about TV talk show host Bill Maher and Merino wool but was trailing the other two contestants by $1,000 at the first commercial break.
During the customary get-to-know-the-contestants chit-chat with Trebek, Malaier told the host about almost losing a finger to a rock crab.
Malaier got revenge.
“I ate him,” he said.
Malaier knew the past participle of smite (smitten) and what year Geraldine Ferraro lost her bid to be vice president (1984). He missed an easy question about Texas Gov. Rick Perry but knew what the act of throwing someone out of a window is called: defenestration.
He breezed through a category of “Man” words: Mannheim Steamroller, Manchuria and Manchester, but missed the Japanese internment camp in California, Manzanar.
In the chemistry category he correctly asked, “What is distillation?” That, combined with the daily double, took him up to $12,200.
After questions about Henry Ford, Edgar Allan Poe and more, he was up to $20,600 by the end of the category section.
The final question had to do with animated television: “This teen duo debuted in a 1992 animated short in which they play baseball with a frog.”
Malaier guessed Ren and Stimpy. The correct answer was Beavis & Butt-head, leaving him with $8,100. Lucky for him, his fellow contestants also missed the answer, making him the episode’s champion.
Malaier will compete again at 7:30 p.m. Thursday on KOMO-TV (4).
craig.sailor@thenewstribune.com
253-597-8541
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