Those of you who follow the news may have noticed that it seems to be all the rage lately to report upon the rather bleak employment situation. I can tell you that where I work, we are certainly getting into the spirit of things, and we're doing our little bit to contribute to the unemployment rate. Rex got let go over a year ago of course, Sulser's been long gone as well, then they laid off Aaron, and then Matt got the old heave-ho. Last week, apparently having gotten bored with axing single employees one-by-one, they busted all remaining full time employees down to 32 hour work weeks. Myself, I'd be downright glad to get thirty-two hours- I don't work a set schedule, just long enough to get my work completed, and turns out lately there's been precious little work to complete. Since my job just isn't the gold mine it used to be in happier days, and before it gets to the point where I have to buy off-brand cat-food, I figured it was time to scout around for supplemental sources of income.

My first thought was to look for a second job, but of course looking for a second job presents its own set of problems. Foremost among these is the risk that I might actually find a second job, and then where would I be? I'd be stuck going to some sucky job, that's where.

So long story short, what I decided to do was sign up to be a contestant on the TV game show Jeopardy!, and short story shorter, what happens when you sign up to be a contestant is that you have to take this qualifying test online to weed out the morons. And today was the day for all us Jeopardy! hopefuls to take the test, today at 8pm EST.

The way the qualifying test works is that you get a series of questions, and have fifteen seconds per question to type in the answer, and the goal is to get at many correct answers as you can. As you would expect from Jeopardy!, they do a pretty classy job with the test, although I think it would have been even better had they played the Jeopardy! theme song while the test ran. But I can see how maybe they thought that might distract some people, and anyway you can just hum the theme song in your head if you're so inclined.

The questions generally are of the type where either you know the answer or you don't, and if you don't know it you're pretty much screwed because fifteen seconds isn't really long enough to cheat and google the answer. For example there was a question about what actress played Benjamin Button's love interest Daisy, and since I've never even heard about no "Benjamin Button" (which I gather is a movie or something) I was kind of lost... I knew they made a Dukes of Hazard movie, and I think there was a Daisy in the Dukes, but thing is I didn't see that movie either, however I'm pretty sure that it was that Simpson chick who played THAT Daisy, but for the life of me I couldn't recall whether Daisy Duke ever even had a love interest- I mean, sure she was always kind of sweet to Enos, but that don't mean she was sweet ON Enos, hell, she never was sweet on Nobody in Hazard County, far as MY eight-year-old-ass could tell, and given the sorry specimens of inbred rednecktivism on display in Hazard County I can't say I blame her. What I'm driving at is I'm pretty sure I got the question wrong.

I did keep track of those questions which I'm reasonably sure that I got correct, though, and face it when your first impulse is "great wall of china" or "sword of damocles", it's probably right, so I'm pretty sure I got 30 questions right. "Thirty Questions!" you say- "Fabulous!" Well, I wish I could share your enthusiasm, but sadly those 30 probably correct ones were out of a possible total of 50. And I'm pretty sure that those remaining 20, well, I got them wrong. As it's unlikely that my default answer ("Batman!") was correct in more than a small minority of those questions.

I DO hope they grade on a curve. But if not, hell, there's always Wheel of Fortune.