Posted: 13 Jan 2010 08:56 PM PST

South Dayton's Zollinger Wins First Night On Jeopardy!

By Tim Latshaw editorial@post-journal.com

SOUTH DAYTON - How do you turn 22 years of trying into a $26,801 victory?

Just ask Jason Zollinger.

Zollinger, described as "an engine assembler from South Dayton," not only fulfilled his longtime dream of appearing on Jeopardy! on Tuesday, but overcame a slow start to become the day's champion.

Friends, family and spectators filled the family-owned Zollinger's Restaurant to watch Jason compete against Jennie Burroughs from Missoula, Mont. and one-day champion Mariann Cook Andrews from Turnwater, Wash. While the episode was taped in November, contractual non-disclosure obligations meant that only Jason and his wife Rose, who had been in the audience, knew anything of the outcome.

A free buffet of prepared and donated items was served to all who came and towels printed with "Team Jason" were handed out as well. The towels were to be waved as a form of silent cheering, as outbursts during the show would be punished with, according to posted signs, tape over your mouth for the first offense and buying a round for everyone on the second.

The towels initially saw little airtime, however, as Zollinger answered only one clue during the first half of the "Jeopardy!" round. During the first commercial break, he trailed in third place with $1,000 and was approached by a contestant coordinator about his timing problems. After a clue is read, a set of "enable lights" is flipped on. Buzz in too early and you are locked out for a fraction of a second. Buzz in too late and another contestant has likely beaten you to the punch.

"In that first round I was just dying," Zollinger said. "I knew plenty of those answers and just couldn't get in. I was waiting too long; I was waiting for the lights. And then I tried to get in sooner and I was just too early."

Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek's traditional contestant banter took place following the first break, during which Zollinger gave an amusing story about traveling to Tokyo and being mistaken as an NFL player.

Once the game resumed, Zollinger began picking up on the timing of the signaling button more acutely. He slowly built his score, then hit upon the first Daily Double of the game. In a move that tangibly tensed up the crowd at the restaurant, he chose to make it a "true Daily Double" by risking all his money on a question about, well, money. Correctly identifying Independence Hall as the building on the back of the $100 bill, he effectively doubled his score and would quickly finish the round in second place with $5,000.

Zollinger would have enough luck and control of the board during the "Double Jeopardy!" round to hit the remaining two Daily Doubles in the game. He again risked all his money on a clue regarding a monument to Iwo Jima, doubling his score to $12,400, and risked $4,000 on a clue about superlatives, bringing his score to $22,400.

Hitting all three Daily Doubles was definitely a contributing factor to Zollinger's win, and choosing to risk it all on two of the clues was not quite a spontaneous decision.

"My plan, going in, was to bet it all if I got the Daily Double in the 'Jeopardy!' round," he said, citing ample time and ability to catch up if he had incorrectly answered then. "When I got the first one in 'Double Jeopardy' it was a good category - it was Iwo Jima. I was really gung-ho with the category and I felt good about trying to double up again."

Plans, however, do not always bring confidence, and Zollinger said he was very nervous throughout the entire game, even after he took the lead.

"I guess after the second Daily Double, when I doubled up again, that was when I started to feel - I wouldn't call it comfortable with the game, but at least better about the game," he said.

Zollinger had $24,400 after "Double Jeopardy!" - a commanding but not insurmountable lead over second-place Burroughs, who had $13,400. The category: Famous Women.

As the spectators at the restaurant watched the contestants write their responses to a clue demanding the name of a hall-of-fame aviator-astronaut, Zollinger spoke to the crowd.

"Does anyone know who Eileen Collins is?" he asked. "She was the first woman to command a space shuttle. It was something I picked up thumbing through an almanac at the hotel before heading to the show."

The crowd cheered, many confident that Zollinger had just given them the correct answer. On the TV, Trebek approached Andrews.

"You ran into a buzzsaw today named Jason," he said, the crowd cheered again.

She revealed her response: Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. Trebek declared her correct. The crowd quieted.

Burroughs revealed her response: Sally Ride. She took the lead.

Trebek moved to Zollinger; the crowd sitting in stunned silence. He revealed his answer: Sally Ride.

The restaurant erupted. Zollinger's fake-out mattered little against the revelation that he had actually done it. With a total of $26,801, $401 more than Burroughs, he had won.

"I think a lot of people think that I lost this game, and I had to just sort of play with them," he said.

"I guess maybe it was mean; my dad told me it was cruel." Jason's father, Larry Zollinger, was as clueless to the outcome as everyone else and taken by his son's misdirection. He had earlier suspected his son may have won, however, through some deductive reasoning.

"The picture that was in the paper; that picture was taken after the taping of the show because he said nobody talks to Alex Trebek before the show," Larry said. "Losers don't smile like that."

Jason and Rose both said they would spend at least part of the winnings on debt payments and home repairs, having not yet set upon anything more extravagant.

But becoming the champion means returning for another game, and Zollinger's Restaurant will be open again Wednesday night to see if Jason can become a 2-day champion.

Jason will not be present, instead watching at his mother's house in Cuba, N.Y., but it may do little to dampen the excitement of a village and area as it tunes in again.

"Somebody from a small town goes out to the big world and wins," Larry Zollinger said. "And all our lives we've been told, 'podunk' and 'hick town' and 'backwoods' and guess what: we just had a boy out of here that went to compete with the big guns. ... Here's a kid who works in the factory, went to college for a couple years and didn't like it, but kept on reading and kept on thinking and kept on trying."

And after more than two decades of trying, when simply making it to the show was a dream fulfilled, Jason Zollinger proved himself to the nation.

"We had a party before I left for California and I told everybody then that all I wanted to do was to prove that I belonged, and I feel that I've done that," he said. "It's a really big sense of accomplishment."

Jason Zollinger will defend his championship tonight at 7:30 p.m. on WKBW (Ch. 7).

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Thursday: MLK fish fry at senior center - The Almanac Online

Posted: 13 Jan 2010 01:04 PM PST

The Menlo Park Senior Center will hold its annual fish fry from noon to 1 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 14, to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. Jym Marks, the proprietor of a hair salon on Willow Road and a poet, will give a talk titled, "Would Dr. King Be Proud of His Dream?"

Dr. King was born on Jan. 15, 1929. Martin Luther King Jr. day will be observed on Monday, Jan. 18.

The Senior Center is located at the end of Terminal Avenue, by the Onetta Harris Community Center. Lunch costs $5.

For more information, call 330-2283.

After-school science classes in Portola Valley - The Almanac Online

Posted: 13 Jan 2010 01:11 PM PST

The physics of simple machines, the interaction of force and motion, is the topic for after-school winter science classes for kids in grades K-3 at the Portola Valley Town Center.

The 10-week sessions are $250, which includes materials and snacks. Classes meet on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons, except for holidays.

Classes began Monday, Jan. 11, but registration continues through Friday, Jan. 22.

Go to tinyurl.com/PVregistration to register, or register by mail or in person. Online registration does not allow online payment; checks must be mailed or delivered in person to Town Hall.

Go to www.portolavalley.net for more information, including class hours and frequently asked questions. Click on the Community Classes link on the left side of the home page.

To contact the instructor, Yvonne Tryce, write to ytryce@yahoo.com.

The Last Season of Maureen Howard’s Quartet: A Review of The Rags of ... - The Faster Times

Posted: 13 Jan 2010 12:57 PM PST

4272411314_59554d2fe3_o The Last Season of Maureen Howards Quartet: A Review of <i>The Rags of Time</i>

Viking Adult (October 15, 2009)

Maureen Howard has finished her quartet. The Rags of Time is the fourth and final volume of an effort that began with A Lover's Almanac (1998), followed by Big As Life (2001) and The Silver Screen (2004). These books have been quietly published and quietly read. Their project is large. In a literary landscape that is fast, crowded, and desperate to astonish, Howard's books offer something else. They are heart-breaking, huge, unsolved, and uncannily close to life.

Howard's quartet is loosely divided into seasons. A Lover's Almanac begins the quartet with the framework of winter, and The Rags of Time completes the quartet with the framework of fall. The large cast travels along time's arrow while negotiating the enigmatic territory of memory. The characters that move in and out of the narrative include: the central couple Artie and Louise, their children, Artie's father Cyril, his wife Mae, his soulmate Sylvie, Marie Claude and her husband Hans, Joe and Rita Murphy and their mother Isabel, John James Audubon and his wife Lucy, the park-builder Frederick Law Olmstead, the unclassifiable Sissy, the writer Mimi, and many, many more. The characters shift from central to peripheral, or from peripheral to central, as the story's center shifts and shuffles. Memory and time trade their blows.

The project of memory is not only the story's project-it's also the reader's. Memory tasks the reader twice-once on a personal level, as all stories do, with personal-historical-literary associations. And then again, quite literally-almost physically, in this case. The story is so large, so epic, that this reader, at least, found herself trying to figure out if she had met that character before, or that one? As the story unfolds, associations and intersections (between characters and situations) surface and surprise. I was forced to tap into my reading memory for clues to connections suggested but not confirmed, connections that were perhaps imagined or dreamt instead of intended. For example: by my count, a "Mimi" appears in three of the books, but I do not think it is ever the same Mimi. Another, very different, example: In Big as Life, I was happily reading about a new character when with a shock I realized that this was Mae, a character I've known since early in the first book. Howard has structured her vast web so that we are constantly un-learning or re-learning what we think we know about a character or relationship.

In each and every season, knowing becomes suspect and subject to revision. In fact, much of the movement of these books is a movement from the known to the unknown. The characters themselves experience the precariousness of changing their minds, making a choice, veering from one path, and sometimes veering back again, trading one type of knowledge for another. In The Silver Screen, Isabel Murphy, a girl who has fled the east coast and struck up a successful career in Hollywood, just as suddenly leaves California to come home for good. In the space of a page and a half she goes from a Hollywood to New Haven. Hers is a dramatic story. Choice and change aren't always so. Lou's mother Shirl finds out late in life that she likes to be alone. This happens accidentally-her husband's sudden rise to fame in the bioengineering world leaves her on vacation alone in their timeshare-and she discovers that "alone was surprisingly O.K." This discovery also works to quietly revise the memories Shirl has of a particular loner Aunt. In these books, knowing-and living-become processes of revision.

This strong sense of revision rescues most of the characters from the clutches of archetype. The very notable exception is Fiona O'Connor, a bright star who died young-at least that is how the other characters remember her. Fiona is the final, unanswered question. Her voice is conspicuously missing. She never gets to tell her version of the story. I could not stop comparing her to Percival, from Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves. Percival is another bright star who died young. Much of that gorgeous novel is a triangulation around both his presence (when he is alive) and his absence (after he has died). So much of Howard's quartet feeds off of Fiona's enduring absence, her silence, the power both her presence and her absence had and have over the living.

In the final volume, The Rags of Time, omission takes on a pivotal role.

If the first volume of the quartet is an intensely observed story, the last volume is an intensely inhabited one. This may be due, in part, to the fact that the previously invisible narrator of these novels now becomes a character-Mimi, the writer who is finishing her quartet of seasons. This is an unnerving move for Howard to make, offering this narrator-writer a place in the story, enlarging an already large world to include the storyteller, who informs us soon enough that "this day's outing [to Central Park] was a strategic maneuver against the assault of memory." For Mimi? For the reader? The Rags of Time is very much an investigation of that assault.

Mimi grapples with her characters, with what she tells and doesn't tell, with how she revises and arranges a story that must be as responsible for its omissions as it is for its inclusions. It's a problem that narrative has: it always has to exclude more than it includes. Mimi's characters share her struggle. At one point Artie even thinks of his grandmother, "who said something like that about our sins, most particularly sins of omission, that we could face them come Judgment Day." Mimi struggles, in the end, with the fact that the story cannot encompass it all. There is too much. No wonder War and Peace becomes a pertinent trope in this book. A successful epic always manages to gesture towards an even larger, untold, story. Mimi reckons that stories are worth this cost: "You were wrong about information stealing life out of a story. That's such a romantic notion. See, it's all different now. You have to live it, live with the glut, the lottery prize of mechanical reproduction and still tell your story."

The intimacy of the final volume is the intimacy of a story and characters that have been lived with for a very long time. This book has strayed into the narrator's world, and unnerves with its uncanny proximity to ours. Mimi continues to tell the stories of her characters, but she can no longer escape the very visceral world she lives in-her workroom, New York City's Central Park, et. al. Once again, nothing gets solved, only told. Howard's quartet has very few epiphanies, and very little desire for them. These books seem more interested in (as one character puts it) "hanging in with uncharted lives, small truths-well, at least stories that may not set us free."

A Lover's Almanac is performative, dizzying, richly layered, like some fabulous brocade. By the time The Rags of Time emerges, the writing has taken a long journey, through the bittersweet and intoxicating Big As Life, through the sad rich quiet of The Silver Screen. Each volume succeeds in transforming its season into something foreign, unknown. And, like the seasons, each book expands and alters the stories that came before it. Because the seasons are cyclical instead of linear, this is, potentially, an infinite process. At the end of the forth book I wanted to begin all over again-I wanted to revise my reading with re-reading. What could the first volume say about the last? What could the early lives tell me about the later ones?

At the end of The Rags of Time the narrator departs, passes away, and it is her husband who has to look back at her work. Mimi began her project, her "seasons," intending to write a love story. She has struggled with the love story. Examining her manuscript, thinking that he will hand it over to her editors, her husband now muses, "They must know she never got the love story right, said perhaps it was not meant to be a love story at all." He's right-and so is she: the love stories are not the central story. The central love story has to do with Time, and our relationship to it. We must be involved with Time whether we like it or not. How do we write that story? How do we live with it?

Emily Austin

Emily Austin is working on a very lost novel. At the moment, she still lives in Brooklyn.

...
Read more about Emily Austin ->

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Wildlife artist to exhibit at Besser Museum - Alpena News

Posted: 13 Jan 2010 11:45 AM PST

Wildlife artist to exhibit at Besser Museum

By DIANE SPEER

His buddies hate to hear about it, but when Christopher Smith of Interlochen heads out hunting daily in the fall, he considers himself to be on the job. Not only does he take his gun, but he also brings a camera to photograph birds and other wildlife he spots along the way.

The images he captures during hunting season as well as other times of the year later become subject matter for his successful painting career.

"I'm an armed bird watcher," said Smith, with a dry sense of humor. "It's me, my dog and my gun."

Though his friends call it "hunting," he jokingly calls it "gathering source material."

Since Smith graduated 14 years ago from Lake Superior State University, he has made a living out of specializing in wildlife scenes and dog portraits for clients across the country. In the process he has amassed a large body of work, a portion of which will be on exhibit at the Besser Museum beginning Saturday.

Smith's "Wildlife Art" exhibit features 56 of his original paintings and prints. A free "Meet the Artist" public reception in his honor is planned from 5-8 p.m. at the museum.

Though Smith's degree from LSSU is in fisheries and wildlife management, with a major in orinthology, his intentions all along were to try and make a living from art. From an early age, his father Steve, an accomplished wildlife writer, saw artistic talent in his son and gave him encouragement.

"I momentarily thought about studying art," Smith said. "I talked to professional artists and they encouraged me to get a background in wildlife art. I have utilized it a ton, along with my love of the outdoors. At an art school I would have learned a lot, but it was a good move for me."

He has illustrated more than 20 hunting and fishing books, as well as contributed artwork to a number of national magazines, including "The Retriever Journal," "The Pointing Dog Journal," "Ruffed Grouse Society," "Ducks Unlimited," "Shooting Sportsman," Upland Almanac," "Just Labs" and several others.

In 2005, Smith took first place in the Michigan Duck Stamp Contest, and took top honors in the contest for the 2009 Michigan Ducks Unlimited Sponsor Artist of the Year.

He works out of a home-based studio, keeping a regular schedule. Though he started out in pastels, he now also uses both oils and acrylics as well as pen and ink and occasionally pencil. Often, he will have multiple paintings going at once, particularly when it comes to the oils since they require multiple layers and more time to dry between the layers.

"The oils are very thin layers and detailed as opposed to thicker," said Smith, whose wife, Lani, is an art teacher and a potter. They have two children, Nathan (7) and Audrey (4), and a 10-year-old lab, Libby.

Smith's exhibit at the Besser Museum is supplemented with several waterfowl mounts done by Ralph Bolda of Limited Edition Taxidermy in Alpena. He and Bolda struck up a working relationship several years ago, whereby Smith brings him waterfowl and photographs of the poses that he wants Bolda to capture in his mounts. Smith then uses those completed mounts as models from which to paint.

Besser Museum staff member Randy Shultz, who hung the exhibit in Wilson Gallery, said the museum is pleased to have an artist of Smith's caliber and one who reflects the sensibility of Northeast Michigan.

"We're a hunting/fishing community," Shultz said. "This exhibit is a perfect reflection of what we have in our own backyard."

Smith's work will remain on exhibit through March 27.

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Almanacs

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Almanacs “South Dayton’s Zollinger Wins First Night On Jeopardy! - Post-Journal” plus 4 more

Almanacs “South Dayton’s Zollinger Wins First Night On Jeopardy! - Post-Journal” plus 4 more

South Dayton's Zollinger Wins First Night On Jeopardy!

Emily Austin

Wildlife artist to exhibit at Besser Museum

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