He's been purified in the waters of Lake Minnetonka...

... and now he's cleaning up on Jeopardy! Fred Beukema, that is, he of the yearly Beukemixes which we all adore around these parts. He's won two games already and is playing game 3 today. (Since 4:30 is perhaps the most inconvenient time of day for me to sit in front of the TV I've finally had occasion to use the recording capacity of my PC. I grossly overestimated the amount of TV I care to record anymore when I bought the thing. At any rate, it works pretty slick.)

Fred put a lot of work into preparing to be on the show (he documents it pretty thoroughly on his blog), and as Quin has mentioned mmmph times, Fred was always his chief competitor at the Isaac Asimov superquiz when they worked together. This is very much his sort of thing. It's fun to watch someone you know, especially when he's doing so phenomenally well (in both of the first two games Fred went into Final Jeopardy with a score more than double the second place contestant's, so he couldn't lose unless he deliberately bet a huge amount on the FJ question. And as you can tell from the Daily Doubles, Fred is a conservative better). It seemed like the perfect opportunity to bet $Texas and answer "Suck it Trebek", but they probably screen for that sort of behaviour before they let you on the show.

So congrats to Fred! I'd say good luck in game 3, but since it was a done deal weeks ago that would either involve some sort of time machine or some very careful verb conjugations (future perfect tense, maybe?)

(The title of this post makes sense if you watch his Hometown Howdie, but that link will only work for a few days).