Good evening. My name is Joe Pidgeon. I am 61 years old and I spent 35 years as a train dispatcher for the railroad here in Omaha, which means I spent 35 years answering questions fast with somebody waiting on the other end. You would think that would make me good at Jeopardy!. You would be wrong, because I am married to Carolyn.

Carolyn and I have played along with Jeopardy! every weeknight since the show came back on the air in September of 1984 with Alex Trebek. (Carolyn watched the old one with Art Fleming in the daytime in the sixties. I was at work. She says this explains a great deal.) We started writing the scores down in January of 1987, in steno pads, and as of Friday night the book stands at 2,914 games: Carolyn 1,763, Joe 1,089, ties 62. I would like it noted that I won the summer of 1991.

Our son Greg, who is good with computers, told me the Internet needed a page like this. I am not sure it does. But here it is, laid out like the board. Pick a category. The scores for this month are on their own page, the scorebook.

THE GAME
How it works on the show, as of the fall of 1999.

$100. Three contestants, six categories, five clues in each, worth $100 up to $500. Alex reads the answer and you have to give the question. If you ring in before he finishes reading, the buzzer locks you out for a moment, so the whole game is in the timing. Get it right and the money is yours; get it wrong and it comes off your score.

$200. Then comes Double Jeopardy!, six new categories and everything doubled: $200 up to $1,000. This is where games are won and lost. I have watched a lot of people coast through the first round and fall apart in the second, and I have been one of them in my own living room.

$300. Daily Doubles. There is one hidden in the first round and two in Double Jeopardy!. Whoever finds one gets the clue alone and can bet as much as their whole score, or up to the top value on the board if they have less than that. The people who win big are the ones who aren't afraid to bet it all.

$400. Final Jeopardy!. One category, one clue. Everybody who finishes Double Jeopardy! with more than zero writes down a wager after seeing only the category, then gets the clue and thirty seconds while that music plays. Only the winner takes home the money. The other two get parting gifts.

$500. Champions. The winner comes back the next night, and anybody who wins five games in a row retires undefeated. The best of them come back for the Tournament of Champions, which Carolyn and I treat as a national holiday. The show also does a College Championship, a Teen Tournament and a celebrity week, and this month it started the new season with a week of 11- and 12-year-olds. More on that in the book.

HOUSE RULES
Posted on the refrigerator since 1987.

$100. It must be in the form of a question. If you just shout "Lincoln," you get nothing. "Who is Lincoln" or it doesn't count. No exceptions, not even for me, not even the night I had the flu.

$200. No answering before Alex finishes reading. Same as the show. If you blurt it out in the middle, the clue is dead for you, and the other player gets a free try. Carolyn put this one in after the first week. She meant me.

$300. Keep your own score, in pen. We each have a steno pad and a ballpoint. If both of us say it at the same time, nobody scores. Arguments about who said it first are settled by whoever is not holding the remote.

$400. Daily Doubles go to whoever got the last clue right. The wager is said out loud before Alex reads it. No changing your mind once you hear the clue.

$500. Final Jeopardy! wagers are written on the pad first, and turned face down, before the clue comes up. Then we each write our answer. Whoever loses the night does the supper dishes. I am very good at the dishes.

JOE'S BEST
The categories I pray for.

$100. Railroads. Thirty-five years. If it ran on rails in this country, ask me.

$200. U.S. Geography. A dispatcher has to know every town on the line and where it sits. I can tell you the county seat of half the counties in Nebraska and Iowa, which comes up more on Jeopardy! than you would think.

$300. The Presidents. I read a biography of every one of them, in order, between 1975 and 1983. Carolyn calls it my Presidential decade.

$400. Rivers. Comes with the railroad. Every river is a bridge somebody has to worry about.

$500. Baseball. I listened to the Cardinals on the radio every summer of my boyhood and I still know the starting lineups. It is the one category where Carolyn just puts the pen down.

JOE'S WORST
The categories that sink me.

$100. Opera. I have never seen one, and Jeopardy! seems to think everybody has.

$200. Potent Potables. I drink coffee and the occasional Pabst. If it has a little umbrella in it, I am lost.

$300. Pop Music. Anything after about 1965. Our granddaughter Lauren is seven and does better than me.

$400. Rhyme Time. I know the answer. I just can't get it to rhyme before Carolyn does.

$500. Shakespeare. I read one in high school. It was the one with the Danish fellow. That is all I have.

CAROLYN
My opponent. My wife of 39 years. Undefeated in my heart, and mostly on paper.

$100. She worked twenty-two years at the circulation desk of a branch library, and she says that is all the education anybody needs. She is right.

$200. She is best at literature, the Bible, word origins, opera, and anything to do with royalty. She has never read a word about baseball in her life and somehow knew who won the 1946 World Series. (It was the Cardinals. I told her that in 1960. She remembered.)

$300. Her Final Jeopardy! strategy is to bet exactly enough to beat me by one dollar if she's right. She does the arithmetic in her head during the commercial. I have seen her do it on her fingers maybe twice.

$400. Her weakness is sports, and Rivers, and that is about the end of the list. When a sports category comes up she says "all yours, dear," and goes to check on the coffee, and I still don't always win.

$500. People ask why she never tried out for the show. She says she doesn't like being on camera and she doesn't need to prove anything to a stranger from Hollywood. She only needs to prove it to me, every night, at 6:30.

THE BOOK

Our scores for September 1999, night by night, are on the scorebook page. The short version: she won.