Ohio State Student Fails Geography 101 on National TV

Wow, does my heart go out to Ohio State student Maria Khrakovsky. She appeared on the college series of Jeopardy last night — only her lifelong dream — and failed a pretty mundane question:

You see how ol' Alex Trebek — who has been accused of being a sexist, racist jerk (those are three separate links) — did her? I'm not even going to lie, first time watching this video, I only saw "M I C H I G A N" spelled out across the map and heard "this city of 104,000 smallest to boast an NFL franchise." Detroit was the first thing that leapt into my mind as well. I wasn't even paying attention to the map really because I was listening to the question.

Color me shocked there are more than 104,000 people willing to live within the city limits of Detroit. 

Fortunately for me, I wasn't on national TV. Of course, this is making the rounds on the internet today. I can only imagine how mortified poor Maria Khravosky, who was born in Ukraine and absolute loves Jeopardy, is this morning. 

I'm also getting a kick out of slovenly, Miller Lite-drinking middle-aged men beating on a 21-year-old tri-lingual French major about geography. Americans and geography have long had an odiously palpable relationship. I'd be surprised if more than 50% of us could fill out a blank map of the United States. One in four of us doesn't know Earth revolves around the sun.

Keep your head up, Maria. Your talents will obviously take you a lot farther than anonymously-bashing college students on the internet. 

And for me, this is just more proof that Jeopardy is a stupid, stupid show that should have been taken off TV by 1997.