• And everyone who auditioned to host Jeopardy! and didn't get the job will receive lovely parting gifts and a copy of the home game.

This morning, I find myself thinking about New York and all the surrounding areas being battered by Hurricane Henri…like that city hasn't been battered enough by one disaster after another.  Which is why I decided it would be a good time to post this…

• Here's what I'd do if I were in charge of Jeopardy!: Bring in Ken Jennings, Buzzy Cohen and Mayim Bialik for a two-week Tournament of Champions hosted by Anderson Cooper. Winner gets all the money he or she wins plus the job of permanent host.

From Korea, a number from the American musical, Catch Me If You Can…

I did a tweet the other day that said…

Every so often, I think that maybe people with different viewpoints could come together in some sort of middle-ground compromise or understanding. Then I look at how many people get outraged over the question of whether pineapple belongs on pizza.

Since then, I've received about a dozen messages from folks who want to debate the question of whether pineapple belongs on pizza. I'm not sure they all understood that I don't consider this an open topic. Not everything in this world has to be an argument and this certainly doesn't. Here — I'll give you the answer to the question…

If you want to have pineapple on your pizza, go right on ahead.

And I submit that if that doesn't settle the matter for you, you're just looking for conflict. Until such time as someone in power tries to implement a pineapple mandate for pizza or even a pineapple ban, that settles that. There are so many debates in this world today that will never reach any level of consensus and agreement, we don't need any more.

Amber the Fangirl — not to be confused with my lady friend Amber — is a British teen with grand talent and great enthusiasm for the world of Cartoon Voices. A month or three ago, I agreed to be her guest on a video podcast she does, usually interviewing great voice talent. We really just talk about folks who do voices for cartoons and our experiences with them…

• If Johnny Carson was still on, his monologue tonight would include: "You know, television is a rough business. One minute you're on top; the next, you're on the bottom. As I was telling the shoeshine boy out in the hall, Mike Richards…"

• I have 50+ years in publishing and close to 20/20 vision. And I do not understand why art directors for print media think that if a page looks aesthetically pleasing, it's okay that no one, including the author, can actually read the copy on it.

• Some Republican leaders seem to think that between the threats of shootings and COVID, it's not quite dangerous enough for kids to go to school these days. Next, they'll probably want rabid coyotes roaming every campus.

Given all the catastrophic and potentially-catastrophic news around us, it's amazing that anyone has the time or effort to fret about who's going to host Jeopardy!, let alone get mad about it. But maybe that's the point. Maybe we sometimes need something inconsequential to get our minds off the consequential stuff. So I'll try writing about something that, when you get right down to it, doesn't really matter that much.

So the latest is that yesterday, they recorded the first five shows of the new season with this Mike Richards guy installed as the new permanent host. At the same time, there were all these new revelations of nasty things he'd said on podcasts and elsewhere. And this morning comes the news that he's "resigned," today's scheduled taping was canceled and the show will revert to guest hosts until a final, better decision is made.

There's a certain joy in corners of the Internet today. A lot of folks had come to loathe the guy because of who he is and/or how he got the job. A lot more celebrate, as we sometimes do, the sight of any Very Big, Wealthy Company making a Very Big, Costly Mistake.

And we have all this intrigue. What becomes of the five shows done yesterday? Presumably, Mr. Richards made comments about how honored he was to be the New, Permanent Host of Jeopardy! Do they air those words? Do they air those episodes? They have a current, ongoing Returning Champion and if he won on all five shows, do they not air them and just somehow announce that his Total Winnings jumped up on shows you'll never see? He probably didn't lose or we'd have heard but…well, you see the problem there.

Is Mayim Bialik going to get the post of hosting the syndicated shows? Or are they really doing more on-air auditions? It's a good day to not be the person who has to decide all this. And of course, it's a good day to not be Mike Richards, who has now achieved a notoriety that could (but probably won't) lead to him being the answer to a Final Jeopardy! question some day. He's still at this moment the Executive Producer of the show but that will change as some settlement is negotiated.

Here's what I think: Just pick somebody…anybody who can read and doesn't have a history of stupid, offensive remarks on the Internet. On this planet, there must be at least a hundred such people. The host doesn't matter that much.

Jeopardy!, since back in the days when Art Fleming hosted it, always struck me as a show you watch to play along; to think, "If I'd been a contestant, I would have won $13,500!"  That's usually a bit of self-deception based on the premise that in front of cameras and an America that includes all your friends, you would have come up with the same correct answers you came up with at home with nothing on the line.

You're also assuming that you would have consistently hit the little button ahead of both other players.  If you watch the show, you can often see two or all three of them trying to ring in at the same time.  You probably would not have "won" that part of the game all or even most of the time. But it's fun to pretend.

This will sound like blasphemy to some but I never thought even Alex Trebek mattered that much.  I don't mean he didn't do the job well.  He did it about as well as anyone could…long enough to feel like a vital component of that show. But I don't think he was that irreplaceable.

There are game show hosts who bring a lot of themselves to the proceedings to the point where some people probably tune in to watch the host.  Richard Dawson was that way on Family Feud…though I must say (more blasphemy) that I think the current host, Steve Harvey, does a much better job than any of his predecessors, Dawson included. I'm not saying he's the nicest, most deserving guy in the world. There are stories about him making the rounds, too. But he ad-libs better than almost any other game show host I've ever seen who was not named Marx.

Groucho, of course, was the only reason to tune in the old You Bet Your Life.  (I'm hearing, by the way, that the new revival with Jay Leno is in production and that it's skewing more towards his old "Jaywalking" segments, the point of which were to demonstrate how dumb some people could look on television. Oh, I hope not.)

On shows where the "fun" came from celebrity panelists, fine hosting work was done by Garry Moore and later Steve Allen on I've Got a Secret; by Gene Rayburn or the Match Games of various eras; and by John Daly on the original What's My Line? I don't think any of the revivals of those programs have stumbled onto the right combinations of host and panel members but the shows still work well enough to attract decent audiences.

But Jeopardy! is not about any of that. It's about you sitting home and feeling good when you get as many right as the folks on the show do. I've been suggesting here that Alton Brown would make a good host but he's gotta be off the list that he was probably never on by now. He had his own minor said-the-wrong-thing scandal recently. But when you come right down to it, almost anyone who's doesn't have such a scandal and is comfy in front of a camera and can pronounce all the words right could do it.

Sony probably thinks they need a woman to atone for picking a seeming misogynist. Okay…fine. There are plenty around who could do it, including CNN legal analyst Laura Coates, who Mr. Trebek mentioned as a good fit for the job. Just pick someone already.

French fried potatoes are usually great for about fifteen minutes before they get cold, soggy and undelicious. Here, the Internet's own Chef John suggests a way to re-crisp that which has gone flaccid. I haven't tried this yet but it sounds like it oughta work…and kudos to Chef John for not insisting you sprinkle Cayenne Pepper on them, as he does for everything else…

Yesterday, I had to wait in a long line at a CVS Pharmacy for a prescription and I didn't mind. The line was long because there was an unexpected (by the store) surge of people wanting to get vaccinations there. The lady who ultimately waited on me told me they were waiting for another employee — someone qualified to administer shots — to arrive. The one person on their staff who was qualified couldn't give the jabs and see that prescriptions were properly filled at the same time.

I have no idea what, if anything in particular, caused the stampede and I have no reason to think it was the same way at other CVSes, which I hope is the proper way to pluralize the store name. I got to talking with one young couple waiting for their jabs. "We finally decided it was time to get it done," the lady said. Maybe it just takes some people a while to get around to maybe saving their lives.

It was crowded in the store with folks not getting vaccinations, too. Every store employee was trying to do eleven things at once. The line to checkout if you didn't use the self-service option reached all the way to the next-closest CVS.

Around the pharmacy area, there was one older woman who kept asking — in way too loud a voice — where to find the Stool Softener. After the third or fourth such request, I said "And she really sounds like she needs it" and got a big laugh from everyone who heard me. It was not my proudest moment.

After I finally got my prescription, I picked up a few other items and then used the CVS self-service check-out to pay for them. I had coupons and my ExtraCare discount that took a $21.00 order down to $7.35. The machine then proceeded to spit out a checkout receipt so long that you could have wrapped it around the body of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in lieu of bandages.

The woman trying to checkout at the self-checkout counter next to me was utterly baffled as to how to use the thing. No store employee seemed to have the time to help her so I did — and when I saw that one of the items she was purchasing was Colace, I realized she was the Stool Softener Lady. She said to me, "I'm sorry…I've never used one of these checkout things before but I simply couldn't wait in that line for a human cashier." No, I guess she couldn't.

Here are scenes from another American musical in Korean. This is Spamalot and there's a segment in here with the actors discussing the play and their roles in it. But move the slider ahead to the five-minute mark and you'll see them perform "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life"…

• Every so often, I think that maybe people with different viewpoints could come together in some sort of middle-ground compromise or understanding. Then I look at how many people get outraged over the question of whether pineapple belongs on pizza.