How Do You Keep a Trivia Geek in Suspense?

Tell him there's about a 1 in 6 chance he'll appear on Jeopardy! in the next couple of years. He'll obsessively check his phone messages the whole time.

That's right: we passed the recent in-person Jeopardy! audition held in Seattle, which means we're officially in the applicant pool. 400 contestants appear in a season, the applicant pool is 2000-2500 people--voila! One in six.

What next? The waiting game. Oh, and studying like a mofo. Ken Jennings and Bob Harris both bulked up their knowledge with flashcards and MacGyvered together homemade signaling devices so they could hone their buzzer timing while playing along at home.

We'll do the flashcards, but we'll make do "ringing in" with our TiVo remote for now. And we'll start plowing through the 111,379 actual Jeopardy! clues on the delightfully obsessive J-Archive. (Where we were reminded that Stranger whipping boy Kollin Min was one of the many people whose quiz show dreams were shattered by Jennings.)

And, of course, we'll have our fingers crossed -- two years of that may give us joint problems down the road, but it'd be worth it. We know many people try out more than once before they get on the show. We're in the not-at-all-underrepresented white dude demographic, and we're not the guy who cofounded Talk Like a Pirate Day or an astonishingly sharp cabdriver from Eugene, both of whom were at our audition and both of whom we expect to see on TV any week now.

Do we belong on Jeopardy!? Granted, we love trivia. According to 43 Things, people who want to appear on the show also want to do voiceover work for animated features, present at a conference, and work in a library -- is it atypical that we've only really dreamed about doing one of those things? (The latter.)

Regardless of how things come out -- never hearing from the show, getting on and bombing, blanking on my daughter's name during chitchat with Mr. Trebek -- the experience has already been fun. And profitable: At the audition, I won a copy of the new version of the Jeopardy! home game, complete with signaling devices. I like 'em, but Little Miss Seattlest can't help but fall in love with any device that exists solely to hold buttons.

And if it turns out we'll be on TV, we'll let you know -- not how we do, of course, but when to turn in.