My Lemur Won Jeopardy! and I Will Never Sleep Again

In order to explain exactly why my life has taken a turn for the insomniac, I need to give you two pieces of background information.

AJD and I habitually watch Jeopardy! in the evenings, and usually we have company when we do it.  A number of the animals have watched an episode or two, but the really die-hard Jeopardy! fans among the Wild Republicans are Hrithik and Gilly, although it's worth noting that Zebulon seems to have similar predilections.  Gilly watches because he likes puzzles and games, and also likes commercials.  Hrithik watches because he really wants to win.

Now, by "win" I don't mean "win" in the usual sense; I should make that clear.  For Hrithik, the win conditions are as follows: you win if your species is mentioned in a Jeopardy! clue.  Since Hrithik is nothing if not patriotic, he also wins if Madagascar is mentioned.  Winning the usual way is easier, believe it or not.  Until very very recently, Hrithy had won exactly once in several years, and that was with a mention of Madagascar rather than ring-tailed lemurs.

The second thing that you need to know is that Hrithik has recently taken up meditation.  I think he started about four months ago.  The meditating Hrithik looks pretty adorable.

It looks very cute, right?  Well, it's markedly less cute if you're in the same room.  I always thought that meditators, if they made any noise at all, made peaceful, restful noises.  Like, you know, 'Ommmmmm' or something.  Hrithik does not do this.  No, no, the noise Hrithik makes sounds like nothing more than a particularly obnoxious car alarm.  It goes something like this: 

'WAAAAAAaaaaaaaaWAAAAAAaaaaaaaaWAAAAAAaaaaaaaaWAAAAAAaaaaaaaa....'

Why?  I don't know!  It's not clear to me whether this is some sort of traditional lemur form of mediation or whether it's something he somehow came up with on his own.  I'm inclined towards the latter, given that I've known him for years and he's only just started this nonsense, and also given that he's a bit touchy about the whole thing.  But either way, it sucks!  His favourite time for meditation is night, because he is nocturnal, and... well... do you think you could sleep with that car alarm noise going off in your room for hours every night?  I didn't think so!  And the worst part is, he's been getting more and more enthusiastic about it as time passes.

In fact, he's become so enthusiastic about it that he's started proselytising.  Oh yeah.  I'm not kidding.  Look at this:

He taught the kittens to meditate!  The kittens!  And of course they loved it, perverse little creatures that they are.  Stal has to work his ass off to get them to pay attention to their Archaic Feline lessons, but Hrithik gets it in his head to teach them car-alarm meditation (it ought to be boring, given that they're kittens with the attention span of gnats, right?) and they just eat it up.  One moment the north room was a haven of slightly-bizarre tranquility and the next minute there are five kittens and one ring-tailed lemur shrieking their heads off zenfully.  'WAAAAAAaaaaaaaWAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaWAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaWAAAAAAaaaaaa...'  Gaa!

You know what it is?  They're Buddhists.  I really think that's it.  The kittens are Buddhists and therefore they're naturally predisposed to meditation.  Which is a problem, because it's hard to tell them not to meditate without stepping on their religious rights.  Fortunately they're not as diligent about their meditative practices as Hrithik is.  They're still doing it, though.

So I imagine you're wondering what on earth Hrithik's inner peace has to do with Jeopardy!, and after all the point of this post is not to complain about his influence on the kittens.  Here's what happened.

About two weeks ago, AJD knocked on my door to announce that it was time for Jeopardy!.  As is my usual wont, I asked Hrithik if he meant to come along, and he replied that no, this time he was going to stay in my room and meditate to see if it helped his game.  I shrugged and relayed this information to AJD as we settled down to watch the game.

And would you believe, he won?  Ring-tailed lemurs were one of the clues!  They even showed a picture of two of them.

We thought that Hrithik would be sad for having missed his big win - but we were wrong.  No, no, he was delighted.  Clearly, he explained, this is a sign that he's meditating properly.  He's reaching that higher state of consciousness.  He's doing something right and he must keep doing it!

*headdesk*

But it gets worse, you see.  Now that Hrithik is spending many Jeopardy! evenings meditating rather than watching the show, suddenly everyone in the Wild Republic is winning Jeopardy!.  Not everyone, really, but tons of people.  In the last week, Rochester has won, Parsley has won, the wolves have come close (the actual answer was "red wolf"), and Gus had an honorable mention a few days ago (one of the contestants has a son of that name) and then won yesterday (because of his name, not his species).  And today... well, today everything snowballed.  Humphrey won, Gilly won (because there was a G&S category), and Team Malagasy won (that is, Hrithik and Zebulon).  All with Hrithik meditating upstairs.

So not only has Hrithik himself won twice in as many weeks, but he's engineered wins for half a dozen of the others as well.

This means, unfortunately, that he is a lemur inspired.  He is unstoppable now.  He meditates longer and longer each night, and he's utterly convinced that he's doing it right, and there's nothing you can say to dissuade him really.  I cannot sleep.  None of us in the south room can sleep, except of course for Sleepyhead.  And what's going to happen once the kittens find out about this?  Then no one in the entire Republic will be able to sleep.

Jeopardy! is a destroyer of domestic peace, I'm telling you.  The only positive to all this cacophony is that when AJD finally makes it on the show - and he will one of these years, mark my words - he's going to have one hell of an anecdote.  I will admit that this is small consolation to me now.  At least he's cute.