Papa Richard Johnson spielt -- aber heute!

When he was much younger and Wheel of Fortune was a new show, Richard Johnson of North Kingstown sat and watched the show with his grandmother.
At first, he didn’t want to watch, but she insisted, saying “sit with me,” and so he did.
Over the years, as he became an adult, he kept watching. He left North Kingstown and traveled for 16 years, spending time in South Africa and Canada to name two places. He met his wife, started a family and about 11 years ago returned home to Rhode Island to live in the same house he grew up. That's when the tradition of the TV on at 7 p.m. with Pat Sajak, Vanna White and his parents and children truly became a family routine.
“When you just sit down every night and watch, after a while, I felt like ‘you know? I can do that. I could be on that,’” Johnson said.
Today, Johnson can cross being a contestant on Wheel of Fortune off his bucket list and he and his friends and family are eagerly awaiting the April 16 airing of his appearance, the results of which he is sworn to keep secret. He hasn’t even told his parents what happened.
“It was cool just to be able to stand there, to walk into the studio and see it in person for the first time,” Johnson said. “When I walked in and looked at the wheel, it was a lot smaller than I thought it would be.”
Sajak “is as nice in person as he seems to be on the show and so is Vanna,” Johnson said.
Now, Johnson wants to pay it forward. And to do so, he’s asking for his friends to come to his viewing party at the Knights of Columbus Hall that night and bring a canned good. Later, Johnson said he will deliver all the cans he’s collected to the North Kingstown Food Pantry.
“We’ll come together to watch it – it was fun and exciting and we can bless some other people,” Johnson said.
Locals will know Johnson as a member of the North Kingstown Community Chorus and M.C. for all the concerts there.
“I make my way around town,” he said.
He’s also asking for all the friends he made over the 25 years he’s traveled with a Christian theater company to bring a canned good to their local food pantries, “even if they just watch in their own living room.”
So how does one get from muttering in front of the TV to laying hands on the 2,700 pound wheel in front of the lights and cameras?
It all started with a notice he saw about a casting call at the Warwick Mall in October. It was his birthday weekend and he figured there’s no harm in trying.
It was a “cattle call,” he said, with names on pieces of paper in a bucket. Those lucky enough to get called have a chance to audition.
He didn’t get picked on the first day.
So he came back, put his name in the bucket, and sure enough, found himself on stage.
“You have to have a hook, talk about yourself, and if you have special talents, you get to show those. Then solve a puzzle,” he said.
What else can a singer do but sing, and so Johnson broke out into a rendition of a song he wrote himself.
It’s called Breakfast with Dad and it’s based on a true story about one of his friends and her dad as the generations go through life. It starts with a child’s young love for a dad, to his habit of ordering the same breakfast at Cracker  Barrel, to a time after her dad has died and she sees a “great big sign,” and she knows it’s time for “one last breakfast with dad.”
People were clapping by the end and it’s likely a few were crying. He didn’t bring a CD but folks were clapping along. He spoke loud with a clear voice. Made sure he smiled and showed charisma. Finding the perfect Wheel of Fortune contestant is a science, Johnson said, and he said he tried to “put it all out there.”
Three months later, he gets an e-mail inviting him to another audition in January in Newport. He goes and next thing he knows, he's locked in a three-hour long process. He's in a large group of people who take turns solving puzzles, responding to questions, “all kinds of things” to see who might make the cut.
“They’re being specific about what they want. They want personality. They want energy. Smile. Drive.”
At the end, three-quarters of the potential contestants are told to leave. Just 25 were left and the entire process starts over.
“When I came home from that my dad says to me ‘how did you do?’”
“I did the best I can,” Johnson said to his father.”I did my absolute best. If they don’t take me, then OK, don’t take me, but I gave it everything I had.”
Two weeks later a letter arrived in the mail from Wheel of Fortune, telling him he’s a contestant and between now and the next 18 months he’d be notified of his taping date.
“I thought I had time,” he said, only to get an e-mail 10 days later telling him his tape date was Feb. 13.
He and his wife scrambled to rearrange their schedules and soon found themselves in sunny California, heading into the taping.
When he walked into Sony Pictures Studios, that was it – no more contact with the outside world. Even with his wife. Talking to other contestants, even asking someone where the bathroom is, could be considered cheating.
Contestants get appointed representatives who guide them through the process. They’re shown the wheel, the set, trained on how to use it.
And everyone at the show seemed excited and rooting for the contestants, Johnson said.
“They want you to win. They don’t want to watch you go away losing.”
Every contestant is promised at least $1,000 for appearing, and Johnson said that’s the extent of what he can reveal.
And it’s understandable that Johnson wants to keep the results a surprise.
It’s a chance for him to look to his 16-year-old daughter and 18-year-old son and say, “come sit with me.”
The viewing party will be held at the Knights of Columbus Hall at 1265 Tower Hill Road, North Kingstown and will be from 6:15 to 8 p.m.
Johnson has a CD of original music entitled "Moments in Time" and is available at his Web site,   wrichardjohnson.com The CDs will be for sale for $12 at the viewing party and $2 from each sale will go to the food pantry.

NY Times on Origin of English

-- Historians are split between 2 camps, we might identify as the wheel (chariot-driven warriors), and the hoe (peaceful farmers).  Here is some new evidence in the debate.   

Family Tree of Languages Has Roots in Anatolia, Biologists Say

By NICHOLAS WADE   Published: August 23, 2012 

Biologists using tools developed for drawing evolutionary family trees say that they have solved a longstanding problem in archaeology: the origin of the Indo-European family of languages.

The family includes English and most other European languages, as well as Persian, Hindi and many others. Despite the importance of the languages, specialists have long disagreed about their origin.

Linguists believe that the first speakers of the mother tongue, known as proto-Indo-European, were chariot-driving pastoralists who burst out of their homeland on the steppes above the Black Sea about 4,000 years ago and conquered Europe and Asia. A rival theory holds that, to the contrary, the first Indo-European speakers were peaceable farmers in Anatolia, now Turkey, about 9,000 years ago, who disseminated their language by the hoe, not the sword.

The new entrant to the debate is an evolutionary biologist, Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He and colleagues have taken the existing vocabulary and geographical range of 103 Indo-European languages and computationally walked them back in time and place to their statistically most likely origin.

The result, they announced in Thursday’s issue of the journal Science, is that “we found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin.” Both the timing and the root of the tree of Indo-European languages “fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8,000 to 9,500 years ago,” they report.

But despite its advanced statistical methods, their study may not convince everyone.

The researchers started with a menu of vocabulary items that are known to be resistant to linguistic change, like pronouns, parts of the body and family relations, and compared them with the inferred ancestral word in proto-Indo-European. Words that have a clear line of descent from the same ancestral word are known as cognates. Thus “mother,” “mutter” (German), “mat’ ” (Russian), “madar” (Persian), “matka” (Polish) and “mater” (Latin) are all cognates derived from the proto-Indo-European word “mehter.”

Dr. Atkinson and his colleagues then scored each set of words on the vocabulary menu for the 103 languages. In languages where the word was a cognate, the researchers assigned it a score of 1; in those where the cognate had been replaced with an unrelated word, it was scored 0. Each language could thus be represented by a string of 1’s and 0’s, and the researchers could compute the most likely family tree showing the relationships among the 103 languages.

A computer was then supplied with known dates of language splits. Romanian and other Romance languages, for instance, started to diverge from Latin after A.D. 270, when Roman troops pulled back from the Roman province of Dacia. Applying those dates to a few branches in its tree, the computer was able to estimate dates for all the rest.

The computer was also given geographical information about the present range of each language and told to work out the likeliest pathways of distribution from an origin, given the probable family tree of descent. The calculation pointed to Anatolia, particularly a lozenge-shaped area in what is now southern Turkey, as the most plausible origin — a region that had also been proposed as the origin of Indo-European by the archaeologist Colin Renfrew, in 1987, because it was the source from which agriculture spread to Europe.

Dr. Atkinson’s work has integrated a large amount of information with a computational method that has proved successful in evolutionary studies. But his results may not sway supporters of the rival theory, who believe the Indo-European languages were spread some 5,000 years later by warlike pastoralists who conquered Europe and India from the Black Sea steppe.

A key piece of their evidence is that proto-Indo-European had a vocabulary for chariots and wagons that included words for “wheel,” “axle,” “harness-pole” and “to go or convey in a vehicle.” These words have numerous descendants in the Indo-European daughter languages. So Indo-European itself cannot have fragmented into those daughter languages, historical linguists argue, before the invention of chariots and wagons, the earliest known examples of which date to 3500 B.C. This would rule out any connection between Indo-European and the spread of agriculture from Anatolia, which occurred much earlier.

“I see the wheeled-vehicle evidence as a trump card over any evolutionary tree,” said David Anthony, an archaeologist at Hartwick College who studies Indo-European origins.