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Monday, February 4, 2008
A: 8,888 questions and a lot of puns
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
And the question is: What’s in “Ken Jennings’s Trivia Almanac?”
Jennings, of course is the Alpha Dog of “Jeopardy!,” the young man who won 74 straight games in 2004, a record that’s the trivia geek equivalent of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. (Actually, it’s more like hitting a game-winning home run in 74 straight games.)
So what do you do once you’ve peaked at age 30? Well, Jennings wrote a book about trivia culture, then this new trivia almanac, talked some trash about Alex Trebek on his blog that was pretty amusing, and lost his entire $2.5 million in a Baltimore alley playing craps one night. Naw, I’m kidding about that last one. He’s been very responsible, I’m sure.
Anyway, Jennings will be at the Margaret Mitchell House Feb. 5 to promote “Ken Jennings’s Trivia Almanac.” The event is sold out, presumably full of people who want to challenge Ken. Anyway, the book is a treasure for trivia buffs. It’s laid out chronologically day by day, then with themes each day, often built on a pun: “I’m With the Banned,” “Cheap Novel Tease,” “Jr. Samples.” And to to top it off, there’s a range of difficulty from really easy to really hard.
So if you had the chance to ask Ken Jennings one question, what would you ask him?
Also, a quick heads up! Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of “Maus,” is here Feb.5 He’ll be tracing the history of cartoons from Hogarth to R. Crumb, with emphasis on what he calls “forbidden images,” inspired by the commotion over Danish cartoons that depicted Muhammad. Part of the SCAD-Atlanta Writer Series. 7:30 p.m. Feb. 5. Free. Savannah College of Art and Design-Atlanta, 1600 Peachtree St. N.W., Atlanta. 404-253-3100, www.scad.edu.
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