If you've been wondering what trivia whiz Ken Jennings has been up to since winning $2.5 million two years ago on "Jeopardy!" here's your answer: The software engineer from Salt Lake City has written a book. It doesn't hit stores until September, but I snagged an advance copy and read — OK, skimmed — it so you won't have to.
Judging the book by its cover, I thought: Who wants to read a self-congratulatory memoir by a geeky quiz-show champion — called "Brainiac," no less?
But the title refers not so much to the author as to the obsessive subculture of trivia buffs, which Jennings chronicles with a reporter's curiosity and a welcome self-deprecating humor.
The book includes 170 trivia questions plus an amusing behind-the-scenes account of Jennings' "Jeopardy!" exploits. Some tidbits (with my snarky comments in parenthesis):
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Jennings nailed his first trivia question at age 4, when he stunned his mother by blurting the answer to "Where did the Wright brothers' first flight happen?"
(Yikes. At age 4, the only things I was blurting were "Mommy," "doggie" and "more whiskey, please.")
He once spent an 11-hour airplane flight seeing how fast he could name all the nations of the world in alphabetical order. (Not out loud, apparently, or he'd be dead today — because his seatmate would have strangled him.)
One rival contestant, in the green room before a taping, told Jennings he had "smoked two bowls of weed" that morning to calm his nerves. (Needless to say, the dude lost.)
When Jennings finally lost, in his 75th game, he was so weary of the show's pressures that he felt "a tidal wave of relief." (Yeah, right.)
During Jennings' celebrated run, a Salt Lake City sign painter named Ken R. Jennings got so many late-night phone calls that he began answering "Is Ken Jennings there?" with, "No! He ran off with Vanna White!"
