Ken Jennings Story

Wednesday, Jul. 26, 2006 - 8:34 a.m.

Old Buddy Dave showed me this story recently:

`Jeopardy' Champ Ken Jennings Blasts Show
Tuesday, July 25, 2006 2:54 PM EDT
The Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) � "Jeopardy!" ace Ken Jennings, who won $2.5 million during his 74-game winning streak, has a few unkind words to say about the show � and dapper host Alex Trebek.

"I know, I know, the old folks love him," Jennings writes in a recent posting, titled "Dear Jeopardy!" on his Web site.

"Nobody knows he died in that fiery truck crash a few years back and was immediately replaced with the Trebektron 4000 (I see your engineers still can't get the mustache right, by the way)."

Jennings also takes aim at the show's "effete, left-coast" categories and "same-old" format.

"You're like the Dorian Gray of syndication," he says. "You seem to think `change' means replacing a blue polyethylene backdrop with a slightly different shade of blue polyethylene backdrop every presidential election or so."

A call by The Associated Press to "Jeopardy!" spokesman Jeff Ritter was not immediately returned Tuesday.

Jennings, a software engineer from Salt Lake City, snagged 74 wins on "Jeopardy!" in 2004 before he was beaten by challenger Nancy Zerg.

Trebek, 66, has hosted the show since 1984. In a "correction" posted Monday on his Web site, Jennings offers an apology of sorts.

"We regret the insinuation that Mr. Alex Trebek is a robot, and has been since 2004. Mr. Trebek's robotic frame does still contain some organic parts, many harvested from patriotic Canadian schoolchildren, so this technically makes him a `cyborg,' not a `robot.'"

That sounded so utterly unusual for Ken Jennings, whom I almost felt I'd gotten to know over the summer of his winning run.

So, I went and did what I've learned to do before making a blog post about it -- I decided to go read for myself what he'd written -- which you can see right here on his blog .

What do you suppose? Gee! A reporter taking a few lines out of context and twisting them for purposes of accomodating their own agenda? Sound the trumpets -- that's NEVER happened before!

Once in awhile, I hear a surly kid call Doctor Laura and complain about not being able to go spend time with their friends, and then when she gets Mommy on the phone, we find out the child is getting Ds in school and setting fire to things with the microwave oven. This is the same sort of thing. Once we go read and get a bigger context, we see that the reporter is, for lack of a better phrase, out of line, and full of shit.

If you don't read Ken Jennings' blog and understand the larger context -- and only get the one side of the story -- you'll get confused by the story content.

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Sorry not a long post today; it's foggy here and cool, and while it is so, I'm gonna dash around and get stuff done.

Have a good Wednesday.

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