Spurred on by my extreme enjoyment of Ken Jenning's book Maphead, I decided to go back and read his first book called Braniac, the subtitle of which is the header of the post and perfectly sums up not only the book, but each of the people and situations he represents within it.
About 50% of the book's content specifically relates to his appearance on Jeopardy!, from the tryout process through the entire taping and the media frenzy that ensued shortly thereafter. I must admit that it was very entertaining to read this human side of the seemingly super-human Ken Jennings, where he talks about all the near misses, his strange relationship with Alex and the other staff members at the studio, his secret double-life he led for months since the delay in taping meant that he was taking months off of work and couldn't tell anyone why, and the looks on the other contestant's faces when they heard for the first time that this guy they were going up against had been champion for more than 60 or 70 days. He talks about the initial tryouts and his buddy that went to tryout with him (but never made it on the show), how it took a full 8 months (8 months!) before they called him back to come and play a single game, and how at least two people who he knew from prior trivia circles came to have their own turn on Jeopardy!, only to be put on indefinite hold since he couldn't play against them and no one knew when (if ever) this guy would ever leave the show. He talks about trying to find a new and exciting way to write his name each day, and the laborious chore of thinking of some witty comment to say about himself after several dozen days on the show.
And eventually he talks about the one thing that he feels kept him alive on the show so long (besides an insane amount of trivia knowledge) and what he believes may have done him in, in the end - the buzzer. Arguably one of the trickiest components of the show, we've all seen those contestants who savagely click their buzzer, or who jump the gun and buzz to early, only to be denied the chance to answer time and time again. So it's no surprise that he gives credit to the fact that he had developed the perfect timing when pushing the button, giving him a huge advantage over the other players who were on the stage for the very first time, fighting the instinctive urge to buzz in too early. Ironically, the show's producers decided to replace the guy who 'flips the switch' once Alex finishes reading the question, which activates the buzzers. And it was on that very show that the super-human Ken Jennings lost for the first time in 74 straight episodes.
But he remembers with the most eerie specificity the details of several events on Jeopardy! as only a person who has a ridiculous amount of trivia stowed away already could have, mostly including times he flubbed an answer or was almost beaten. At times I almost wished I had all of the episodes taped, so I could watch the moments he describes and see if I could see the thoughts in his facial expression, or recognize his nervousness in that moment. This passage in particular would have been interesting to place with a visual:
(it's long - feel free to skip it and come back later, if you need to)
"I've already lucked into the first two Daily Doubles of the game, and, doubly lucky, I knew both answers, so the score is not particularly close when I find the third Daily Double as well. I have $28,000 on my scoreboard. Bill Carter, the vaguely Billy Blanks-esque fitness trainer at the third podium, is in second right now, but it's a distant second. There are no more Daily Doubles hidden on the board to guard against, and the category is a strong one for me: "Literary Pairs." I have a little room to maneuver.
My typical Daily Double wager is only a couple thousand or so. I believe the technical Jeopardy! term for that kind of wager is "wussy bet." Some of that is strategic - why risk a lead when you don't need to?-but much of it is just cowardice. I'm the kind of gambler who gets antsy when the casino doesn't have a one-dollar-minimum blackjack table, so I don't much like the idea of blowing tens of thousands of dollars on a single trivia question, even if it's "found money" that I'm risking, even if I'll have more big scores than crippling losses.
Often I'll bet an amount that will give me a nice, round score if I answer correctly. This too is partially strategic-it tends to make the math easier-but it's mostly anal-retentiveness and superstition. I do the same thing at restaurants, making sure the tip neatly "evens out" the total tab. Right now, I have $28,000. I could bet $2,000 to make a nice clean thirty grand. But that's way too low, given the category. What's the next round number?
"I'll bet $12,000 of it, Alex," I hear myself saying.
This is the biggest wager of my young Jeopardy! career. There's an immediate hush in the already quiet auditorium. Alex's voice seems even more sober than usual as he reads the question:
"The film title Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind comes from a poem about these ill-fated medieval lovers."
I grimace and my tongue probes an upper molar. I'd read the question in a flash, trying to give my brain a head start while Alex finished reading it out loud, but precious seconds are ticking away and the answer's still not coming. I nervously lean my chin on one hand. Soon Alex will sternly prompt me for a response. What do I say?
Mindy and I both loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when we saw it a few months back [my comment: I did, too, actually. It's a fabulous movie and if you haven't seen it - see it! (have tissues on hand, though)]. I remember the title quote is from Alexander Pope, because, in the movie, Kirsten Dunst's character is embarrassed when she mistakenly attributes it to "Pope Alexander." But I don't remember the movie ever naming the poem in question. [I don't even remember that reference, and I've seen it more than once.]
Okay, the category is "Literary Pairs," so you're probably meant to remember the answer from its literary source, not from a Jim Carrey movie. Did Pope write about any famous lovers? Nothing leaps to mind. Is there a clue in the quote? Sunshine. Spotless mind. Forgetfulness. Amnesia. Now, I'm drawing a blank. I might as well have amnesia.
Well, what about the answer space? What ill-fated lovers make up a "literary pair"? Romeo and Juliet - too easy for a $1,600 clue. Let's see, title lovers. Antony and Cleopatra? Troilus and Cressida? Nope, there's already been a "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" question in the category, so Shakespeare is out altogether. Hero and Leander? They're classical, not medieval. Plus, I think that's Marlowe, not Pope. "Medieval" is starting to bother me. Who are the great star-crossed lovers of medieval romances, anyway? Medieval. Middle Ages. King Arthur. Hmmm. Arthur and Guinevere? Lancelot and Guinevere? They were "ill-fated," sure, but I don't remember anyone of Pope's day writing too much poetry about Arthurian romance. That came back in with the Victorians. "Tristan and Isolde" is another Arthurian possibility, but it seems a little too hard an answer for the $1,600 space.
Alex is looking fixedly at me. All this internal monologue has taken seven or eight seconds, though it feels like hours. "Whhhhhoooooo... aaaaaaarrrrrre..." I begin as slowly as I can, hoping inspiration will strike while I stall. Another long pause. $24,000 is at stake here: six months' take-home wages at my day job, the price of, say, a new Toyota Camry. I don't even have a good guess, so I'm on the verge of saying "Tristan and Isolde."
Wait. "Medieval lovers." You wouldn't really say that about fictional characters, would you, even if their lives were set in medieval times? Something about the wording almost makes the clue sound historical, like the answer is a pair of real people who lived during the Middle Ages. Then what makes them a "literary" pair? Either because their story became popular fodder for poets, or -
Or one was an author.
Something accelerates in my head, and suddenly I can sense the answer tantalizingly out of reach. Dante and Beatrice. Petrarch and Laura. Wait! I know who it is! Love letters, castration. The Alexander Pope clue jibes as well. What were their names?
Alex is about to rule against me for taking too much time. "Uh, er, Heloise," I blurt out. "Uh, and Abelard." Peter Abelard, the famous French theologian who fell in love with Heloise, the gifted teenaged girl he tutored, got her pregnant, and then lost his "little Peter" Abelard in violent fashion when her angry uncle found out.
"Yep!" says Alex, to my great relief. Only then do I realize that I've been holding my breath for the whole twenty-five second ordeal, and forcefully exhale."
(end of quote)
Seriously? For one thing, I don't think that many thoughts in an entire day, let alone a few hours, much less 25 seconds. I don't even think I would think that much about which house to buy or what neighborhood to live in. And even if I managed to think that much, there is no way I would remember it in that much detail (although he does say he goes to his hotel room that night and continues thinking (read: obsessing) about that question). I don't even know if I could pull that much detail out of my wedding day or the day my kids were born. I can't even begin to imagine what's in that head of his, although I'm pretty sure he probably never forgets his anniversary or what his wife's favorite color or flower are.
In a way, it's kind of like watching the Olympics, or professional sports, where we marvel at the abilities the men and women have, to train their body to move in ways we can't even begin to understand. In many ways, both situations rely a great deal on biology, but the training is the only way to develop this kind of agility and precision. In the same way I marvel at a quarterback's ability to throw a ball down-field and hit the guy (who's been running, besides) square in the chest, I am simply astounded at this man's ability to use his mind the way he does. Granted, he's spent decades filling his mind with what is likely millions of pieces of information, but besides the fact that I've never even heard of most of the people he talks about in that passage, the way he's able to relate and recall the information he has stored is nothing short of astounding. I can't even manage to bring to mind where my camera is half the time, or what I had for lunch yesterday.
Peppered throughout the book and intermixed with his stint on Jeopardy!, Ken explores the world of trivia-lovers in much the same way he did with map-lovers, finding the quirky, odd and obsessed people out there who eat, sleep and breathe the stuff. He talks a lot about a college phenomenon called Quiz Bowl, which is an elitist trivia challenge club that is still operating at many high-level colleges today. In fact, he mentions that many contestants on trivia shows, Jeopardy! and otherwise came straight out of Quiz Bowl, enough that he recognizes many of them from his college days. The first guy who won the million on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Quiz Bowl. The guy who set the all-time record for winnings on a game show in 2000 on Twenty-One? Quiz Bowl. How about the guy who won the million on 1 vs 100? Yep, Quiz Bowl. Or the guy who somehow won more than $2 million on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? You guessed it! Quiz Bowl. Probably for bragging rights more than anything else, the National Academic Quiz Tournaments, LLC maintains a website that lists all Quiz Bowl players that have gone on to win game shows. If you want to check it out, you can find it here http://www.naqt.com/game-show-appearances.jsp. You might find yourself recognizing a name or two.
Also, just like Maphead, this book is peppered with trivia facts (although I like the format more in Maphead). This book lists trivia questions throughout the chapters with subscript numbers, and then has those numbers at the end of the chapter with the answers. Not surprisingly, I know very few of these answers, but I did know which birds are known for making their home at San Juan Capistrano (swallows), and I also know which is the only one of the 50 states that has a flag that is not rectangular (Ohio!), thanks to my brother-in-law, Eric.
The zany characters and outrageous trivia traditions make up the other 50% of this book, where he interviews trivia fanatics and briefly joins their worlds in an attempt to show us what it's like to be completely obsessed with trivia. One guy he talks to is Fred Worth, who wrote a series of books titled Trivia Encyclopedia for years. Like most other trivia writers (and, as it turns out, writers of newspapers, dictionaries, and even road atlases), he included a piece of untruth in his writing. Book writers apparently do this often so they can tell when their works are being copied or plagiarized. Even map-makers will sometimes include fake cities, dictionaries invent words, and encyclopedias create fake famous people, all in hopes of catching a criminal in the act when the lie shows up in someone else's work. For Fred, it was the TV character Columbo's first name. His answer: Philip. The real answer? Columbo doesn't have a first name (although apparently extreme Columbo fanatics have paused a scene in the very first season where the detective is wearing a badge that clearly reads "Frank Columbo").
Imagine Fred's surprise when he bought the first edition of the game Trivial Pursuit in 1984 and began reading the trivia questions, only to recognize many of the questions as his own. Then it happens. He turns over a card and it says "What's Columbo's first name?" Answer: Philip. He thought he had them. He sued Trivial Pursuit for damages but ultimately lost because the court ruled that trivia was facts and could not be copyrighted. Even though Fred Worth had spent decades researching and collecting trivia facts, and even though it was discovered that nearly 28% of the questions in Trivial Pursuit had come right out of his book - word for word, Fred still lost. So what did Fred get from Trivial Pursuit's huge success of twenty-two million copies of the game sold in their first year? Twenty cents. That's the royalty he received from the one copy of the book they bought and used for the game. Poor guy.
But, clearly the most memorable people in the book would have to be the crazy people in the town of Stevens Point, Wisconsin. In April, the entire town turns into the trivia capital of the world for exactly fifty-four hours. This story is almost impossible to believe - and it totally makes me want to make a road trip there and check it out. The town only has 25,000 people living in it, but each year more than 12,000 people register for this trivia contest (probably a lot more, actually, since he wrote this book back in 2006 and he tends to be a bit of a trend-setter in these things). And while most of the participators live in town, many make a yearly pilgrimage from a neighboring town, or used to live here and make the journey home to compete.
Want to go, too? They already have dates posted online for the next three years. :)
What makes this trivia game so unusual is that it's done over the radio and questions come after every two songs that are played, 24 hours a day: 428 times from 6pm Friday night until midnight on Sunday. All of the players are split up onto teams (it would be impossible to do alone) and each team has exactly two songs to call their answer in to the radio station before the next question is read. It's a constant stream of trivia: day and night, night and day. One question every seven minutes or so, around the clock. Insanity! And as if that's not enough... "There are also the twenty-odd visual questions in the New Trivia Times newsletter that 90FM releases the week before the contest. There are the three audio questions - a Name That Tune game of twenty-four short song snippets played on the air during the contest. There are the "running questions," a quick scavenger hunt played on Stevens Point's Main Street early Saturday and Sunday mornings. There are the "trivia stone" clues, a car-based treasure hunt whose cryptic directions are read out on the air every so often during the weekend. And this year, on top of all that, there are also eight ultra-difficult questions that will be read out intermittently during the contest. Teams will have the whole weekend to try to crack them." The prize? The top ten teams get a little trophy, and that's it. Seriously. The contest even ties up so much of the tiny city's phone lines that AT&T was forced to upgrade the equipment there in order to keep up with the demand, almost a decade earlier than they planned to.
But Ken Jennings is not impressed. He doesn't feel like this is real trivia. He thinks it's cheating sitting at home with seven minutes to come up with the answer to the questions. After all, they have the internet. But before Google existed, this town kept extensive Notes on everything facet of human life. Binders, filing cabinets, bookshelves, and rooms-full of Notes. And just because the internet is here, they haven't given up their Notes. Many players have kept such thorough Notes for so many years that they can find answers there quicker than they can online. And of course, this means they have to work on writing and keeping these notes, all. year. long. And lest you think that the internet would actually help these people, consider these questions, "What's the visitors' score on the scoreboard behind LeBron James in that Nike ad?" "Can you read the t-shirt on that teenager ordering Little Caesar's?" These players actually tape TV commercials so they can watch them over and over again and often assign players on their teams different nights each week to watch TV to keep up on all the shows. One guy Ken talks to has 31 notebooks with detailed notes on over 8,000 movies. A date with that guy would be pretty fun, now, wouldn't it?
And in case that isn't weird enough, consider the 'consumerist' questions they like to ask. "snack ingredients, packaging details" to the point where these guys have basements full of filing cabinets full of candy wrappers, cereal boxes, and Happy Meals. Ken looks through one cabinet labeled "N-Z" and finds "Scooby Doo dog treats, Shrek breakfast cereal, Spongebob Squarepants macaroni and cheese". This is nuts.
Granted, the internet definitely did change the game. It leveled the playing field in a lot of ways, since people who hadn't been taking notes for decades could suddenly play, too, and it changed the nature of the questions as well. Ken finds this out with the first few questions "What movie poster was visible behind John McEnroe's head on the second night of his short-lived talk show?" "What secret US military base was named for a processed food in 1942?" He starts to realize that you can't really play this kind of game without the internet. These questions are nearly impossible to answer off the top of your head, although in a couple of hours he does find that he knows some of the answers and even helps the team he's visiting get a point they wouldn't otherwise have gotten. You'd have to read the book to see what I mean, but this game actually kind of sounds like fun. He talks about going out to dinner with one team (of course the restaurants in town all have the radio station on) and muttering around the table about the answer while sizing up the other teams in the booths across the way. Neighbors become enemies. Parents against grandparents. Bosses against employees. Teachers against students. Everyone is equal on this same focused mission.
The guy who runs the contest is undoubtedly proud of the work he does. 150 hours of work go into making the weekend event happen, but he has the joy of uniting the whole town and bringing friendly competition and excitement to his own little piece of heaven. But... "He takes his responsibility seriously. Starting the first Sunday night in January, he and John Eckendorf lock themselves in their writing room every night of every weekend until the contest starts in April. 'Everything in my basement, all the garbage we generate, I have to hold on to until after the contest,' says Jim. He knows that, otherwise, teams would be going through his trash. After all, this is a guy who gets stalked every time he goes to the supermarket. 'I'll grab something off a shelf, and people will stop dead at both ends of the aisle, just staring at my cart.' One player tells me she spent weeks trying to track down a tube of the same toothpaste she heard Jim used." Crazy, no?
One other thing I liked (and the last thing I'll share with you, since I've practically now written a book about this book) is his section on the game NTN. If you've never played NTN, it's a trivia game where at some restaurants (like TGI Friday's) they bring a little box to your table and you can play along with the questions on the TV screen. It always seemed innocent enough to me, and it was pretty fun to play. But, of course, I had no idea of the world that existed behind that TV screen. Apparently there are teams here too, and rivals at that. There are people who travel the country playing the game, who work their jobs around when the game is on, and then there's the guy who played 416 hours of NTN during March of 2000 hoping to win a pair of plane tickets (that's over 13 hours a day!) He won... and he used the plane tickets to fly to an NTN get-together in Phoenix. Many NTN players are fiercely loyal to their home site and follow the scores and standings like obsessed sports fans.
NTN players demonstrated what a tight-knit community they were when a well-respected player suddenly died in February of 2001. That night, dozens of top teams around the country used his nickname in place of their own out of respect, literally flooding the screen with his name. Nearly all had never even met him in real life. Although I doubt you'd be surprised to hear anything else trivia fanatics are willing to do now that I've said all this, I was still surprised to find that rival 'teams' will work to recruit good trivia players into their home site's team, and some players will move cross-country to join a team of their choosing - kind of like a professional sports draft pick. It should come as no surprise that the names on that list of Quiz Bowl turned game show winners are some of the most popular 'drafts' onto NTN teams.
Oh, the weird and wacky world of trivia. Thank you Ken Jennings for bringing us all a glimpse into these crazy, fascinating lives from trivia history. Once again I'd like to recommend this book to all of you. It's not as polished as Maphead, but is still a supremely enjoyable read - especially if you like Jeopardy!, trivia games, other game shows, or trivia in general.
As a parting thought, I'll leave you with this quote from Ken. Written during the half-way point of his Jeopardy! journey, it's a perfect fit with our own family's life of unschooling. It's a beautiful testament to the availability of information all around us, and the amazing way our minds seek to learn and understand the curious nature of our lives and the lives of those around us. It's comforting to know that there's still some things out there for Ken Jennings to learn, because that means I've got lifetimes still left to be uncovered. Curiosity is a wonderful thing, and there is so much out there to learn and try and do!
"Forty-odd games of Jeopardy! have taught me something else about knowledge - namely, that it's everywhere. I had always assumed that the brains lined up behind the Jeopardy! podiums got all their knowledge from books, from a lifetime of voracious reading. Their sensitive, pallid complexions certainly support that theory. But in my case - and other contestants I talk to have backed me up - reading is secondary (don't tell your kids). Sure, I like to read. I recognize many answers from things I read in books. But many, many more clues I just remember from a lifetime of general curiosity, of keeping an eye open for what's going on in the world around me.
It's almost embarrassing how many Jeopardy! answers I give that come not from some highbrow leather-bound reference book but from somewhere a little more plebeian. Should I admit how many mythology questions I knew only because of the Thor comic books I read as a kid, or how many geography questions from globe-trotting reality shows? Almost all my knowledge of stars and constellations comes from bad sci-fi movies. All my national flags come from NBC Olympic coverage. All my aquatic birds come from crossword puzzle clues.
It's encouraging, I guess, to realize how much information we wade through every day, stuff we could absorb if we were engaged enough to notice it. Back at home between tapings, I'm aware for the first time of just how easy it is to learn something new every hour of every day. If I'm watching a few minutes of an old war movie on late-night TV, I'm probably learning something about World War II that I didn't know before - the only D-Day beach that shares its name with a chemical element (Gold), for example. If I'm flipping through a magazine at the dentist's office, I might be learning about something new on every page: global warming, or the NBA play-offs, or health-care reform. If I'm cooking dinner with Mindy, I might learn some new word of French or Italian that shows up in the recipe, since those are the languages that I don't speak - the kind of pasta whose name means "little turnips," for example. (Ravioli) Even the mindless Thomas the Tank Engine videos that Dylan makes me watch with him, when I pay attention to them, turn out to be a treasure trove of information on trains and railroads. Dozens of times every day, the "Hey, that could come up on Jeopardy!" alarm will go off in my head. It's not a panicky feeling anymore. Now I sort of enjoy it."
No comments:
Post a Comment