Ken Jennings (After Jeopardy!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Jennings#After_Jeopardy.21
Taking advantage of the notoriety that Jennings’s losing Final Jeopardy! answer afforded, H&R Block offered Jennings free tax planning and financial services for the rest of his life. H&R Block senior vice president David Byers estimated that Jennings would owe approximately $1.04 million in taxes on his winnings.
Jennings also has a column in Mental Floss magazine called “Six Degrees of Ken Jennings”, in which readers submit two wildly different things and he has to connect them in exactly six moves, much in the same vein as the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. The column has been written since at least November 2005 and is still being written as of October 2008.
For those of you who don’t remember the contemporary events of 2004 (I barely do, but then again, I’m a drunk!), Jennings won the game show Jeopardy! 74 times in a row. That’s a total prize of $2,520,700. I regret blowing my parents off when they told me to apply for College Jeopardy. Especially now, when my biggest accomplishment from knowing a vast amount of useless facts to date has been winning trivia nights at a few bars. My prize? Beer.
All right, maybe it was worth it.
Jennings’s Six Degrees column is no longer, but he does have his own blog which is rife with wordplay quizzes, contests, book and game reviews, and interesting trivia. After all, you never know when you might be called upon to reach into the depths of your knowledge and pull out a random fact out of your brain. Better than your ass, especially when beer is at stake.
