IAmA 74-time Jeopardy! champion, Ken Jennings. I will not be answering in the form of a question.
Hey Redditors!
I’ll be here on and off today in case anyone wants to Ask Me Anything. Someone told me the questions here can be on any subject, within reason. Well, to me, “within reason” are the two lamest words in the English language, even worse than “miniature golf” or “Corbin Bernsen.” So no such caveats apply here. Ask Me ANYTHING.
I’ve posted some proof of my identity on my blog: http://ken-jennings.com/blog/?p=2614
and on “Twitter,” which I hear is very popular with the young people. http://twitter.com/kenjennings
Updated to add: You magnificent bastards! You brought down my blog!
Updated again to add: Okay, since there are only a few thousand unanswered questions now, I’m going to have to call this. (Also, I have to pick up my kids from school.)
But I’ll be back, Reddit! When you least expect it! MWAH HA HA! Or, uh, when I have a new book to promote. One of those. Thanks for all the fun.
Updated posthumously to add: You can always ask further questions on the message boards at my site. You can sign up for my weekly email trivia quiz or even buy books there as well.[/whore]
I hear you had an awesome roommate when you lived in Utah who went on to write books and stuff. Why don’t you tell us about how awesome he was?
I kid. (Only a little.) Okay, a serious question. How did it feel to beat Brad? I always felt you got the raw end of things during your previous meeting, coming in cold as you had to. In some ways, that free pass to the final round was a backhanded compliment.
Hey Brandon! I hope I’m allowed to out this comment as coming from bajillion-seller-of-nerd-fantasy books Brandon Sanderson.
Yeah, I felt like the buzzer gods were not smiling on me last time Brad kicked my butt. This would have been sweet, sweet revenge, if a supercomputer hadn’t been raping me the entire time.
I wish I had something clever to say, but this is just an awesome development in an already great thread.
So, were you two really roommates? If so, how did you manage to keep all the women away from the shared living quarters of an aspiring fantasy author and a trivia nerd?
Yes, we were—just lucky chance. I moved into a place where he was already living. A duplex with five rooms, I think. It wasn’t too long (six months or so?) before Ken got married to a girl two or three houses down. So you could say that we failed at keeping the women away…failed WITH STYLE.
And, if you want your head to spin, try going to dinner with Ken, his brother Nathan, and Earl (Ken’s old friend and college bowl team-mate.) All three are geniuses, and it’s a strange experience to be around them as they play off of one another. The literary allusions, pop culture references, and puns create a conflux of wit nearly dense enough to pull down small astral bodies.
Wow you roomed with Ken Jennings? Damn that is a cool bit of trivia. I apologize for this being an offensive or intrusive question, but did it have something to do with you both being Mormon or was that total coincidence?
Yeah, I was going to BYU at the time. Ken was finished, I believe. We had both come to Provo for school, though. (I’m from Nebraska originally.)
Wait…are you really Brandon Sanderson? Because if so I literally just finished reading Mistborn the other night. It totally made me cry.
Thank you for reading. I feel both guilty and proud to have made you cry.
I’m reading Warbreaker right now and it’s amaze-balls. I’m all about reading well written fantasy goodies right now because I’m (very slowly) writing my first fantasy novel. I bow to your skill.
Best of luck to you in your writing. Just keep at it. The secret to becoming a great writer is to first be a dedicated writer.
This is so sad, instead of wanting to ask the OP questions, I just want to ask Brandon Sanderson about the WoT series! I need to know what happens to Rand! Cmoooon! Get back to writing so I can spend my hard earned money on you! >.> P.S. All of my friends (including me) are graduating with our post grads this year and sharing the WoT has been one of the ways we keep in touch. If you could, I dunno, like send me a whats up or something, I would poop my pants, and then show it to them. But hey, that’s just me.
I’ll do an AMA eventually. One of these days. (I keep saying that.) Anyway, back to writing, as commanded…. :)
Sanderson and Jennings were roommates… Nerdgasm. Ken, do you read WoT?
Our other roommates were Brent Spiner, “Weird Al,” Kevin Smith, Stan Lee, 5/6 of Monty Python, and the lightsaber kid from that one video.
There’s got to be a sitcom pitch in here somewhere. Two semi-famous Mormons, living together, being nerds. Like Big Bang Theory, only with more green Jell-O. Glen Beck could play the evil apartment building owner who keeps trying to come up with crazy schemes to get us kicked out, since our apartment is rent controlled to 1870’s prices as long as a pure descendant of Brigham Young lives in it.
Stephenie Meyer is our version of Wilson, only instead of standing behind a fence, she hides in the basement and gives cryptic, half-nonsense advice in exchange for bad poetry. Tom Cruise and Jon Travolta live in the rival Scientologist apartment building across the street, and are always trying to one-up us. Season finale: Cruise secretly joins the church of Inglip.
TIL that Mormons can be hilarious. Would never have guessed from the pantaloons or whatever those Mormon undies are called.
Wait. I’d have thought that wearing odd underwear would be an extra-special indication of hilariousness. I’ve been wearing it for the wrong reason all these years…
(They’re actually called garments. And yes, they are a little odd. The Mormon equivalent of a turban, or a kippah, or what have you. They’re basically just a T-shirt and knee-length boxers, though, so they’re less strange than they probably sound.)
Good point. Have you ever seen the Mormon temple in Nauvoo, IL? I grew up in that county, it was kind of a big deal when it was first built.
I keep meaning to get there. I had relatives in the area when I was younger, so we’d make the drive up from Nebraska (where I grew up) to the area frequently. Haven’t been back since the temple was re-built, though.
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