For me, it started as a child with one of those little wooden jigsaw maps of the U.S., where's there's crocodiles on Florida and apples on Washington state. That was my very first map.
— Ken Jennings
During the whole 'Jeopardy' experience, I felt like I was living a bit of a double life, I would be secretly flying out to L.A. to tape new shows, hoping that none of my coworkers would notice the absence and figure out what was going on. 'Jeopardy' tries very hard to keep their secrets.
I have always loved maps.
I would stare at maps of Delaware for hours.
People are using GPS systems to find millions of little hidden objects throughout the world - often as simple as a piece of Tupperware hidden in the woods. You go to a website, you get the latitude and longitude to get the specific location of a certain specific hiding space, and then you go there and see if you can find it.
There's just something hypnotic about maps.
You watch an old 'Jeopardy!' and the categories alone are very plain. 'Poetry,' or 'Movies,' or 'Physics.' If you watch it now, though, there'll be a theme board where the categories are all Hitchcock movies. Lots more jokes, lots more high-concept categories and questions.
As Jeopardy devotees know, if you're trying to win on the show, the buzzer is all. On any given night, nearly all the contestants know nearly all the answers, so it's just a matter of who masters buzzer rhythm the best.
Being a nerd really pays off sometimes.
It's boring to have the same guy win. I'm actively rooting against myself.
If I start outsourcing all my navigation to a little talking box in my car, I'm sort of screwed. I'm going to lose my car in the parking lot every single time.
Even before you understand them, your brain is drawn to maps.
For some reason the most devoted mapheads seem to be kids.
You live overseas, you see these exotic places and you want to know about them. But, weirdly, it also made me homesick for all these very prosaic places in America.
I can't relax and sink back in the couch and watch 'Jeopardy!' the way I used to.
I remember one of my last shows, the Final Jeopardy! clue was something like 'These two boys' names are top 10 boys' names in the U.S., they both end with the same letter, and they're both names of Jesus' apostles.' Now, obviously that's not a knowable fact.
The future is here.
When you see people who are really good at game shows, the one common attribute is a cool head under pressure: an ability to perform as well in the studio, surrounded by lights and noise, as you do on your couch.
It's so much fun that the money is just icing on the cake. There seems to be a lot of icing.
Sure I have a cell-phone, so I don't have to remember everyone's number anymore, but that really wasn't a core part of my brain.
I would read the atlas for pleasure. I knew it was weird. It was weird.
When you make a decision, you need facts. If those facts are in your brain, they're at your fingertips. If they're all in Google somewhere, you may not make the right decision on the spur of the moment.
I have condemned my kids to a lifetime of geographic illiteracy.
We don't realize how hard it was to drive anywhere outside the major cities less than a century ago.
The Final Jeopardy! questions seem to be, by design, things you can't know. And so it's not about who knows them, but who can figure them out in thirty seconds.
Knowing lots of answers but being a millisecond slow on the buzzer is indeed very frustrating.
It's really changed me. For the first time I'm in favor of the Bush tax cuts.
If it's on the Internet, then it's gotta be true.
