NEW YORK, Jan. 16, 2008
Trivia King's Trivia "Almanac"
Penned By Ken Jennings, Of "Jeopardy!" Fame
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Play CBS Video Video The Early Show Plays Jeopardy All-time Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings won 74 games and $2.5 million. He now hosts a Jeopardy game for "The Early Show" reading questions from his newly released "Trivia Almanac."
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(CBS/EARLY SHOW)
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Ken Jennings on The Early Show Wednesday (CBS/EARLY SHOW)
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The question?
Who is Ken Jennings?!
The king of trivia nation, whose six-month run as champ on the popular show ended in November of 2004, is out with his second book -- "Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac: 8,888 Questions in 365 Days."
It devotes a page to every day of the year, offering trivia quizzes pegged to oddball historic events that occurred on each date. For instance, the Feb. 22 page notes the 10,000 B.C. birth of Pebbles Flintstone, the 1495 A.D. beginning of Europe's syphilis epidemic, and the 2006 download of the billionth song from iTunes.
The quizzes include easy questions, moderately difficult ones, and stumpers -- labeled "Easy," "Harder," and "Yeah, Good Luck."
Jennings chatted about his latest offering on The Early Show Tuesday with co-anchor Harry Smith, then put Smith and fellow co-anchors Julie Chen and Maggie Rodriguez through some trivia paces.
He told Smith his "Jeopardy!" windfall has freed him to write full-time, saying, "I was a computer programmer, and not a very good one, and not in love with every aspect of my job, so, now I get to stay home and work in my pajamas and see more of my kids, and I really like being a writer."
Jennings says it's hard to define trivia, but you know it when you see it. Not every obscure fact counts as "trivia."
There's something odd and attention-grabbing about the really great pieces of trivia, he points out, and they generally have something like a "Whoa!" moment associated with them when you learn, for example, that Monkee Mike Nesmith's mom invented Wite-Out, or that camels have three eyelids.
To read an excerpt of "Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac," click here.
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