They Killed Ken! 557
kwings writes "SF Gate (via the AP) is reporting that your pal, Ken Jennings has been beaten after his 75th(!) game. I fully expect Mr. Trebek to hold a wake, or to keep calling the champion 'Ken' for the rest of the season. :) Since they're only up to airing game 41, it will be an interesting few months (or 34 shows)."
I think they should give Ken Alex's job. (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it'd be cool if the host actually knew all the stuff when interacting with the contestants.
Bummer. (Score:5, Interesting)
Jeopardy just won't be as fun to watch after he's gone. Ken's converted Jeopardy from an interesting game-show to a serious spectator sport in my house. It just won't be the same.
Jeopardy rules (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't count on it (Score:5, Interesting)
Ken's winning streak has been fantastic for Jeopardy's ratings (up 35% from the same time last season, last I heard). This could be just another ploy to try and drive the ratings up even further.
Come on, guys. We're notorious skeptics here on Slashdot. Don't believe everything you read.
Re:that was a good run though (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, if this news is right that his final curtain closes on show 75, its roughly on course.
It had to end sometime (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, I'm sure even Ken would/will/did get tired of playing sooner or later. 75 games sounds like a nice round number to stop on; he set the single-game score record with something right around 75,000, as I recall (maybe even 75k even?).
So, it'll be interesting (to me) to see if he more or less quit on purpose - either just not coming back by choice, or obviously throwing the game to lose.
Xentax
Re:Bummer. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Jeopardy rules (Score:1, Interesting)
The most attractive theory--albeit suspiciously neat--is that it derives from a prolonged act of political nepotism. The Victorian prime minister, Lord Salisbury (family name Robert Cecil, pronounced ) appointed his rather less than popular nephew Arthur Balfour to a succession of posts. The most controversial, in 1887, was chief secretary of Ireland, a post for which Balfour--despite his intellectual gifts--was considered unsuitable. The Dictionary of National Biography says: "The country saw with something like stupefaction the appointment of the young dilettante to what was at the moment perhaps the most important, certainly the most anxious office in the administration". As the story goes, the consensus among the irreverent in Britain was that to have Bob as your uncle was a guarantee of success, hence the expression. Since the very word nepotism derives from the Italian word for nephew (from the practice of Italian popes giving preferment to nephews, a euphemism for their bastard sons), the association here seems more than apt.
Actually, Balfour did rather well in the job, confounding his critics and earning the bitter nickname Bloody Balfour from the Irish, which must have quietened the accusations of undue favouritism more than a little (he also rose to be Prime Minister from 1902-5). There is another big problem: the phrase isn't recorded until 1937, in Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Mr Partridge suggested it had been in use since the 1890s, but nobody has found an example in print. This is surprising. If public indignation or cynicism against Lord Salisbury's actions had been great enough to provoke creation of the saying, why didn't it appear--to take a case--in a satirical magazine of the time such as Punch?
A rather more probable, but less exciting, theory has it that it derives from the slang phrase all is bob, meaning that everything is safe, pleasant or satisfactory. This dates back to the seventeenth century or so (it's in Captain Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1785). There have been several other slang expressions containing bob, some associated with thievery or gambling, and from the eighteenth century on it was also a common generic name for somebody you didn't know. Any or all of these might have contributed to its genesis.
Re:The losing Final Jeopardy question of Ken Jenni (Score:5, Interesting)
I think TV Week should be called out on this one, because clearly their source is the blog, and the blog's source is a named informer; however, they way their article is written, they make it appear that the source went directly to them. This is good for them, because it makes it look like they have people "on the inside" that are willing to give them information.
When the NY Times can have a plagiarizer on their staff for a long time without knowing it, I do not think I would put such actions behind a much less credible periodical as TV Week.
Re:I think they should give Ken Alex's job. (Score:3, Interesting)
Quoted from http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,6216,00.htm
It also may be that Trebek is too tied up with potential court dates to appear on the show. The 59-year-old host was sued Monday by a United Airlines employee, who says he left her with serious hand injuries during a confrontation at Los Angeles International Airport.
Marlene Andrade, 31, of Hawthorne, California, claims Trebek got irate last May when she said his carry-on luggage was too big for the plane. She allegedly asked him to place his bag through a metal template at the front of an X-ray machine to test whether it was too big. She claims Trebek lifted the hinged plate and began passing the luggage through anyway. "He said... 'Don't you know who I am?' " says Andrade's lawyer, Steven Lerman. "And she said, 'I don't care who you are, these are the rules.' "
Andrade alleges that Trebek then slammed the plate down on her hands, and she's seeking unspecified damages for the incident. Trebek has declined to comment on the matter, pending ongoing litigation.
Doesn't add up (Score:2, Interesting)