Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me

I hope I'm not exposing too much of my inner geek by admitting to this, but then I thought, 99% of the people that might read this also have a geeky side so here goes:

So, for those of you who don't already know, I am a major fan of the NPR show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! It is basically a news quiz show that digs up the funniest stories of the week and asks comedians about them. The stories are usually really funny and to add to the good time, the comedians banter back and forth and provide great commentary. [I may be a bit biased to it because the host Peter Sagal lived in Boston for a while, and is also a distance runner.] At any rate, every show they invite a famous person on to play "Not My Job" where they are asked silly questions about things they likely won't know anything about.

Recently Ken Jennings (the Mormon guy who won 73 consecutive Jeopardy shows, yes you read that right, almost 15 straight weeks of winning Jeopardy) was invited back to Jeopardy to compete against another Jeopardy wiz and Watson the IBM computer. I was reminded how witty and cool Ken Jennings seems to be and thought he would be a great candidate for that "Not My Job" game. Sure enough he was on it... twice! And he is hysterical!

Here is the link to his first show (CLICK HERE).

And here is the second (CLICK HERE).

Now, after you listen to the second one, you must read Ken's blog post that followed his first appearance, where he breaks down how he got the right answers. I love the banter in the second show between Peter Sagal and Ken Jennings, and is worth listening to for that alone.

One last cool thing about Ken Jennings... he has competed in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament made famous (or at least was made known to the documentary watching public) by the documentary Wordplay [which happens to be an fantastic documentary]. Not only did Ken compete, but he took first in the Rookie division that year. His blog post about the event is pretty funny too.

Another guy that I think is cool.... Will Shortz. If you haven't ever read anything about him, read his Wikipedia page, he is quite an interesting fellow.