My dear friend Billy sent me this thing, about Ken Jennings unfunnily ripping on Jeopardy and Alex Trebek.
In case you don't know who Ken Jennings is, he's the guy who won 74 straight games of Jeopardy! and walked away with two and-a-half million dollars. In a perfect example of biting the hand that fed you, he posted recently on his website a bunch of unfunny comments about Alex Trebek being a robot because he doesn't age and how the Jeopardy set is rarely updated.
Well you know what, Ken Jennings? Who fucking cares what the set looks like? It's a game show. Part of a game show's charm is its dated look, and frankly, I think it looks great. Furthermore, you are a software engineer, and as such, your ideas of what of an attractive visual aesthetic should be are automatically supsect. And then you attack Alex Trebek for appearing as if he has not aged? Clearly, you have not watched the show as consistently as the rest of us have. Though his journey through life has been graceful, Alex Trebek shows the wear of the years just like the rest of us do or will. His hair is considerably grayer than it was when I was a kid, but apart from shaving his mustache, I think he has remained a dapper and tasteful fixture of afternoon television. I will be very grateful to Jesus if I have held up so well by the time I am 66. And what's so bad about being a young-looking gameshow host anyway? Do you also find fault with Pat Sajak and Vanna White? Looking young comes with the territory. Hosting a gameshow is a ticket to eternal youth, as opposed to whatever nerds in Mormonsylvania like you do.
But why stop at affonting Alex Trebek's youthful handsomeness? You also mock the "effete, left-coast" categories. Well, Ken Jennings, the categories are geared to challenge contestants' mastery of intellectual traditions and disciplines, as well as their familiarity with pop culture. In other words, they seek to find an agreeable balance between the high brow and the middle. This is why its contestants come from a pool that includes everyone from professors to unemployed pony-tail guys who play video games all day. I will concede that "effete" might be an acceptible modifier on a technical level, but I do not think the show's categories carry the prissy elitism that your use of the word implies. As for your left coast-centric allegations, Jeopardy! has to plead guilty, seeing as how it is written and filmed in Burbank. On behalf of the show's producers and writers, I apologize that the questions and categories do not reflect the radiant culture regularly enjoyed by you and your wives in Salt Lake City.
I guess I just don't understand what motivated you to level such a fusillade at a game show that was nothing but fun and profitable for you. Though I commend you on your achievement, let's not forget that Jeopardy provided you with an opportunity to acquire a bunch of money without having to do a whole lot of work, apart from emptying your head of a lifetime's worth of accumulated trivia. It's not as if you founded a Fortune 500 company, invented jet packs or cured cancer. You merely stood behind a podium and pressed a button before anyone else did, which makes you little more than an insufferable, quick-drawing know-it-all. So fuck you, Ken Jennings. Alex Trebek has more character and likeability in 1/100 of his mustache follicles than you do in your entire body.
--The Robo-Pirate
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2 comments:
I read somewhere Jennings was just trying to be funny. With his brain, he should know nerdy just can’t do funny. It's a fact.
Actually I like the old set before there were even tv screens, also totally dig the Price is Right set and hope they never change it. As for Trebek, I had a crush on him forever and long for the return of the mustache. There is just something sexy about the guy that has all the answers.
If the game show is the key to eternal youth, I am getting on a plane ASAP out to Burbank to try to land me a gig.
i don't know enough about any of the subjects (except, perhaps, for nerdism, mormons -- my middle dtr usedta date one -- and 1984, the yr of her genesis) to have an opinion, but this is some damn sharp 'n' funny writing
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