I got to hear Ken Jennings

[ghostjmf]

work his way up the BAM board yesterday. Due to the joys of TV transmission by converter box into a preset VCR, when mystery signals in the world at large crap up your box, usually you get it switched to a station BAM is not on. Or you're "lucky enough" to just lose the signal entirely, then wait while the system reboots itself, reading in the program guide from the box's parent network while you miss the program for 3 or 4 minutes. Yesterday I got one of the other mystery effects, where the picture is frozen on ABC "Breaking News" from the 1/2 hour before, where the city center of somewhere, USA appeared encased in ice (or else it was a scene from a futuristic movie using icy blue effects) for 1/2 hour while the sound track to BAM played. Mercifully. Better than losing the whole thing.


So I missed KJ's visual affect, but was impressed that he was, from verbal info, playing the game like a "normal person", reasoning out answers, saying stuff like "I know this from doing too much Twitter" & so forth, rather than blurting out the answers J! style.

They didn't introduce his +1 yet.

[Weyoun]

work his way up the BAM board yesterday. Due to the joys of TV transmission by converter box, when mystery signals in the world at large crap up your box, usually you get it switched to a station BAM is not on. Or you're "lucky enough" to just lose the signal entirely, then wait while the system reboots itself, reading in the program guide from the box's parent network while you miss the program for 3 or 4 minutes. Yesterday I got one of the other mystery effects, where the picture is frozen on ABC "Breaking News" from the 1/2 hour before, where the city center of somewhere, USA appeared encased in ice (or else it was a scene from a futuristic movie using icy blue effects) for 1/2 hour while the sound track to BAM played. Mercifully. Better than losing the whole thing.


So I missed KJ's visual affect, but was impressed that he was, from verbal info, playing the game like a "normal person", reasoning out answers, saying stuff like "I know this from doing too much Twitter" & so forth, rather than blurting out the answers J! style.

They didn't introduce his +1 yet.

His +1 is New York trivia gadfly Tony Hightower.

Ken's stack was very easy.

[Kazoo65]

I also thought his stack was WAAAY too easy (especially for a 74 time J! champ). I really wanted him to get a tough stack so we could see how he would handle it. Maybe Monday's questions will be harder.

[jarnon]

Maybe Monday's questions will be harder.

Here's a spoiler preview:

Spoiler

I sure didn't know the answer. And checking a transcript of the speech, I found that all four phrases were in it, so that's a damn hard question. You can also see that Ken used all his lifelines, so he won't be the new John Carpenter.

[jarnon]

From the Millionaire FB page: Ken's interview with BuzzerBlog.

In 1999, I was the guy calling the phone line every day trying to get on, and I never got a call back. I loved the show so much. That was the show that made me realize, “Wait, you can try out for a game show! These are real people! Some of them I know who are going on these shows!” I would have never tried out for Jeopardy! without that Millionaire experience. It’s funny—every time I met Regis thereafter, in an interview or whatever, he would always get on my case. [in an enthusiastic but bad Regis impression] “Ken, why didn’t you come on Millionaire?! You’re on Jeopardy!, you took 66 shows to win a million dollars. On my show, you could’ve earned that in an hour!” He always gave me a hard time for not going on Millionaire.

[MarleysGh0st]

Yeah, that's what many of us have been asking for years. "Why don't we appear on Millionaire?"