https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14028070/
NEW YORK – “Jeopardy!” ace Ken Jennings, who won $2.5 million during his 74-game winning streak, has a few unkind words to say about the show — and dapper host Alex Trebek.
“I know, I know, the old folks love him,” Jennings writes in a recent posting, titled “Dear Jeopardy!” on his Web site.
“Nobody knows he died in that fiery truck crash a few years back and was immediately replaced with the Trebektron 4000 (I see your engineers still can’t get the mustache right, by the way).”
Jennings also takes aim at the show’s “effete, left-coast” categories and “same-old” format.
“You’re like the Dorian Gray of syndication,” he says. “You seem to think ‘change’ means replacing a blue polyethylene backdrop with a slightly different shade of blue polyethylene backdrop every presidential election or so.”
A call by The Associated Press to “Jeopardy!” spokesman Jeff Ritter was not immediately returned Tuesday.
Jennings, a software engineer from Salt Lake City, snagged 74 wins on “Jeopardy!” in 2004 before he was beaten by challenger Nancy Zerg.
Trebek, 66, has hosted the show since 1984. In a “correction” posted Monday on his Web site, Jennings offers an apology of sorts.
“We regret the insinuation that Mr. Alex Trebek is a robot, and has been since 2004. Mr. Trebek’s robotic frame does still contain some organic parts, many harvested from patriotic Canadian schoolchildren, so this technically makes him a ‘cyborg,’ not a ‘robot.”’
© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Um, you know that the original post was a joke, right?
I don’t know. Does MSNBC? That’s the question.
Seems the news feeds want to start picking at something. Ken has said on his site the article was a tongue in cheek bit of silliness.
If you read the blog itself, it’s fairly obvious it’s a joke. But the first time I read the news story, I thought he’d lost his mind–