The Giant Head bidding passed $200 last night, or in other words, roughly 20 times what I thought it was worth. Suckers! It looks like someone from the Game Show Congress is the current high bidder, so maybe there will be a giant, cathartic Ken-Jennings-piñata bashing event at this year’s GSC. Or maybe there will be a Ken-Jennings-burning-in-effigy, in honor of my 2004 Jeopardy! defeat to Nancy Zerg. “Remember, remember the 30th of November! Gunpowder, treason, and plot!”

I think the GSC is just a convention of some kind, but what if there was an actual game show Congress, with elected representatives and debates and GSC-SPAN and so on? “We, the 109th Game Show Congress, hereby resolve that May 8 shall hereafter be known as ‘Wink Martindale Day’ throughout every corner of this great game show nation!”

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Since several readers, apparently, actually stayed awake during last week’s exegesis of a 1998 court case involving a Seinfeld trivia book, I thought I’d take a look at another trivia case: 1984’s Horn Abbot v. Sarsaparilla, which wasn’t as legally important, but is not without its interesting features.Does your game closet, or your parents’, contain a beat-up blue copy of the original 1983 edition of Trivial Pursuit? Mine sure does, and I know I’m not alone. An astounding 22 million copies of Trivial Pursuit sold in 1984 alone. But my bookshelf contains another curio: a book called In Further Pursuit of Trivial Pursuit, by someone named Joseph DeBartolo. Its navy-blue cover has the “Trivial Pursuit” part of the title in big, ornate, orange-gold letters, with scrolly filigree above.In other words, it looks exactly like the Trivial Pursuit box, in book form.

This, as you might have guessed, was an unauthorized, unlicensed work, as a big fine-print (not-so-fine-print?) disclaimer on the cover states. But the book’s contents are even more eye-opening than the already-dicey cover. The book contains all 6,000 questions from the original Genus edition of TP, categorized as they were on the game cards, but re-ordered alphabetically, and with little explanatory squibs following each answer. The idea, I guess, is that after being befuddled or intrigued by a Trivial Pursuit question, players could look up the answer in this book and get more background on the subject. Some of the In Further Pursuit annotations are genuinely interesting, like this one:

A: Sir Walter Raleigh

Q: What 17th-century explorer was buried with a pipe and a box of tobacco?

W: Raleigh also left instructions for his coffin to be “lined throughout with the wood of my old Havana cigar-boxes.”

Others, not so much:

A: A

Q: What letter is on the left end of the middle row of letters on a typewriter keyboard?

W: Yes, it’s there alright!

This book would have made a great Trivial Pursuit spin-off, if Horn Abbot, Ltd. (the Trivial Pursuit creators) had cared to license it. According to the court’s ruling, that’s exactly what DeBartolo wanted them to do. He contacted them in March 1984 about his book idea, and apparently got the idea the book was a go, hiring “a team of researchers” (the book credits 21, many of whom sound like friends and family–the book has a distinctly homemade look, and I can’t find evidence of “Sarsaparilla Ltd.” ever publishing another book) and spending “a great deal of his own funds on the book.” In July, Horn Abbot sent DeBartolo a letter reminding them that the book had not yet been approved. And then in November, they claim, someone from Horn Abbot walked into a bookstore and happened to discover DeBartolo’s unauthorized book on the shelves. Within two weeks, they’d filed suit.

As you might expect, this wasn’t a difficult case to decide. A week after the suit was filed, the District Court judge issued a restraining order stopping sale of the book. The ruling cites the “likelihood of confusion,” since the book all but swipes the official TP logo on the cover. The judge also cites the copyright violation committed in using 100% (!) of the game’s copyrighted cardware in the book. (Remember that the Seinfeld Aptitude Test folks got nailed for using Seinfeld dialogue in as little as 3% of their book.) Horn Abbot’s lawyers argued, quite reasonably, that someone could buy a copy of DeBartolo’s book, which retailed for about half of TP’s $25-$30 1984 price point, and get all the fun of playing the game without Horn Abbot seeing a cent. This was an open-and-shut case. I’m not quite sure what DeBartolo was thinking (unless it was, gloomily, “I can’t believe these guys screwed me by stringing me along and then refusing to license…I’ll show them”).

Though the restraining order was issued on December 3, a copy of the book showed up under our Christmas tree for me three weeks later. I was ten years old. (Luckily my grandparents did their Christmas shopping early that year.) The book isn’t hard to find–you can get a used copy for under a dollar on Amazon–but I still have my worn, 20-year-old copy here in front of me. Because the book lists all 6,000 Trivial Pursuit answers alphabetically, it makes it easy to look up the most-asked answers in the original Trivial Pursuit game. It turns out that numbers top the list: fully 37 questions in the TP box have the answer “Three.” (So if you don’t know a Trivial Pursuit answer, always guess three. “Where is the Yucatan Peninsula?” Three. “What’s the name of the rabbit in Bambi?” Three.)

The most popular place? “Paris” is the correct answer to 21 questions. The most popular person? “Ronald Reagan, ” for 11, followed by JFK, Thomas Edison, and Gerald Ford. Yes, “Gerald Ford” is the answer to three times as many TP questions as “George Washington.” Freakin’ Canadians.

One interesting footnote to the case: the original Trivial Pursuit creators long ago left the day-to-day running of Horn Abbot, but the company still zealous protects the valuable “Trivial Pursuit” IP. My upcoming book Brainiac was originally subtitled “Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivial Pursuits,” until I asked Horn Abbot what they thought about that and got a couple strongly worded letters from their legal counsel in reply. Most of what they claimed was bogus–there would be no likelihood of confusion in this case whatsoever–but Random House wasn’t looking for trouble, so the subtitle got changed to the slightly less felicitous “Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs.” Alas. If you buy the book and a bottle of white-out, I’ll happily come to your house and hand-print the real subtitle on the cover.

Since this site seems to have a lot of eyeballs on it at the moment, I thought I’d spend a few minutes shamelessly pimping my first book, Brainiac, due September 12 from Random House’s Villard imprint. Sure, I’ve mentioned the book before, nervously hyperlinking the title of the book, Brainiac, every time I mentioned the book, Brainiac. But except for that subtle, subtle tactic, I’ve hardly even mentioned it.

Toward the end of my 2004 Jeopardy! run, I started pitching the idea of a behind-the-scenes Jeopardy! memoir to publishers. Ben Loehnen, an editor at Random House, liked the proposal, but thought the digressions in the proposal (about the history of game shows, the appeal of trivia, etc.) were more interesting than the straight Jeopardy! material. Ben and I kept mentioning Stefan Fatsis’s Word Freak, a book we both loved, and wondering if it wouldn’t be possible to write something like Word Freak, but focused on trivia instead of Scrabble.

At the time I had no idea if there even was a trivia equivalent to the kind of obsessive Scrabble competition that Fatsis gets sucked into in Word Freak, but I went on the road to find out. In fact, I spent almost a year visiting different trivia meccas: playing pub trivia in Boston, watching college quiz bowl practices in rural Minnesota, meeting the Who Wants To Be a Millionaire writers in Manhattan, playing 54 straight hours of radio trivia in quiz-obsessed Stevens Point, Wisconsin. I didn’t know if I had enough to say about trivia to fill a book, but once I unpacked the subject, it turned out to be almost bottomless. It turns out that, to tell the story of trivia, you have to mention Jonathan Swift, Robert Benchley, Earl Warren, Susan Sontag, Glenn Close, and Sha Na Na. A cast of thousands.

Response to the book has been great: USA Today singled it out as one of four “hot non-fiction” titles from May’s BookExpo America, alongside John Grisham and Barack Obama. Retailers have been enthusiastic too, once I caved and agreed to the too-prominent cover photo of myself that they insisted on in the jacket design, below. (Click for a larger version.)

I’ll be spending most of September and October on a book tour, and plenty of big-name TV is already lined up. And Publishers Weekly has already run this great review:

“Did you know that Trivia was a Roman name for the goddess Hecate or that Jeopardy! tapes a week’s worth of shows in a single afternoon? Jennings’s record-setting 2004 six-month stint on the syndicated TV quiz show won him $2.5 million and instant fame as he landed on Letterman, Leno, Sesame Street and Barbara Walters’s ‘Ten Most Fascinating People’ list. Sprinkling trivia questions throughout his first book, the former computer programmer is a charmingly self-deprecating guide to the subculture of esoterica as he relates how he answered his first trivia question about the Wright brothers at four and made his chops on the ego-driven college quiz bowl circuit; confides how he mastered the ‘tricky’ Jeopardy! buzzers; bonds with professional trivia writers; and describes being bested by the puzzler ‘Most of this firm’s seven thousand seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year’ (Jennings answered FedEx; H&R Block is correct). You don’t have to be a couch potato to answer this: what’s an eight-letter word for a highly entertaining, fast-paced read that demystifies ‘America’s most popular and most difficult quiz show’ while pondering how trivia is a cultural phenomenon that offers a tidy alternative to life’s messiness as well as instant camaraderie between people from different walks of life?”

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the book later–for much of September, I probably won’t shut up about it–but I’m already excited. I had a blast writing it, and I hope it does well enough that someone will let me write something else sometime.

Last week, I blogged about the weighty responsibilities of temporary C-list fame, as represented by the giant foam sculpture of my head sitting in my garage. This was the same day that the dog from Frasier died, and America needed a feel-good story like this to buoy up its spirits. The “big head” picture got this blog linked hither and yon. Our traffic is up almost forty-fold from this same time last week.

I finally decided to follow the suggestion of several message board commenters, and yesterday I put the giant head on eBay, to benefit the American Cancer Society, if someone actually spends $10 to buy the damned thing. The auction is here, and it ends next Wednesday.

Mindy and I have Superman tickets for tonight. Big Sunday arts-section “think pieces” in all the major papers tell me that Superman is either gay or Jesus, or possibly both, for all I know, but I just hope the script is snappy and the CGI is okay and Ned Beatty doesn’t return as “Otis.”

At some point this weekend, if you find yourself looking at movie times and Superman is sold out (or if you see it, it sucks, and you want to fly around the earth backward to turn back time) check out Wordplay instead.

Patrick Creadon’s debut documentary is a look at the world of hardcore crossword puzzle solvers. I know, I know, but the poster should have a big blurb at the top saying “It’s better than it sounds!” The film very cannily interviews famous crossword fans from Jon Stewart to Bill Clinton to Mike Mussina (?!) and even edits together footage of each celeb solving the same crossword. The quirky non-famous solvers you meet along the way go head-to-head in a final match (filmed at last year’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, Connecticut) that’s as exciting as anything in Spellbound. And the whole thing is anchored by the presence of New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz, whose quiet, easy charisma helps explain the worshipful doe eyes he gets from America’s crossworders.

I chilled with the puzzlers this spring in Stamford, where I was the “guest of honor,” handing out trophies and so forth. I dishonored the “guest of honor” post when I insisted on competing as well, and, awkwardly, had to hand myself a trophy when I somehow won the rookie division. That still meant I was something like 37th overall, though. The Stamford Marriott was full of people who were literally halving my solving times, people who immediately knew that the tricky clue “Count of Monte Cristo” meant “UNODUETRE” (uno, due, tre, get it?) while I was still staring mutely at U _ O _ U E _ _ _.

Here’s me in the rookie division finals–nice headphones, Ken. Photo “borrowed” from Nancy Shack:

It was a great weekend, full of indelible memories. The nice man in the lobby selling books of his particular puzzle niche: pornographic crosswords. Recent Jeopardy! veteran Stella Daily taking 12th place, while wearing crossword-patterned silk pajamas. The angry boos every time sudoku was mentioned (since sudoku can be computer-generated, it has the potential to put a lot of crossword constructors and editors out of work). The lady who assaulted me as soon as I walked into the ballroom: “Are you a real crossword fan, or just an amateur?” she demanded. “Who’s Bambi’s cousin, three letters?” “It’s not his cousin, it’s his aunt!” someone else roared at her. They continued the argument while I backed nervously away. And, most of all, watching a special screening of Wordplay with an audience made up of the other tournament players. If you ever get a chance to watch a movie in a room full of nerds who are all making their film debuts in said movie, do it. You won’t hear much of the dialogue over the squeals of recognition, but it’s still a lot of fun.

Wordplay is currently enjoying a critical consensus of 97% thumbs-up at RottenTomatoes.com, which is probably some kind of non-Pixar record, and it did okay on 45 screens in major markets last weekend, averaging $7,000+ per screen. But I think it has breakout potential–say what you will about crossword solvers, they’re still light-years more interesting than emperor penguins–so give it a boost this weekend with your ticket dollar.

Maybe nobody in Wordplay averts a plane crash, stops a bullet with his eyeball, or leaps tall buildings in a single bound. But you will see Al Sanders solve a Monday Times crossword in two minutes flat. You will believe a man can fly through a crossword.

Edited to add: The great Trip Payne, who took fourth at Stamford this year and stars in Wordplay (among other things, he gives a stirring paean to the letter Q) stopped by the message boards to note that Wordplay goes even wider this weekend, adding over 100 screens.  If you think it’s not playing in your area yet, take another look Friday.

I spent the afternoon hiking up Salt Lake City’s Little Cottonwood Canyon with my family…only to come home five hours later to find that our little blog had been linked to today by some pretty heavy hitters, and traffic here has exploded by–literally–an order of magnitude. I just wish today’s blog post had been a little better than some weeny apologia for not playing more pub trivia.

Anyway, to all our new visitors, welcome and please drop by again. Feel free to sign up for our weekly trivia mailer (which debuts next Tuesday), preview my upcoming book Brainiac, or chat on the message boards. The Whack-a-Ken Flash animation game is, sadly, still under construction.

For those who haven’t checked out the site message boards yet, this thread has turned into an interesting discussion about why some better-known game show players (Brad Rutter and I are both name-checked therein) might try to avoid to the trivia-playing limelight at, say, a local NTN or trivia bar. Some posters politely wondered if this wasn’t a case of overly fragile ego–could Mr. High-And-Mighty TV Winner be afraid of being beaten by the feisty local talent at O’McGillicuddy’s Almost-Irish Neighborhood Pub? Wimp.

Speaking only for myself, obviously, I tried to explain that I’m very comfortable getting trivia questions wrong…unlike most of you, I imagine, I’ve gotten hundreds of them wrong in front of a national TV audience. And my ego somehow survived. But that was officially “on stage.” When I speak at campuses and corporate events, and audience members try to stump me with trivia questions, I’m, again, officially “on stage.” On the clock, so to speak. But when I’m hanging out in a bar or restaurant, “off the clock,” I just don’t enjoy the limelight that much. And if I got noticed playing trivia at somebody’s local bar, I think there’d be quite a bit of attention, which I probably wouldn’t enjoy. Whether I did well or not.

The British love trivia (one in ten Britons self-identified as a “quizaholic” in one recent survey) but my sense is their nomenclature is a little different from ours (and if I’m wrong, I hope a British reader puts down his steak-and-kidney pie, pops in his monocle, and writes in to inform me). The word “trivia” has been in use in the UK ever since the Trivial Pursuit fad of the mid-80s, but most hardcore players refer to their pastime as “quizzing.” I’m not entirely crazy about the word “quiz,” since it makes trivia sound about as fun to me as seventh-grade algebra, but I like the idea that there might be two separate words: one for the concept of trivia (the enjoyment of odd facts, and questions about them) and another for quizzing (a specific, public, competitive game built largely on trivia). The difference between “trivia” and “quizzing” is sort of like the difference between “stamps” and “philately,” or “caves” and “spelunking.”

This makes sense to me–and it helps explain my odd pathology. I’ve always like learning weird trivia. After spending a year researching my book Brainiac, I’m even something of an unwilling expert on the subject. But the competitive side of it, the “quizzing”? Maybe it’s what I’m best known for, but it’s not something I have much experience with. Most of my trivia hours have been spent behind closed doors, playing trivia board games with friends or even quiz bowl (these are both competitive, sure, but far from public, especially since I was totally anonymous at the time). I’ve never had a pub trivia team or a regular NTN watering hole.

That doesn’t mean I never will, though. Maybe Seattle has a thriving trivia scene where I can blend right in. I guess we’ll see.

Posting this from Sun Valley, Idaho, where I’m speaking at a thingy. Sun Valley may be located in the second ugliest state of the union (sorry, Wyoming!) but it’s actually quite scenic up here.

Random thought from the road: one of my favorite TV genres has to be the failed-sitcom-version-of-hit-movie. There aren’t a lot of these lately, but it was almost de rigueur for hit comedies in the ’80s and ’90s. I love them, first of all, for their bargain-basement casts, which make it easy to play the who’s-the-made-for-TV-version-of game. Ever wonder who the made-for-TV Jason Robards is? It’s William Windom. Can’t get Rick Moranis? Hello, Peter Scolari!

But, paradoxically, I also love these shows because, oddly, they always seem to manage to cast someone who will soon go on to megastardom, far outshining their big-screen counterpart. Here’s a partial list.

Next up: Rachel Blanchard, who is one airborne-reptiles movie away from eclipsing the career of her Clueless predecessor, Alicia Silverstone. By this logic, even Kevin Meaney (Not-Quite-John-Candy in 1990’s “Uncle Buck”) will be a Brad Pitt-sized superstar any day now.

I was excited to see that my mail yesterday included a manila envelope with a Mississippi postmark, which always means the same thing: Trent Lott wanting me to blurb his memoirs. (“So good you’ll finally get over Strom losing in ‘48!” –Ken Jennings.”) No, sorry. A Mississippi postmark always means the same thing: my five comp copies of the new issue of mental_floss are here.

mental_floss may insist on punctuating/capitalizing/typefacing its title oddly, but it more than makes for up it with the irresistibility of the trivia content inside. Its quick-factoid format and punchy layouts make it impossible to put down. I’ve never given away an comp copy without the recipient wanting to subscribe. Just last week, a financial advisor called me in to sign some papers, and he–a golf-playing corporate type who shows no external evidence of being a trivia nerd of any kind–admred my mental_floss t-shirt (as seen above). “You read mental_floss?” I asked, surprised. “Oh yeah. I’m a Flosser,” he immediately replied. To the best of my knowledge, this is a neologism of his own invention.

Or take my arty, poetry-reading friend Tim. Tim’s indie-cred is pretty solid; the last time I was in a Barnes and Noble with him, for example, he insisted on buying me a copy of Sherman Alexie’s first short story collection. But he also had to check the magazine racks to see if a new mental_floss was in. Everybody’s doin’ it. Even Monica from Friends read mental_floss.

Full disclosure: I write a regular column in mental_floss, called “Six Degrees of Ken Jennings,” in which I use six trivia factoids to connect two seemingly unrelated concepts. In the new issue, for example, Silly String is finally, at long last, tied into string theory.

Writing one of these things is usually a pretty fun afternoon of Googling. Readers suggest topics for each new “challenge,” so editor Neely Harris will occasionally email me with a few new suggestions. I’ll pick the one that made me laugh hardest, with little regard for its trivia-friendliness. Then I draw a series of branching possibliities outward from the first element (Silly String, in this case), using trivia either off the top of my head or from the Internet, until I have maybe a dozen potential three-fact combinations. Then I’ll do the same thing working backward from the “destination” element and hope that I find some overlap somewhere. If not, I keep hammering away at the third and fourth steps until I find a pair that meets somewhere in the middle.

In this case, it took a couple days’ thought–and even then, I had to fall back on a geographic link. I always feel vaguely guilty about using geographic locations as links, since they seem so easy that they’re almost cop-outs. “3. Two strikers were killed in Chicago’s bloody 1886 Haymarket Riot. 4. You know who else is from Chicago? Billy Zane!” At least in this case I linked Georgia, USA to Georgia, USSR, so that seemed a little more clever.

Then I send a short rundown of the links back to Neely. Problems often crop up at this stage, usually because mental_floss prints hundreds of trivia facts per issue, and has done for the past five years. Which means any factoid that leapt easily to my mind has probably already been in the magazine. And if they’ve used it prominently or recently, as you might expect, they don’t want to repeat.

In this case, Neely warned me that my story about the origin of the phrase “Geronimo!” for skydivers had been told in the mag before, as had the life of Leon Theremin. Since one bad link obviously topples the whole house of cards and means the entire piece will need to be written from scratch, I dread these e-mails. In this case I spent a couple more hours working out an alternate way to get from Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree (step 2) to “Good Vibrations” (step 5). This version went like this: Forrest Carter’s The Outlaw Josey Wales -> A whale that exploded on-camera in Florence, Oregon in 1970 -> Florence, Italy, where the Mona Lisa was painted -> the Beach Boys’ Smile album. I actually liked this version okay, but it was doomed from the start: mental_floss had delved into exploding whales not long before. Plus, as I suspected, they didn’t like the Wales/whales pun. I love the punny links, but mental_floss seems to find them unfunny and tenuous, so they often get tweaked.

So I fleshed out the old outline, but tried to keep away from specific facts about Geronimo and Dr. Theremin that had been used before. The piece is typically accepted then, and undergoes a slight rewrite into what seems to be the mental_floss “house style.” Sometimes Neely asks fact-checking questions at this point, so I take care to back up all my Wikipedia-gleaned facts with real books (thanks, Google book search!) In this case, there was a panicky last-minute back-and-forth on whether or not a theremin was actually used on “Good Vibrations.” (Turns out it’s a very similar instrument, then called an “electro-theremin,” so the link between steps 5 and 6 still works.) And then a month later I have a new mental_floss to read in the hammock.

Just like when I wrote about the magazine in Brainiac, I am now exhausted from all the bold and italics required to write about mental_floss. At some_point, it’s going to give me carpal_tunnel.

Is it just me, or are Sam Raimi and R.E.M.’s Peter Buck rapidly becoming the same person as they get older?

I spent the morning being interviewed for a series of GSN documentaries. Here’s your inside-baseball trivia about having TV interviewers in your home: they will inevitably want to unplug your fridge, to get better sound. Then they will put their car keys in your fridge, so they don’t forget to turn it back on.

Segments from the interview will be used in at least two different one-hour specials: one on “Inside Secrets of the Game Show Champs,” and one of “Greatest Game Show Moments.” (What a concept.)

I think I disappointed the interviewer on the “Inside Secrets” stuff. I talked about the stuff that helped me on Jeopardy! (cramming with flash cards, practicing buzzer timing, etc.) but he wanted what he considered to be real insider dirt. “Is there some particular contestant coordinator you should butter up?” he asked. “Is there a better podium to choose?” Um, no.

Interestingly, he did seem interested in talking about quiz bowl as means of Jeopardy! preparation. For those who don’t know, high school and college quiz bowl serve as a de facto farm club for big-money quiz shows. It’s not that a majority of game show contestants are quiz bowl veterans. But a majority of the big winners certainly are. (Take a look at this partial list.)

In my experience, this isn’t just correlation: it’s causality. Quiz bowl makes you a better game show contestant. But not in the way you might think.

Many people assume it’s the buzzer. Quiz bowl players hold buzzers; therefore, they will be better Jeopardy! ringers-in. This doesn’t really hold. For one thing, many of the most common styles of quiz bowl buzzer look and feel nothing like the Jeopardy! devices. More importantly, sheer buzzing speed, so important in quiz bowl, don’t mean squat on Jeopardy!, where you have to wait for Alex to finish reading the question anyway, no matter how fast your thumb is.

Oddly, I don’t think quiz bowl knowledge provides that big an edge either. It certainly doesn’t hurt that quiz bowl forces you to re-learn all the stuff you (theoretically) knew in high school and have since forgotten: rare earth metals, Constitutional amendments, Frankish kings, whatever. But Jeopardy! tends to emphasize items of common knowledge and current import–topics, say, that might come up among reasonably educated people at a cocktail party–compared to the more rarified, academic focus of quiz bowl material. (This is something I actually like, and many hardcore quiz bowlers actively dislike, about the Jeopardy! knowledge base.) Obviously, there’s plenty of overlap–maybe quiz bowl will get you that ultra-tough $2,000 Jeopardy! clue about Moses Maimonedes or Stephen of Blois–but reading The New York Times the day before your Jeopardy! match would probably be more relevant than reading a tournament’s worth of quiz bowl “packets.”

No, the big payoff from quiz bowl is, simply put, the way it changes the way you think under pressure. There’s a moment in certain quiz bowl questions where you hear something familiar, and some part of your reptile hindbrain subconsciously starts deciding for you whether or not you know this answer. (Evolutionary psychologists believe this is a vestigial trait left over from dinosaur pub quizzes.) Before your higher brain function can catch up, certainly before the answer has materialized on the tip of your tongue, some part of the brain has done the math, instinctively decided that the answer is within reach, and instructed your thumb to buzz. It’s an odd feeling: you don’t quite know the answer yet, but somehow you know that you know it. The buzz itself is almost reflexive. Then you have a second or two to dig for the answer.

This is an invaluable skill on the Jeopardy! set. You don’t need your thumb to buzz immediately, but your brain needs to decide as soon as possible whether or not to risk a buzz on each clue, in the few brief seconds before Alex finishes reading it. The earlier you’ve decided whether you’re in or not, the more time you have to dredge up the answer, double-check your work (does my first-impulse answer really make sense?), and prepare the timing of your buzz. Real life doesn’t offer too many recall situations with similar urgency, so every quiz bowl game you play is, I would imagine, literally re-wiring your brain to make you a better Jeopardy! player. “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him! We have the technology!”

I didn’t tell all this to the GSN interviewer though. I told him that game show contestants should just relax out there and make sure they have a good time, win or lose! Seemed like a better sound bite.

And yes, he remembered his car keys when he left.

It doesn’t really look like me, right? Jimmy Carter, maybe? Or Alfred E. Neuman?

So, like many of you, I’m sure, I have this huge styrofoam version of my head sitting in the garage. It was part of a parade float here in Salt Lake last July, and after the parade they very kindly called me up and asked me if I wanted the huge head. I said yes. What if I said no and then someday I needed a huge styrofoam version of my head? Then I’d feel pretty dumb.

But I have yet to do anything really cool with it. I didn’t knit a huge Santa hat for it and put it on our roof last Christmas. I haven’t been sculpting styrofoam likenesses of Brad Rutter and Jerome Vered so I could make a little Jeopardy! Ultimate Tournament of Champions version of Easter Island in our backyard. Big Ken has just been gathering dust in our garage. But he just keeps smilin’! What a trooper.

And now we’re moving to Seattle. I can’t really see paying the movers to pack it up and bring it with us, but I can’t quite bring myself to throw it away, either.

So what do I do with the Big Ken Head? Discuss here.  Best suggestion wins a prize.*

*Note: prize may be a big Ken head. You pay shipping. Offer void where prohibited by law or your mom.

Here we go: in the spirit of great Seinfeld two-parters like “The Boyfriend” and “The Pilot,” the continuation of yesterday’s post. Don’t worry, Castle Rock lawyers. I won’t ask any trivia questions.

The District Court ruling, which held up on appeal, went in favor of Castle Rock. The Carol Publishing Group was ordered to stop selling The Seinfeld Aptitude Test, and to pay Castle Rock over $400,000 in damages. And since 1998, I haven’t noticed too many of these “unofficial quiz books” in stores anymore.
Even if you’re not a lawyer (note: I am not a lawyer), the decision is pretty interesting reading if you enjoy trivia. Here’s a rundown of some of the highlights.

1. The court giggles that, even though Seinfeld is ostensibly a “show about nothing,” their opinion here is not “about nothing” at all, but is in fact a “difficult and interesting” copyright decision! Oh, tell another, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York!
2. One of the most-cited precedents in the decision is Twin Peaks Productions Inc. v. Publications Int’l, Ltd., in which the courts found that an unofficial Twin Peaks episode guide infringed on copyright, largely because the authors quoted 89 lines of dialogue (30 of which were probably, “That’s a damn fine cup of coffee!”) from the quirky ABC drama. My childhood bookshelves were also lined with dozens of unofficial episode guides like these, so I’m sort of shocked to see, in hindsight, that they were all in clear violation of copyright.
3. One precedent which, the court finds, doesn’t hold here is Worth v. Selchow & Righter, which I discuss in Brainiac. In Worth, Trivial Pursuit was cleared of wrongdoing even though they admitted to lifting perhaps a third of the questions in the first Genus edition of the game from Fred Worth’s 1970s bestseller The Trivia Encyclopedia. But Trivial Pursuit had only borrowed facts, said the court, and turned them into trivia questions. The Trivia Encyclopedia couldn’t claim a copyright on facts. But in Castle Rock, Judge Sonia Sotomayor rules that the kind of facts that Beth B. Golub had lifted were protected by law. Here’s the money quote from the opinion: “The facts depicted in a Seinfeld episode, however, are quite unlike the facts depicted in a biography, historical text, or compilation. Seinfeld is fiction; both the ‘facts’ in the various Seinfeld episodes, and the expression of those facts, are plaintiffs creation.” In other words, Seinfeld doesn’t own a fact like “Jason Alexander portrays George Costanza on Seinfeld.” But it can claim to own a fact like “If George were a porn star, he would call himself ‘Buck Naked,’” which can more easily be called the “creative expression” of a writer. I have some qualms with the overall ruling here, but I’m sympathetic to this particular argument. Most of the appeal in a trivia question about George’s porn-star name is not in how artfully the trivia writer framed the question, invented the wrong multiple-choice options, etc. It’s the laugh the reader gets from remembering the episode in which the joke was first made. If the writer is still getting the laugh without getting a royalty, maybe there is an argument for infringement.
4. With the prima facie case for infringement made, the court looks at Golub’s argument that her book represents “fair use” of Seinfeld’s copyrighted jokes and plot points. Thankfully, the court does at least find that The Seinfeld Aptitude Test is a “transformative work,” meaning that it goes beyond the original Seinfeld episodes by providing a new character or purpose to the original expression. It’s easy to overlook the fact that writing trivia is hard work, requiring skill and even art, and goes way beyond the random transcribing of sitcom dialogue, but the court recognizes that Golub has added her own creative expression to the original material. Even more interestingly, the court muses philosophically that, in today’s TV culture, the wall between fictional plot points and real-world fact is fast breaking down. People–particularly trivia fans–don’t perceive a difference anymore between knowing that Rocky Balboa’s turtles were named Cuff and Link, and knowing that American Idol Taylor Hicks (a “real person,” whatever that means) has two goldfish named Lamont and Ray. Of course, if the court really agreed with that statement, they might have ruled differently on the prima facie case in 3, above.
5. Unfortunately, the “transformative” nature of the work is just one prong of the fair use test, and Golub and her publisher don’t do so hot on the other three. First, decisions favor fictional creations (a sitcom teleplay) over nonfictional ones (a trivia book), reasonably enough. I think the next finding, that Golub used a “substantial portion” of Seinfeld content in the book, is a little more iffy, since only 3-5% of the book quotes directly from show dialogue (the decision makes it sound like even the description of plot elements has the same potential for infringement as quoting dialogue, which I don’t really buy on common-sense grounds) but it’s certainly in line with precedent.
6. The biggie is the final “fair use” test: Does the infringing product affect the potential market for the original work? The judge found that, yes, of course, Golub’s book might hurt the sales of a future Official Seinfeldâ„¢ Trivia Book. Golub argued that Castle Rock had been extremely reluctant to market tie-in books, and that, therefore, there really wasn’t much chance of an official Seinfeld trivia book hitting the shelves, ever. The court replies that Castle Rock also has the right to refrain from a certain market as a matter of creative expression, which I thought was pretty persuasive and even admirable.

So I find myself agreeing with much of the specific logic in the decision, even though I don’t like where it ends up: in a world where copyright owners control all trivia that gets written about their creations. So let’s say you’re a trivia writer who wants to produce something like The Seinfeld Aptitude Test, about a corporate property. What, other than paying a license fee, are your options?

1. Combine. If the 643 Seinfeld questions in Golub’s book had been a single chapter of a larget work (say, The Slightly Overrated 90s Sitcoms Aptitude Test, alongside chapters on Friends, Frasier, and Drew Carey), she probably would have been fine. Plaintiff’s case on the “substantiality” and “potential markets” tests would have been weakened considerably.
2. Choose a less litigious show. Apparently, by the holding in Twin Peaks, all the unofficial episode guides on my childhood bookshelves were illegal. So why didn’t Star Trek or The Twilight Zone sue? Maybe they’re more friendly toward the fan-community efforts that make that kind of genre show a success. Or maybe, since the shows in question had been off the air for decades, no one was minding the litigation store. So pick a crappy old show for your trivia book. Even if the rights-holder’s estate or corporate descendants or whoever figures out that they still own the license and sue your ass, you can make a stronger argument for fair use on “potential markets” grounds. “Your Honor, no one has approached MTM Productions about the White Shadow book rights in 28 years!”
3. Argue that Castle Rock v. Carol only applies to Seinfeld. From the decision: “Perhaps more to the point, SAT seizes upon the notion which lies at the very heart of Seinfeld–that there is humor in the mundane, seemingly trivial, aspects of every day life. Indeed, by inviting its readers to recall literally 643 bits of information from various Seinfeld episodes, SAT ‘follow[s] the basic premise of the Seinfeld show by focusing on minutiae in the day-to-day lives of the show’s characters.’ As defendants boasted before the onset of this litigation, SAT succeeds at ‘capturing [Seinfeld's] flavor in quiz book fashion.’” In other words: you lost the “substantiality” argument because you wrote a trivia book on a show that’s so trivia-heavy. I’d like to see a lawyer argue that this ruling only holds for shows like Seinfeld, which have no overarching themes and storylines. If you write a trivia book about Seinfeld, a show about trivia, you’ve stolen the Secret Sauce, the whole essence of the show. But let’s take a show possessing great dramatic sweep and prone to broad social statement, like Knight Rider. If you just ask trivia questions about niggly little Knight Rider plot points, and ignore the show’s more important themes (its brilliant examination of the perks and perils of advancing technology as well as the questionable morality of the military-industrial complex, as represented by Knight Industries), maybe you’d be okay.
4. Confront the “uncopyrightable fact vs. creative expression” issue head on. So, as early as 1998, you have a judge wondering if there really is a difference anymore between the facts about historical persons that you find in encyclopedias and the “facts” about Degrassi high schoolers that you find on The N. Surely, with the rise of reality TV over the last eight years, the time is ripe to put this argument’s money where its mouth is. “Your Honor, we contend that Nash Bridges’ middle name and the color of the couch on According to Jim belong to America now! Information wants to be free!” If I were a fiction writer of any kind, I wouldn’t be crazy about an argument like this. But as a trivia writer? It’s clearly an idea whose time has come.

Wow, that was long and boring. Just what I wanted, to turn this blog into The Volokh Conspiracy during its very first week.

If you’re of a certain age, and reading a blog like this one, you probably, at one point, had a bookshelf lined with cheap trivia paperbacks. I sure did, right around the time Trivial Pursuit hit, in 1984. Most of my books were quickie tie-ins to the trivia boom, designed to satisfy the cravings of Trivial Pursuit nuts who had already gone through all the cards twice. But others were obviously aimed at a different group, the coveted fans-of-something-else demographic. The Jedi Master’s Quizbook. The Ultimate Yankee Baseball Quiz Book. M*A*S*H Trivia. 1983’s The Matt Dillon Quiz Book (!)…Rumble Fish, not Gunsmoke.

Some of these were licensed properties, I could tell. They would often have the word “Official” in the title, and better photos. But lots of them were clearly home-cooked, unlicensed, written by fans, and for fans. These weren’t cheap, fly-by-night offerings from minor publishers, either. Warner printed Beatles and M*A*S*H quizbooks, without (as far as I can tell) anyone from the Fab Four or the 4077th seeing a penny. The Star Trek and Tolkien quiz books that Bart Andrews did for Signet in the 1970s (and which I remember my parents owning) showed no sign of being licensed.

This never struck me as odd. You don’t have to own the copyright to M*A*S*H to ask trivia questions about it, do you? I didn’t know what “fair use” was when I was eight, but I do now, and this doesn’t seem beyond the pale. Star Trek and M*A*S*H facts and plot points are out there, now, floating in the cultural ether. Somebody may have made up dilithium crystals and Donald Penobscot at one point, but they can’t still own every trivia question that gets asked about them, right?

Or can they?

In 1998, the Carol Publishing Group released Beth B. Golub’s unofficial Seinfeld trivia book, The Seinfeld Aptitude Test, in the well-trodden path of other unofficial TV quiz tie-ins. The book contained 643 questions (multiple-choice, matching, and simple question-and-answer) on the famous minutiae of the first five seasons of the top-rated sitcom. “To impress a woman, George passes himself off as (a) a gynecologist, (b) a geologist, (c) a marine biologist, (d) a meterologist.” “What is Kramer’s first name?” (Answer: “Unknown.” Remember, this was after only the fifth season.) “What candy does Kramer snack on while observing a surgical procedure from an operating room balcony?” Yada yada yada. A prominent disclaimer on the back cover reminded readers that the book was an unofficial tie-in to the show.

But Seinfeld, at the time, was being very picky about licensing and merchandising, and aggressive about unlicensed free-riders. Only one licensed Seinfeld book had been released, and that was a special Seinfeld issue that Entertainment Weeklyhad planned on releasing as an “unofficial companion” until Castle Rock threatened litigation.

Whether you agree or not with the outcome of the case, you have to feel bad for Golub and her publisher.  They were publishing in a well-established genre.  Seinfeld executive producer George Shapiro had called their quiz “a fun little book.” NBC had even given away copies of the book as promotional items to advertise the show’s new season. And then Castle Rock sued.

(That’s probably long enough for one entry. “In a moment, the results of that trial.”)

I was going to blog today about the landmark 1998 trivia court case, Castle Rock Entertainment v. Carol Publishing Group, Inc. But then the day got away from me.

So instead, you get to enjoy this picture of Bob Boden, me, and the J from the old Jeopardy! set (1991-1994, I think, but I’m sure somebody will be along to correct me in a few minutes if I’m wrong). Bob says he actually had a choice of which letter he could take.

“‘Duh, the J!’,” he said. “Who would ask for, you know, the O or the D?”

When the subsequent Jeopardy! set was taken down and redesigned in 2001, the show had Alex autograph the old setpieces and sold them on-line in a massive eBay charity auction. The large Jeopardy! logo sold for a whopping six-figure sum. The three contestant podiums were also auctioned off–if I remember right, this was when Ultimate Tournament of Champions semifinalist Pam Mueller bought back her old podium.

I have to admit I’m sort of jealous. I would probably pay quite a bit for the leftmost podium on the current set, where I spent a good six months of 2004, were Jeopardy! to ever hold another charity auction. But where would you put it? The living room? The bedroom? What if it doesn’t go with the carpet? I would probably put it in the front window, like Darren McGavin in A Christmas Story, and plug it in so all the lights blinked. “It’s…it’s…it’s indescribably beautiful! It reminds me of the Fourth of July!”

Happy Father’s Day to dads everywhere. My father, yours, whoever actually fathered Suri Cruise…everyone. I just opened my Father’s Day presents from Mindy and Dylan, which included an edition of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children illustrated by Edward Gorey, and a DVD of William Dieterle’s 1941 film adaptation of The Devil and Daniel Webster. Like many three-year-olds, Dylan is a huge Criterion Collection fan.

Last month, I spent a weekend in the Twin Cities, because I’d agreed to host a local high school quiz bowl tournament that was going to air on public TV there. This was mostly a favor to my friend Rob Hentzel, who runs NAQT and had put a huge amount of work into getting this TV tournament off the ground. I didn’t really know what to expect, but Twin Cities Public Television did a great job with Face Off Minnesota. Taco Bell and Pizza Hut had pitched in some money, and the set had been cobbled together, I was told, from leftover setpieces from Jesse Ventura’s short-lived MSNBC show. It looked classy. The kids were smart, of course, and actually pretty funny when I pitched them nerd faux-interview questions like, “What math or science equation do you most identify with and why?” or “If you could take only one punctuation mark to a desert island with you, which one would it be?”

I learned that game shows are also a lot less stressful when you actually have all the answers on a sheet of paper in front of you! It’s fun to do the stentorian, Trebekian, slightly disappointed, “Oh no, I’m sorry. The answer is ‘Nagorno-Karabash,’ of course. Nagorno-Karabash.”

But mostly I wondered why this kind of programming is now ghettoized to public-access limbo. Many local stations run their own high school quiz shows. Brad Rutter (you may remember him from such appearances as “kicking my ass in the Jeopardy! Ultimate Tournament of Champions”) hosts one in his Central Pennsylvania hometown. But quiz bowl-style tournaments, once a TV mainstay, haven’t aired nationally in decades.

The very first game of the Minnesota tournament was a real nail-biter. Cretin Derham Hall, down 100 points with just minutes to play, came storming back by answering each of the last four questions and upset Minnetonka High by 5 points at the buzzer by knowing the name of the former Portuguese colony that was transferred to Chinese control in 1999. I thought it was just as thrilling as any last-minute Super Bowl downfield march. (This is probably why I didn’t date much in high school.)

But trust me: this was great TV. The National Spelling Bee now airs live, in network prime time, and A&E is currently televising the Rock Paper Scissors Championship, a tournament that sounds more like an SNL parody than an actual event. Why do we think no one will watch quiz bowl?

The usual answers? Quiz bowl is too cerebral. (Who cares where Nagorno-Karabash or Macao are?) The players aren’t telegenic. The format is too hard to follow (since contestants can interrupt the host mid-question). But I’m not convinced. You don’t watch the spelling bee for play-along, because you, the home viewer, probably have no idea know how to spell “ursprache” or “weltschmerz.” (I just had to look them both up, by the way.) You watch the spelling bee, as fellow ex-quiz-bowler Greg Lindsay put it to me last weekend, “To watch little kids suffer.”

So there’s your TV pitch: “Quiz bowl: all the cruelty-to-children of the National Spelling Bee, all the pulse-pounding excitement of Jeopardy!” How can it miss?

Yesterday’s cliffhanger resolved: a couple game show fans let me know that the Feud podium in the photo is from the Ray Combs era. (Poor Ray…I always identified with him a bit, since he was the only game show personality I knew to be Mormon, which made his senseless death in 1996 seem particularly sad to me.) Thanks to Aaron and Dave Mackey for IDing the photo. Some pictures I found here seem to agree with Aaron and Dave…the original Dawson face-off podium had these weird plunger thingies, which I didn’t remember at all.

At one point in Brainiac, I speculate that the supply of trivia will never be exhausted, simply because new questions are appearing all the time: in headlines, in magazine sidebars, in box scores. You couldn’t ask, five years ago, “What’s the only NBA franchise to retire the jersey of a player who never even played for them?” simply because it hadn’t happened yet. But it hadn’t really occurred to me until today that this is only half the story: new trivia is always being created, but the old stuff sometimes goes stale as well. Canadian trivia writer Paul Paquet pointed out, in his weekly e-mailing, that one of his favorite trivia questions goes stale this weekend: “Will you still feed him? Will we still need him? Who turns 64 on June 16, 2006?” He’s right: now that it’s already happened, and dozens of TV entertainment news anchors spent yesterday making this exact same joke, this question has effectively expired. Paul is dead.

I noticed another example of this phenomenon last night when Mindy and I took Dylan to see Cars. One of my favorite bits of obscure animation trivia was always, “Who’s the only performer to voice a character in every single Pixar feature to date?” He’s in Cars as well, so the streak lives, but there’s a jokey sequence during the end credits that explicitly points out his unique 7-for-7 achievement. Suddenly, my clever, obscure little fact becomes obvious to everyone who sits through the Cars credits hoping there will be funny “outtakes.”  And so a great trivia question dies.

I like blogs with art, so I thought I’d upload some photos. First up is this shot of me standing at the actual face-off podium from the game show Family Feud. And yes, I was geeking out. I just did some back-of-the-envelope math and it turns out that the Family Feud-watching time of my childhood totals up to about two months of my life. I used to dream about standing at this podium and coolly knocking out the number-one answer. “Play or pass?” “We’ll play, Richard.” For me, seeing this thing in person was like looking at a Vermeer up-close or touching a moon rock.

This podium is one of hundreds of one-of-a-kind items in the collection of TV exec and game show uber-fan Bob Boden (at right). Game show fans will probably know more than I do about the provenance of this item…I can’t remember if Bob said it was used during the Richard Dawson era or the Ray Combs era or both.

Wow, first post. No pressure. H…hello? Is this thing on?

Actually, I do feel a bit of pressure. I know there’s nothing groundbreaking about yet another nerd getting on-line and starting up yet another blog. (Yes! Some pasty computer guy you don’t care about blogging about his boring daily life! Finally!) But, in my case, it’s complicated a little by my having been in the public eye, off and on, for the last couple years. To a nation of stoned college students and doting grandmothers (or whoever it is that watches Jeopardy!) my name has–totally undeservedly, I hasten to add–become shorthand for a whole concept: improbable human braininess, if not omniscience. Even now that I’m not doing anything famous anymore, my name shows up all the time in a certain kind of lazy newspaper writing, often with the words “Even” or “Another” prepended. “Even Ken Jennings might not know the answer to this poser…” “These days, you don’t have to be another Ken Jennings to be an expert on…” (I look forward to the obituaries. “Even Jeopardy!’s Ken Jennings couldn’t cheat death today, it turned out…”)

In other words, America seems to have had the idea, at least for six months back in 2004, that being successful on a quiz show is clearly the same thing as intelligence. Why wouldn’t that Ken guy be curing cancer or inventing a hybrid car that runs on cheap, plentiful buttermilk? After all, he was pretty good on Jeopardy! It does me no good to protest that trivia acumen isn’t the same as intelligence, and sometimes isn’t even related. People typically take this for false, charming, Mormon modesty.

This is all by way of warning you that this site will not be some on-line brain trust, taking aim at the great social issues of our day. That smart young man from Jeopardy! will not be casting a shrewd eye on the problems of modern society, or even poking fun at the little foibles of modern life. “Confessions of a Trivial Mind” is, as its name implies, a blog about one thing: trivia.

But this doesn’t mean that I plan on posting an annoying list of “Did You Know?”-style factoids every morning. Trivia is a big topic–even an important one. My upcoming book, Brainiac, is practically a manifesto on the subject, a defense of trivia and all trivial minds everywhere. And that’s because I think trivia doesn’t have to be trivial. Sure, sometimes it’s going to be about esoterica like movie cameos or baseball records or Aquaman’s gallery of super-villains. But it doesn’t have to be! You can know weird stuff or ask trivia questions about just about anything: advances in modern medicine, or the Civil War, or the life of Mozart. Or it can be Aquaman vs. the Black Manta and Ocean Master. Whatever turns you on. That’s the beauty of trivia: it makes knowledge seem fun and sexy, even when it’s not. No matter what the topic.

So my hope is that trivia, as a subject, frees me up to write on just about anything I want. The random contents of my crowded head, delivered daily. Which is, you know, totally different from all those other blogs out there. So I hope you visit from time to time and take a look.