‘Jeopardy’ champ Ken Jennings blasts game show

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 website.

"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."

More from Ken: http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2006-07-25-jeopardy_x.htm

And here’s what Ken really says on his blog:

Sense of humor, meet Michael Starr

I woke up to this New York Post piece this morning. If you don’t want to read it, I can sum up for you: I’m ungrateful to be snarkily ripping on Jeopardy! in this blog entry http://ken-jennings.com/blog/?p=70 of last week. How dare I? They made me!

I’ve met Michael Starr a couple times, and he always seemed like a nice enough guy. Which leaves me wondering: does he know how asinine this non-story is? Despite working for the Post, I’m sure his reading comprehension is just fine. He knows there’s no way I was genuinely calling for angry bees and ventriloquist’s dummies to be added to the Jeopardy! format. It’s a humor piece, and one which gets its laughs from the outrageous non sequiturs it proposes, not the ripeness of its target for criticism. For the record: I’ve loved Jeopardy! since I was a kid, as anyone who talks to me for about five minutes knows. Making goofy jokes about TV shows isn’t “bashing.” I believe it’s the whole reason Al Gore invented the Internet.

I am grateful to Michael for the extra web traffic this morning, but not for the humor-impaired sock puppet users who showed up on the message board http://www.ken-jennings.com/messageboards this morning to either defend Jeopardy! or make trouble, I can’t tell which. In any case, they’ve (he’s?) violated several of our posting guidelines, and the threads will be removed shortly. I welcome reasoned disagreement on a blog entry’s strengths and flaws, but this wasn’t it.

http://www.ken-jennings.com/blog/