Ken Jennings fanboy

Me, that is.

I've been trying to decide if any Brush with Fame besides meeting Mister Rogers in person ranks higher than trading email with Ken... Any suggestions? He's definitely above tapping Arnold Schwarzenegger in Munich.

Anyway, in the continuing saga, Ken links to some guy at Huffington Post who called AP and asked them what their problem was. They said 'blasts' wasn't a good word choice, otherwise, they were fine with their article.

But when you get past my hours of email-deleting last night, not all the news is bad. Ken-Jennings.com had 573,000 pageviews yesterday, up just slightly from last Tuesday's, um, 1,800. I assume many of those people actually read the original blog article and called off the hounds. Four thousand new signups for the trivia mailing list. Some Brainiac pre-orders, looks like. An outpouring of on-line support and snickering from bloggers, who love it when those dead-tree fogies in the "MSM" screw something up. So, in the end, we probably gained quite a few new readers.

A few people have asked what Jeopardy! or Random House thought about the whole thing. I haven't heard from Jeopardy! and can't imagine that I will. They're very kid-gloves and need-to-know with contestants and ex-contestants alike. I did e-mail them a quick loyalty oath, avowing that I had no grudge against the show and am bewildered by the whole kerfuffle. As for Random House, my editor's only response to the New York Post story was, "Would it killed them to have mentioned the book?" Yeah!

My favorite response came from my father-in-law, who forwarded me a study showing that the brain's ability to detect sarcasm and irony doesn't develop until age six, and in 25% of the population, never develops!

Fine, but did they all have to email me on the same day?

And that's all I'm ever going to say about that. Hopefully, by tomorrow, our traffic will be down to something sane, and I'll be able to open the message boards again and actually post something interesting.

Ah, celebrity... she is a fickle, fickle mistress...

And one more thing I missed before. I notice, belatedly, that Ken had a post entitled Me and my little Brainiac . I love his allusive titles! This is a reference to everyone's favorite Mormon children's fiction, The Great Brain series.