The Ken Jennings Jeopardy! Reign

For the past few months, the Game Show Network has been rerunning the series of Jeopardy! episodes in which Ken Jennings won his remarkable 74 games in a row. Since we weren't at the point of watching Jeopardy! with any regularity during Ken's reign, we decided to make an effort to watch all 75 episodes from the first fortunate win to the last remarkable loss and all the dominating runs in between. Sans one episode where the cable froze up, we saw the entire run, and while we had some expectations of what the series would be like, a few items did jump out at me that I didn't expect:

• Man, was Ken competitive: I suppose it makes sense that being so successful would require a certain drive that many people don't have (beyond the remarkable recall knowledge, of course), but it was very obvious how determined he would get when a game was close and he needed to pull away. It was also interesting to see how grumpy he would be if he missed a daily double; it wasn't an obvious tantrum, but he was clearly more grumpy than the average player.
• Holy recall, Batman: His ability to chain link facts and data to decipher the correct answer was very cool to watch, for lack of a better phrase. I'm not sure I've ever observed somebody on the show simply ring in and figure out the answer so effectively as he could...of course, I never observed somebody win 74 episodes either, so there is probably a correlation there.
• Somebody's gonna get a punch in the nose: I think I only saw one person who I thought was genuinely angry at losing to Ken. I forget his name now, but while some folks would make slightly snide remarks that were obviously in frustration yet masked in good humor, one guy sighed a breath of anger after continuously being unable to bet Ken to the buzzer that could have turned Ken to ash had he been close enough.
• What a geek: Okay, this wasn't a surprise exactly, but I think Ken was even geekier than I thought he would be.
• Yikes, I actually watched the Game Show Network: yet another thing I never thought I'd be able to say.

If you are at all interested, I can't speak highly enough about his book Brainiac. It is a well researched, insightful look at Trivia in our country while conveniently referencing the Jeopardy! run in the process.