Get Out: Ken Jennings at Local Bookstores

After winning $3,022,700 from Jeopardy!, Ken Jennings could've retired to a Seattle suburb to roll around in piles of dollar bills. Instead, he became America's answer to Ben Schott, wroting about trivia: a book its history, a regular column in Mental_Floss, a popular weekly trivia quiz, and most recently a hu-frickin'-mungous collection of questions, the Trivia Almanac.

In short, he's got the career we've secretly wished we could have since we were nine years old and obsessed with the Book of Lists (Wallace/Wallechinsky version), which is one of the reasons we interviewed him last year.

We haven't yet read the almanac, but we've been looking forward to it for ages. (We're sure it would've been under our tree, had it been published in '07.) "Upwards of nine thousand" questions divided over 365 days? It's a must-read, if only so we know what questions not to ask at trivia night for the next few months (and which ones to riff off of for our own question-writing efforts).

Jennings himself is in town (where he lives) appearing at two bookstores this week, if you want to buy your copy, get it autographed and officially doodled, and ask him whatever random trivia question you'd like to try and stump him with. (Suggestion: "What's the most populous US city named after someone who was alive when it was founded? That's population within city limits, not metro area, Mr. Brainiac.")

Ken Jennings appears tonight at 7 at the Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, and Thursday at 7pm at the University Bookstore in Bellevue.