But still a great gift! Get some holiday shopping done early! Order yours now!
"A rollicking ride of intellectual discovery and emotional growth... unlike his buzzer skills, his comic timing never fails"
-- The Wall Street Journal
"Pulls you in like a good sports story"
-- The New York Times Book Review
"Endearingly frank... jubilant... lighthearted and fast-paced"
-- New York Newsday
"A surprisingly touching memoir"
-- Entertainment Weekly
"Hugely funny"
-- Mental Floss
"Like Jeopardy! itself, it covers a lot of ground and in snappy and informative fashion"
-- Associated Press
"Down to earth and entertaining, even for non-Jeopardy! fans"
-- The New York Daily News
"A very funny writer... the book works like gangbusters."
-- Ken Jennings, 74-time Jeopardy! winner, holder of numerous other Jeopardy! records
"Effortlessly funny and informative... tender, human, and very wise... A must for anyone who loves Jeopardy!, or has ever seen it, or is breathing."
-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
"I haven't seen Jeopardy! since I was a kid, and yet I was charmed and amused by Bob Harris's fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful book. Through sheer force of personality, he takes this brainy TV show and makes it funny and easy to relate to."
-- Ira Glass, creator and host, This American Life
"Eccentric, energetic, and engaging"
-- Publishers Weekly
"The perfect gift for any Jeopardy! fan... I was thoroughly entertained"
-- USA Today, "Pop Candy"
"Surprisingly compelling... a funny and in-depth look at what it takes to win"
-- Long Island Press
"Wise, honest, and very funny... I wish I'd written it. Then again, I wish I'd won $127,000 and his-and-hers Camaros on Jeopardy!, too."
-- Jeff Greenstein, writer/producer, Desperate Housewives, Will & Grace, Friends
"Cleverly executed... solid entertainment"
-- Kirkus Reviews
"Answer: A hilarious, engaging and highly entertaining book. Question: What is Prisoner of Trebekistan? (All right... that was sort of a lame Jeopardy! joke. But what can I say? It's a great book.)"
-- Paul Feig, creator of Freaks and Geeks, author of Superstud and Kick Me
"A surprisingly intimate, entertaining book."
-- Orson Scott Card, author of Ender's Game
"Prisoner of Trebekistan is funny, enlightening -- and just might help you win a million bucks on Jeopardy!"
-- A. J. Jacobs, author of The Know-It-All
"If you don't buy this book -- this funny, learned, charming, and surprisingly moving book -- I will make it burst into flames in your hands."
-- Arthur Phillips, author of Prague and The Egyptologist
"A keeper for anyone who's even remotely a fan of Jeopardy!"
-- TVSquad.com
"If you enjoy... self-aware, geeky good humor, this could actually be your favorite book of the year."
"Hilarious... a true treat for all Jeopardy! fans."
-- Strand Bookstore
"Everything you'd hope for... surprisingly compelling... deftly woven together... this sweet, fascinating book is a great read."
-- Book-blog.com
"If super-intelligent space aliens invaded our planet and demanded to interview one member of our species to ascertain whether or not we human beings were logical, bright, kind, and entertaining enough to be allowed to continue, I would nominate, with all my powers of persuasion, Bob Harris."
-- Emo Philips, comedian
"A masterful job of describing the feel of Jeopardy! in the heat of battle... I knew that Bob was a great guy and a fantastic Jeopardy! player. Now I've found that he's also a wonderful writer. I think I'm starting to hate him."
-- Brad Rutter, top money-winner in Jeopardy! history
“Revelatory... wryly funny about some very serious subjects... Harris's sly wit and infectious curiosity make understanding world chaos fascinating... witty, horrific, and necessary.”
— Boston Globe
“Only Bob could make a user’s guide to our increasingly hostile world this absorbing, this breezy, and—ultimately—this hopeful.”
— Ken Jennings, author of Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs
"Brave... irreverent... charges into the thick of the globe's myriad simmering wars... hilariously relaxed."
— New York Observer
“Fascinating, enlightening, and surprisingly: NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSING. A gimlet-eyed look at the world we endure that’s also suitable for enjoying with a gimlet.”
— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Watching CNN today, 11:14 am PT, as they're coming back from a commercial.
"Three of the stories we're working on..." the anchor intones, highlighting these:
Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize,
Ted Kennedy undergoes surgery, and
"Eight search warrants have been served in the death of Anna Nicole Smith..."
Come on. Do we have to? Annalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead, again splashed across literally hundreds of newspapers and TV stations? Thankfully, it's hardly the wall-to-wall all-else-annihilating festival of eight months ago (see the cartoon below for a quick review of other things that happened that day). But still. Aagh.
Just to review this news cycle's largest events which may have been neglected, depending on which "news" show one's eyeballs fell on, in favor of today's yellow-alert Anna Nicolitude: the US and Russia are getting notably tense. So are the US and Turkey -- and just as Turkey and the Kurds could blow up any minute, with large implications for Iraq. To the good, Israel and the Palestinians are making headway for once, but in Sudan, things blew up again badly in Darfur the other day, while desperately needed peace talks in South Sudan have now gone all wobbly, after decades of war there which have killed maybe 1.5 to two million people.
(Sadly, this last grim news was fairly predictable; southern Sudan has been in a state of civil war pretty much straight through since before independence even began in 1956, with the exception of one 11-year break that ended in 1983 and this fresh flail at peace starting in 2005. None of which I recall even hearing about until writing Who Hates Whom. Despite the death toll. And today's failure, which may set off another horrid war, seems to have gone nearly 100% unnoticed in the US press. Again. Depressed sigh.)
Almost eight hours later, Anderson Cooper (whose work I often respect greatly) and his producers chose to make the Annalissimo one of their top three lead stories as well. By evening, Ted Kennedy's bloodstream and Al Gore's award had been replaced by (a) retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez verbally fragging his former civilian commanders and (b) a police-custody death in the Phoenix airport.
Only Anna Nicole still remained in the top three.
Forgive me, but I feel compelled to repost this video, reviewing the other teensy stuff that happened on the day Anna Nicole died:
That's the headline of this front-page story in today's Globe and Mail, Canada's largest national newspaper, concerning how the African nation of Malawi has rapidly transformed its food economy from famine to surplus, saving countless lives:
Back in the 1990s, the Malawi government gave the poorest farmers a package of fertilizer and seeds every year. The program was so popular that in 1999, they made it universal, for all farmers, and posted a large national surplus.
But starting in 2000, the donor nations on whom this country depends for nearly half its budget forced the government to scale back and then finally to scrap the policy, saying it "distorted the market" and would prevent a sustainable agricultural base.
The result? Smaller and smaller harvests and two years of famine.
[snip]
Starting in 2006, and on a larger scale this year, the government distributed coupons to low-income farmers to allow them to purchase 50-kilogram sacks of fertilizer for 950 kwacha($7) rather than the market price of 4,500 kwacha. As a result, the average farmer's yield jumped to two tonnes a hectare from 800 kilograms.
Bottom line: food production is up 150%. But at what cost?
The fertilizer subsidy cost the government $62-million - 6.5 per cent of the total government budget, a "whack of cash" in the words of one top economist - but that pales in comparison to the $120-million the government spent importing food aid in the 2005 famine. And the sale of maize to Zimbabwe and other countries will inject an additional $120-million into the national economy...
In other words, the subsidies only cost half as much as previous measures, and generated enough income to pay for themselves. Twice over. In addition to ending the famine.
This is, of course, pure sacrilege to those who hold "free" markets as a hallowed force of religious power. (Odd to see it front-paged in a national newspaper. Of course, I'm not in the US at the moment. I'm in Canada, where well-funded public health, education, transport, and educational systems would have destroyed the economy by now, if some disembodied heads on CNBC were remotely tethered to earth.)
My point here is not to promote or decry any particular economic agenda -- I have none, personally -- but to yearn for the sort of open-minded pragmatism that allows, y'know, a newspaper to actually report something useful like this without being instantly denounced for a breach of ideology.
What worked in Malawi may or may not work anywhere else. But it worked in Malawi.
Ideology apparently helped cause a famine. Moving past ideology helped stop one.
Camping out in downtown Vancouver (aka the Hollywood North Annex) for a little while.
Beautiful city if you ever get the chance. Lots to do, sea breezes off the water, friendly people, thriving immigrant communities from seemingly half the planet, killer food and coffee, good transport, and a government which for all its faults remains fairly unriddled with buffoons who confuse violence with vision.
Getting pricey for Americans, though, thanks to the way running up debt tends to run down the dollar. (Half a trillion thrown into war, then the TV news anchors are shocked when the greenback declines. Yeesh.)
When I was in college, my buddy Phil and I used to take roadies up to Toronto, change our money, buy stuff, change our money back, and still have surprising amounts of our original cash. Such a deal.
I can already imagine a bunch of Canadian college kids heading south for the weekend, laughing at our quaint monochrome currency without any ducks, queens, or Inuit carvings on it.
Meet Australia's increasingly vulnerable quokka, courtesy my Trebekistan pal Dara (who in turn I think cribbed this guy from Cute Overload):
I've seen quokkas in Aussie zoos several times, but their natural range (the southwest bit of Western Australia) and mine have yet to overlap in the wild. Quokkas may look more like children's plush toys than any other species. They're still found in abundance on Rottnest Island near Perth, which got its name (Dutch for "rat nest") from a 17th century explorer mistaking these fuzzy marsupials for large rats.
Of course, quokkas are much more closely related to the kangaroo. Like everything else in Australia. If Russell Crowe someday slugs a guy in a bar and then bounds away on two giant feet, don't be too surprised.
Woke up this morning to find myself (in round-shouldered cartoon form, anyway) suddenly on the front page of Salon.com, thanks to the mad genius of Scott Bateman:
(UPDATED: apologies for some weird error that made the animation work fine in every browser except Safari. Fixed. And here's a permalink to the cartoon itself.)
(Say, my griping about ad-driven media has just been revealed as mid-range hypocrisy. Still, it won't be full-on until you see this site running ads from, I dunno, TexacoBurgerKing or whatever, and then running pieces about how the new PetroGriller With Cheese is both yummy and non-toxic. Then the hypocrisy will be complete.)
I'm about to head up to Vancouver shortly for a brief visit, and thinking of the Pacific Northwest reminded me that I want to plug one of the coolest and most unique restaurants I've been lucky enough to eat in, visited a few months ago on a swing through Portland.
Check out the lunch and dinner menus, seriously. Tunisian brik, Nigerian akras... I had no idea what any of it was, really, but it was marvelous.
If you live in Portland, visit Portland, or can spell Portland, eat Nutshell. That is all.
Just hours after “two senior officials” in the White House received the info, somebody chose the forgettable 24-hour partisan advantage of saying, whee, lookee what we got! over the obvious national security interest in keeping this backchannel surveillance of Al-Qaeda, which required years to set up, secret and functioning. There are children with better long-term judgment.
My appall-o-gland was exhausted long ago, but this made it twitch like it was 1999 again. Oh, to be young again and not living under the thrall of these idiots.
Once again, as if it bears repeating for the 237th time: to this bunch, their own political advancement trumps national security, your safety, or any other concern.
If you've read Prisoner of Trebekistan, you may remember my final nemesis, Michael Daunt, winner of the Jeopardy! 1997 International Tournament of Champions, at one time arguably the best player in the world.
Michael was the last (of several) players to beat me over the years, but he's a great, funny, brilliant guy, and we've stayed in fairly frequent touch ever since. Turns out he and some friends are just in the formative stages of launching a new online magazine called Quiblit, itself host to a series of ten other blogs (roll over "Hosted Blogs" for a list), none of which are nearly so hard to spell.
Worth a look. In a quick glance, "Man Bites Blog" looks particularly promising.
One warning: when Quiblit's writers all refer to Thanksgiving as something that just happened, they're not time-warped, they're Canadian. The only time-warping involved entails living in a country where wars aren't rushed into, health care and education are truly considered public issues of real import, and the environment is more than just a place to get and put junk.
I'm hoping that's ten years in America's future. Not part of some distant imaginary 1970s past.
First, if you haven't read the full text of Barack Obama's October 2, 2002 speech in opposition to the Iraq war -- given nearly six months before the invasion began, while most of the country's leaders in both parties were still in full smoke-'em-out mode -- go take three minutes and read it. Seriously. Go. You'll see it wasn't based on a knee-jerk opposition to war on principle, but because of the specific facts of the situation, plainly visible in advance.
You may be blown away by how clearly, accurately, and wisely an American politician can actually speak, at least when he's not yet particularly well-known. (Lately, not quite so much. Obama not even showing up to vote against the Kyl-Lieberman Iran amendment was disappointing.)
In retrospect, Obama (in 2002, at least) displayed both foresight and political courage. How do you discredit that?
If knowing the facts = weakness, then the contrapositive case -- not being weak = not knowing the facts -- is the logical equivalent. Compare and contrast:
"Obama's not in quite as strong a position on the war in Iraq as he really thinks... back in a time when the entire world believed that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had weapons of mass destruction... Barack Obama was against going to the war at that point. I don't think that shows that he is very strong..."
-- Fred Barnes, Fox News, 2007
"Ignorance is Strength!"
-- Oceania ruling party slogan, 1984
Of course, this may have just been a slip of the tongue. I mean, the ruling party in 1984 constantly preached against sex, saw perpetual war as an inherently stabilizing force, engaged in torture in a series of secret prisons, and were completely obsessed with domestic surveillance. Um. Hmm.
Maybe I should get this out of the way while I can: Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia!
Go watch some actual footage of a live pudu birth. (Click on "Nacimiento Pudú" and enjoy.)
I have to warn you first, though -- there are three stages in witnessing pudu mulitplication:
Cute!
ICK! Aaaaagh! Ewww!
Cute again! And getting even cuter!
Now that you're warned -- and maybe putting away whatever you're eating for a while -- go for it.
The footage is the work of Fauna Andina, a private organization that works for the conservation and protection of Chilean wildlife, with reproduction and rescue centers tending to all manner of beasties. I gotta go visit these people someday.
By the way, the cheesy elevator music? Not their fault. All pudus naturally give birth with a soundtrack of cheesy elevator music. It helps keep predators at bay during this vulnerable time. Some big cat wanders up, smelling dinner, and next thing you know, it's running away, holding its ears.
So every time you see a predator looking a little confused, like it's trying to get a song out of its head? Somewhere a new pudu has been born.
From 1948, during his early fame, when he described himself as a "bleeding liberal":
This was before his film career petered out, he sold his soul to GE to keep the money flowing, and then spent the rest of his life reciting the facile maxims he first learned to repeat as G.E.'s hired shill.
Jarring thing to listen to. (Hat tip the Red State Son.)
That would be like, I dunno, hearing Bush decry the idea of using the military in nation-building, warning against overextending the army because it hurts morale, and insisting that the exit strategy should always be obvious.
Camping out in downtown Vancouver (aka the Hollywood North Annex) for a little while.
