BobHarris.com - About Bob

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"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."

-- The Stranger

"Highly entertaining... laugh-out-loud, absurdist funny... hilarious"

-- Akron Beacon-Journal

"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

Books I'm Getting

Now available from the Crown Publishing Group, the kind folks who gave you Prisoner of Trebekistan!

Who Hates Whom:

Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts,
and Various Things Blowing Up
A Woefully Incomplete Guide™

“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

Order now from Amazon—and pick up Prisoner of Trebekistan at the same time and save a few nickels.

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About Bob

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Wednesday, 01 August 2007

There is little in my life which makes linear sense, as you're about to see.

The photo at left, by the way, was taken by a young girl in Athens at the precise moment I fell on my keister in front of the Parthenon. This was during my Almost Seven Wonders trip to the sites of six of the ancient Seven Wonders. The young girl in Athens is probably still trying not to laugh.

It's included here because I've finally lived long enough to realize that falling on my ass may be what I do best. Just like everyone else.

Anyhow, here's some stuff people seem to find interesting:

Television
I used to write for the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the original recipe version set in Las Vegas. More recently I was an on-camera regular on the TLC series Mostly True Stories, where debunking urban legends meant lots of smashing fruit and riding around in race cars and firing inappropriately large weapons. Good times.

I was also the technical advisor on the Travel Channel's Million-Dollar Blackjack, explaining arcane tournament strategies, and a while back I wrote some of the UK speculative documentary series The Perfect Disasters. In fact, I got to destroy Sydney, Australia (my favorite city on earth) in a firestorm.

This was surprisingly fun. If you ever get the chance to destroy Sydney, Australia in a firestorm, by all means, do.

My favorite minor detail: I once did an uncredited cameo on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, as the voiceover on the training film when she starts work at the Doublemeat Palace ("Let's take a look now at the process of harvesting these two special meats"). People always seem to enjoy anything involving appalling foodstuffs.

(Can you see any connection between these jobs and a life spent writing comedy? I can't. For some reason, my TV career implies that I'm rather expert around dead bodies, half-truths, gambling, and massive destruction. You'd think I was working for FEMA.)

Radio
I clearly needed a haircut

My daily tirades about the news ran on KNX 1070, the CBS News flagship here in Los Angeles, from 1997-2002. These little one-minute bursts were often quite silly, but still won awards from the AP and the L.A. Press Club. I was syndicated to about 75 stations starting in 1999, and for several years I was one of the few liberals in the country with a national broadcast voice. Armed Forces Radio even broadcast my pieces four times a day in over 150 countries.

Unfortunately, my radio career ended shortly after 9/11; in early 2002, saying that Bush had little respect for the constitution was considered bad taste if not worse. Now it's pretty much consensus. Oh well.

I hope to put an archive up one of these days. But I've been saying that for years.

Jeopardy! Masters logo

More TV: Quiz Shows
I've been on Jeopardy! more than a dozen times, winning over $150,000 in cash and prizes, most recently in the 2002 Million-Dollar Masters tournament and the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions.

I've never won a tournament, mind you. So far, in fact, I have not won a total of over $3.1 million. But there were enough cool stories involved, and I made so many wonderful friends along the way, that eventually I even wrote a book about it, Prisoner of Trebekistan, which I bet you just may have already noticed somewhere on this site.

Greed

There were also some interesting moments on Greed, where two people I'd just met and I split a million bucks, and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, where I was a lifeline for my friend Howard, giving him an answer worth $250,000. I was on the short-lived USA game Smush, too, where I won the grand prize after a Playboy Playmate wrote a leering little joke about her breasts in lipstick on a mirror.

But Jeopardy! was always the most fun, and my fellow players have become a wonderful fraternity to hang out with.

Not long ago, I got the chance to play Ken Jennings himself in an informal match, the Jeopardy! equivalent of illegal back alley dog fighting. You can read about it here (on my blog) or here (on Ken's). If you're curious, Ken and I both lost -- to Ed Toutant, an old buddy whom you'll meet in Trebekistan.

Books, Magazines, and Miscellaneous Assorted Writing of Stuff
Of course, there's Prisoner of Trebekistan (Crown Publishing, 2006), which makes a great gift for anyone who loves Jeopardy!, has ever seen it, or is breathing, to quote Joss. (I think he was actually the third person on earth to read the manuscript, including my editor, and yes, I just about keeled over with glee when he liked it.) Trebekistan will also be released in paperback sometime in 2008.

There's also the upcoming Who Hates Whom: Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up, a Woefully Incomplete Guide™, to be released in late September 2007 by the Three Rivers Press imprint of Random House. It's a handy thumbnail guide to about 35 of the world's major conflicts, with original maps, sidebars, photos, and illustrations.

Who Hates Whom is meant to be useful the next time something blows up in Thailand or Rwanda or Colombia or Turkey, and CNN or Fox moves on to the next Lindsay Lohan story before bothering to fill in many details. (If you think I exaggerate, see this list of major news stories that were virtually ignored in the U.S. on the day that Anna Nicole Smith died.)

One of these days I'm gonna get around to an original comic book/graphic novel thing for Dark Horse, but this has been hovering for almost three years now, since other things keep coming up. They are supremely cool people, incidentally. I've done odd jobs with them now and again, like chipping in here and here and a few other places. One of these days. Comic book series. Gonna happen. Really.

In 1999 I wrote a collection of political essays called Steal This Book And Get Life Without Parole that the few people who have ever heard of it seemed to enjoy. It's not bad, but looking back, I was trying too hard. And I wrote dozens of articles in the 1990s for various lefty publications like The Humanist and Z magazine and Mother Jones' online edition. A lot of alternative weeklies carried my weekly column, The Scoop. A few pieces even got picked up in places like the Chicago Tribune and so on.

Before that I wrote for National Lampoon for a few years. If you ever read the "Letters" page or "Lampoon's Index" (my version of the Harper's Index) in the late '80s or early '90s, yeah. Hi.

Standup, a previous life

Live shows
I spent most of the 1980s doing stand-up comedy. This was something like 1000 shows in about 100 nightclubs and one-nighters, mostly around the midwest. This was also something like wandering among the undead. Doing standup comedy is like joining the Roma people, only without the social acceptance.

I spent most of the early 1990s doing humorous yet serious college lectures on history and politics and foreign policy. This included over 250 talks at almost 200 colleges, including Dartmouth, Notre Dame, and the University of Chicago. Mostly, though, this was just an extension of my stand-up comedy career, so what I mainly remember is a lot of interstate driving and food from gas stations. Under no circumstances should you confuse me with a legitimate academic, as I have demonstrated on Jeopardy! numerous times.

The Jeopardy! thing led me to also give talks on how to remember stuff easily. That was more fun than the politics, because I was making people feel happy and empowered instead of kinda doomed. I probably did about 40 of these talks.

Voice work and other stuff
Thanks to the radio years, I get offered odd little voice gigs sometimes, which are always pretty cool. Like breathing slightly-annoyed life into Sparky the penguin in This Modern World's animated form, created by Flickerlab. Or reading the audiobook of Noam Chomsky's book on Kosovo, which briefly made me feel like the Voice Of Reason, which was neat. Narrating Animal Life In Action, a 16-part children's educational series. Doing commentary for Dark Cloud, a serious documentary by the Center for Defense Information. Even writing and voicing an animated online game show called Twisted over at Icebox. Plus the Buffy thing. And so on.

If I sat and thought, I'd remember a dozen other interesting little side trips. Eventually, they'll all be on the site.

Ziplines in St. Lucia

Travel
As you'll see if you poke around the site (or would fully expect if you've read Trebekistan), my biggest hobby of late seems to be hurling myself into places I can't pronounce and meeting people in places I'd never heard of ten years ago. I only manage one or two good long trips a year, but there's really nothing more fun in the world than getting completely lost in Indonesia or being chased by a pack of wild baboons in South Africa or taking night-vision-goggle footage of teeny little fairy penguins coming ashore on an island off Tasmania.

So far I've made it to about 40 countries, every one of which I'd run back to in a heartbeat, including places I wasn't entirely sure I'd like.

For more about the hows, see the Travel section of the FAQ or fiddle with the Travel links found in the right-hand column of the site. You might be surprised and excited by how easy this is with a bit of planning. For more on the where (and I have a ton of stuff to add if I ever find time), visit the miscellaneous Travel entries on the blog, the Almost Seven Wonders entries, and the Round-the-World diary from 2003-04.

If the site ever suddenly stops being updated, I'm probably out taking more pictures, goofing around, and trying not to get eaten. And falling on my keister. And, with any luck, making a few friends while I'm at it.
Giant Manta Ray and Me