RfP Wednesday -- Prisoner of Trebekistan

This is a "Reading for Pleasure Wednesday" post that I'll enjoy writing. I've gotten my hands on Prisoner of Trebekistan by Jeopardy! champion and fellow blogger Bob Harris. I had an Amazon gift certificate that I had to use up, that I got from some publisher or someone for filling out a survey or something. So I actually bought a recent book, and Mrs. J got a couple, too.

Prisoner of Trebekistan is laugh out loud funny. Often. I'm just enjoying the hell out of it. The theme, sort of, is how Harris managed to remember all the inane trivia it takes to win on Jeopardy!, and how it felt to do it. But in the meantime, it manages to wander all over the areas of cognitive science, human biology, sociology, and entertainment. In a funny way. Sample sentence: "Believe it or not, your body reacts to stress--virtually any stress--with almost exactly the same biochemical changes it would use to evade a horny ocelot." Now that's literature.

I'm not sure that the memory tips will do me any good. It's all about how to remember useless and unconnected stuff like the Secretaries General of the U.N., or the names of the novels of E.M. Forster. It's great advice, but I don't ever expect to go on Jeopardy!, so I don't know when I'd use it.

In any case, it's good reading. I got it on Monday, and I'm 120 pages into it.