By Stone Martindale Sep 12, 2006, 20:47 GMT
NEW YORK – Jeopardy Champ Ken Jennings won a record 74 games on television's the trivia show in its 23rd season in syndication, but he often is put in situations where he makes deliberate mistakes to appease people when they test him.
Now a celebrity in his own right, Jennings made $2.5 million from the game show in 2004, enough money to quit his job as a computer programmer.
A book author, his new release, "Brainiac," is an account of Jennings and his quest of trivia and its devotees. He said in a prior interview that whenever he goes out, someone has always is armed with a question to try and stump him.
"I guess people wander around with a really hard trivia question in their heads, in case they meet me," he said.
Once he was speaking to a group of school children, and a teacher asked him a question: What was the name of the apartment building that Clark Kent lived in on the "Superman" television series?
"I always try to get the question wrong, because it's easier for me, and people seem happier that way," he said.
"But this time I really didn't know. When I told him he said, 'Of course you don't! It's in only one episode!' It made him so happy that I didn't know that."
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