A friend I used to work with looked at me one day and said, “When I’m 80, I don’t want to look back and realize I was never on ‘Jeopardy!”‘ Within months, after an initial interview, she flew out, was on the show and came in second, winning a refrigerator she didn’t need. It was horrifyingly scary, she said, but fun to look back on.

Now we have another way of dividing the world – people who think competing on a quiz show is the epitome of fun, and the rest of us.

Ken Jennings, being the former, has written a delightful book – “Brainiac” – about his six months of fun with Alex Trebek, on the game show where you must put your answer in the form of a question. Even though most people know Jennings won $2.5 million, he writes well enough that you sweat a little as he goes along, and you pull for this goofy guy who takes so little credit for being extra- smart.

“Brainiac” contains much more than his 75 appearances on “Jeopardy!” As it meanders through the history of people who love little factoids and organize to compete with others who do, readers will keep bumping into a central theme. Are people who can recall trivia simply big brains? Or are people who always win at Trivial Pursuit simply stuffing their heads with meaningless and weird items, eschewing real knowledge and avoiding in-depth mastery of history and such? And what is trivia, anyway?

Don’t those niggling questions contain as much about science, literature and geography as they do about movie stars and old sports figures? Perhaps it shouldn’t be called trivia after all.

Jennings, a Mormon from Utah who did a two-year mission in Spain, is obviously quick-witted. If you didn’t catch him on “Jeopardy!” you can Google his name and watch him in action. Check out one of the funniest moments.

During game 53 of his streak, the “answer” was: “This term for a long-handled gardening tool can also mean an immoral pleasure seeker.”

Jennings quickly buzzed in first and asked: “What’s a ho(e)?”

The audience started laughing and the host hooted: “Whoa, whoa, whoa, they teach you that in school in Utah, huh?” (The actual question was “What is a rake?” But really, Alex, Ken’s answer was perfect!)

Because of his father’s business, Jennings grew up in Seoul, South Korea, and Singapore, where he watched repeats of quiz shows every afternoon. Once back in the States and attending Brigham Young University, he traveled around with friends competing in college quiz bowl tournaments. Like others might discuss fine wines, this crowd enjoyed dissecting the “best” years of various old game shows they stored in their memory.

Why the fascination? Jennings says that quiz shows are “a tightly ordered universe where every rule is well established and explained to the contestants in advance. Questions always have answers. Puzzles always get solved.”

Game shows, like trivia, he says, offer a tidier alternative to life in that they reward nothing but skill and talent.

Still, as an adult, he put away these “childish” things and became a software engineer, a job he realized that he only tolerated. When a chance came up to go to L.A. and try out for “Jeopardy!”, he and a friend took it. They both passed, a year went by and Jennings was finally called to compete. He was told they had dropped the rule that contestants could only be on five shows, but Jennings figured he’d be on one show and come home with great stories.

In the month prior to his first show, Jennings commandeered his son Dylan’s yellow ring-stack toy, just the size of a buzzer, and would stand behind his recliner (the size of the podium) “spastically hammering the Fisher Price logo” when clicking in on the answers for shows he had recorded. Bright pink index cards with Q&As dotted the walls around their home. His wife, Mindy, was wonderfully supportive.

At the end of the first show, Jennings had piled up $37,201 – a nice sum, plus he had finally realized his childhood ambition. “When I was younger, these people were gladiators, the best and the brightest.” Betting big became his trademark.

Since contestants agree not to tell anyone what happens on the show, which is taped months in advance, Jennings and his boss had to come up with new stories weekly for why he was absent from work.

Jennings credits the “formidable home-field advantage that comes with the champ’s podium” for his streak and says a big plus is being comfortable with the buzzer.

He simply won’t take much credit for knowing a bunch of stuff, but admits to seeing a lot of himself in his son, who he calls “a trivia nerd in embryo.” When Dylan was 1½ years old, his favorite phrase was “how come?” and he had a precocious memory. When Jennings told his mother that Dylan “remembers every word he hears,” his mother replied: “Welcome to my world.”

When the shows started airing, Jennings was soon on Leno, Letterman, the morning shows, the evening news – people would yell “Hey, ‘Jeopardy!’ guy” at him on the streets.

It seemed to go on forever, stretching the resources of someone with just a few suits and ties. On his last show, the Final Jeopardy category was Business and Industry, and the clue was: “Most of this firm’s 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year.” The correct response was: “What is H&R Block?”; Jennings wrote “What is FedEx?” When he saw the correct answer, he said he felt a momentary stab of disappointment, followed by a “sudden and surprising tidal wave of relief.” He finally knew the end of the story and could go home, stay with his family and change his career. He knew that someday he would be the answer to a trivia question.

Through each chapter, Jennings puts in trivia questions, and answers them at the end. It’s a device I thought would be annoying, but is actually fun. He also includes a “Trivia timeline: a brief history of time-wasting.” By the end of “Brainiac,” you may come to doubt the time-wasting part. Especially since he could tithe, take his family to Europe and then be left with a big chunk of change.

Diane Hartman is a principle in www.hartmanandbrown.com

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Brainiac

Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs

By Ken Jennings

Villard, 288 pages, $24.95