Not much of football fan. Can't remember the last time I watched a complete game on television. I only watch the Super Bowl a few minutes at a time on teevee. Now if they want to send me to the World Series...
Kinda funny, but one of those "jobs almanac" books has occasionally rated actuary as the number one job in the country. Wouldn't you know, actuaries have dissected and criticized the methodology used for the rankings.
To give this discussion a thin veneer of relevance, actuaries have a strange tendency to show up on game shows. Several occupied the hot seat opposite Regis, for instance. (I'm happy to report that all reached at least 32K.) Even little old moi appeared on It's Academic in the Mesozoic era.
Maybe that's because the actuarial exams form the hardest, longest, trickiest quizzer anybody could ever want to play. Nobel laureate Milton Friedman wrote that the actuarial exams were by far the toughest tests he ever faced. They haven't gotten any easier since. So if you can confront those hyper-quizzers, why not try a game show?
And I have to give Sammons his due. I actually agreed with some of a previous column that he wrote about Pyramid and Match Game. I even agreed when he criticized Dick Clark for his unbearable post mortems on Pyramid.
But here's the thing. Clark's been in the public eye for centuries, er, decades. He's very used to small-bore sniping from obscurities like Sammons (or me). Even if he read Sammons' (or my) criticism, which I very seriously doubt, he would just let the water roll off his back.
Ken Jennings is different. He's a civvie not at all used to the kind of public, childish, really out-of-line bashing administered by Sammons. I mean, what is Sammons' problem that he has to pick on Ken in such an obnoxious, adolescent way? Sammons himself comes off as a tinpot-dictator, hall-monitor type that you'd want to avoid at a Christmas party or any other kind of party.
I'm not without sin here, of course. I'm bashing Sammons pretty good myself. But at least he posted a nasty column that warranted the bashing, right down to the "Mormon assassin" stinker. What has Ken done to deserve Sammons' venom? Nothing except win a lot of Jeopardy games.