Quotes of the Day

Win a game show, become the world's most powerful person?

It's reassuring to see Ken Jennings back in the full glare of the media spotlight. Jennings is one of Jeopardy!'s greatest-ever players (his 74-game winning streak is a record) and he sportingly took on — and was soundly beaten by — IBM's supercomputer Watson. "I for one welcome our new computer overlords," he wrote as part of his Final Jeopardy answer. But now news of an entirely different kind has emerged.

Jennings answered readers' questions on Reddit (under the handle of WatsonsBitch), in which he claimed he was once approached to consider a career in politics. "Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Harry Reid (D-NV) both called me back personally in 2004 to try to get me to run for Orrin Hatch's Senate seat." Jennings declined Schumer and Reid's intriguing offer — hey, trivia books don't write themselves, you know — and summed up the surreal conversation thusly. "I am not making this up. Win on a game show and you can apparently run for the US Senate. That was when I realized the Democratic Party was f@#$ed in '04."

NewsFeed, naturally, has some advice for Jennings, just in case he's interested in the upcoming 2012 election. He could put his Democratic allegiance to the side and see if a conversation about Mormonism with Mitt Romney (the politician the bookmakers think is the favorite to win the Republican nomination) might result in a dream ticket that carries them all the way to the White House. (via Huffington Post)

• Glen Levy