by A. J. Jacobs
cosmos
In the entry on cosmos, the Britannica tells us the universe will end either as a “cold, dark and virtually empty place” or as a “fiery crucible.” So, which is it? Fire or ice? That’s a pretty big difference. Take a stand, Britannica! I want to know what lies in store for me, assuming I exercise daily and eat low-fat muffins and live another few billion years. Information can be maddeningly imprecise. If I had to bet, I’d go with ice, since I vaguely remember some magazine article saying that’s the current leading contender.
But either way, it’s not an uplifting end to all of existence. Unlike a well-timed STD, there’s no way those could turn out to be a lucky break. I’m only in the Cs and already I’ve reached the horrible end to all existence.
courtship
I can’t believe what a bunch of sleazeballs these animals are. That’s what strikes me whenever I read about courtship rituals in the animal kingdom. These critters—at least the male ones—are some slimy, deceitful operators. Consider the shameless debauchee known as the swordtail characin fish (whom I first encountered in the animal behavior section). The male swordtail characin, you see, has long stringy bits that dangle from his gills—bits that are designed to look exactly like the daphnia worm, the characin’s favorite snack. When a hungry female characin sees this tantalizing daphnia, she naturally approaches, anticipating a nice a meal. Instead, when she’s close enough, she gets an unpleasant surprise: the male shtups her. A literal bait and switch.
There are dozens of such stories. Here’s just one other, for variety. The female cichlid fish are called “mouth breeders,” which means they incubate eggs in their mouth. The females swallow up any stray eggs and keep them stored safely between the cheeks. The male cichlid fish knows all about this, so he’s developed his fins to look exactly like an egg—same size, same mustard color. The poor lady cichlid spies one of these so-called eggs, and paddles over to try to swallow it up. But as soon as she opens her mouth, bam, the male sprays her with sperm. Just like that.
I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised about the level of deceit in courtship behavior. Humans aren’t exactly 100 percent guileless when it comes to romance. If they were, Wonderbra would be out of business, and match.com ads would read, “Short, pudgy guy with no discernible income and acne scars that resemble the constellation Ursa Minor seeks beautiful woman to share his rent-controlled apartment.” So I shouldn’t be all high and mighty.
In fact, Julie loves to tell me that I engaged in shameless deceit when wooing her. “For the first three months, it was Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Jekyll,” she says. “Then you had hooked me, and all of a sudden, here comes Mr. Hyde!” I had my own version of the tantalizing daphnia-shaped gills, says Julie. Namely, I pretended to like parties, dancing, dinners at fancy restaurants, even the occasional Broadway musical. Over one early dinner, we made ambitious plans about all the places we’d like to travel: Sweden, South Africa, Portugal. Now Julie knows my actual list of places I want to travel: kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom. And as for Broadway musicals, I haven’t been within five hundred yards of an orchestra pit since she accepted my engagement ring.
I, on the other hand, don’t see it as deception. I tell her: “It wasn’t a conscious change from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. It’s just that I found the woman I love and I figured I didn’t need to go out to parties anymore.” That one always causes a half laugh, half scoff.
After I read about the characin, I padded out to the living room to share it with her. “Hey Julie,” I say. “You know how you say I deceived you and tricked you into marrying me?”
“I sure do.”
“Well, look at this.”
She reads it. “Makes sense,” she says. “Makes a lot of sense.” She seems pleased.
I take back my Britannica and pad back into my office. I’m not sure why I just shared that with her. It certainly didn’t help my cause. In fact, now I’m pretty much screwed in all future arguments. I think I have to be a little more careful with the information I share.
couvade
Couvade is a custom wherein the father goes to bed during the birth of his child and simulates the symptoms of childbirth. He pretends to undergo painful labor, just like the baby’s mother. In fact, the mother sometimes gets to her feet hours after giving birth and waits on the father. Couvade’s social function, says the Britannica, is to emphasize the role of the father in reproduction. It was most recently practiced in the early 20th century in the Basque country.
No offense to the Basques, but couvade seems—how do I put this?—insane. In the first few letters of the alphabet, my gender has come off like a bunch of selfish tools. First the duplicitous cichlid fish, now these Basque fathers who—it’s pretty transparent—are crying out for attention. The wife is getting all the sympathy and limelight for creating a human life. Hey, look at us, we can make faces too!
Well, at least I won’t be jealous of my wife’s contractions anytime soon. Last night, Julie and I took yet another early pregnancy test. It was aggressively negative. For the past few weeks, Julie had been popping fertility drugs, so I was thinking I’d maybe get a litter of Jacobses, but no. Nothing. In my darker moments, I rationalize that maybe it’s a good thing. This isn’t the greatest world to introduce another human being into—it’s got civil wars and corpse-dealing murderers and temperamental artists and carbon monoxide. So maybe it’s okay not to have a kid.
Czetwertynski
I knock off the Czetwertynskis—a Polish princely family—and I’m done. Three out of twenty-six. Now I know my ABCs. Where do I stand? I’m still dazed by the amount of knowledge in the world—but I’ve noticed two things that make me just the tiniest bit better. First, the Britannica does tend to repeat itself. I got a lesson on the Hundred Years War in the As, then in the Bs, and then again in the Cs. So maybe half a million of those 44 million words are unnecessary. Second, I occasionally read about something that rings a bell, a very faint bell, one barely more audible than the broken two-hundred-ton Russian bell—in other words, a fact I knew when I was a kid but that has long ago faded. Once, long ago, I knew that baseball was based on the British game of rounders—a less genteel version of the game, where you could get the runner out by beaning him with the ball (a rule also employed by that depraved bully in third grade). But I hadn’t thought about rounders in maybe twenty years. Still, knowing that it was buried deep in my memory—somehow, that was a little reassuring.
That’s the happy news. The bad news is that I’m still having a hell of a time figuring out what all this information—old, new, half forgotten—means. I feel my mind isn’t fundamentally different. I may have given it a new paint job and fixed the screen door, but it’s still the same shotgun shack.
D
dance
In a tribe on the island of Santa Maria, old men used to stand by with bows and arrows and shoot every dancer who made a mistake. The perfect way to raise the stakes on American Idol.
Darwin, George
Poor George. When your dad is Charles Darwin, you might get a couple of perks—free mutton at the poshest Victorian restaurants, say—but you’re pretty much screwed from birth. You’ll always be a loser Darwin—unless, of course, you also happen to totally revolutionize science and shift our worldview. Well, that didn’t quite happen for George. George Darwin did go into science like his father—he became an astronomer—but his Big Idea was this: the moon was formed when molten lava was pulled free from the earth by solar tides. It’s an idea now considered unlikely to be true. Scientists now believe the moon was formed when a mammoth asteroid smashed into the earth, splitting off a moon-sized chunk. So George Darwin’s moon idea ain’t exactly the theory of evolution. Though to be fair, George Darwin did have another interesting theory—namely, that a pear-shaped rotating fluid body shows stability in space. Oh, wait. Also incorrect.
George is actually the second Darwin descendant I’ve read about in the encyclopedia. There was also Frances Cornford, Charles Darwin’s
granddaughter. Her accomplishment? She wrote a poem called “To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train,” which went like this: “O fat white woman whom nobody loves, / Why do you walk through the fields in gloves?” And so on.
It’s enough to make you want to lie down in front of that train. These loser relatives of history always depress me. They probably wouldn’t even have made it into the encyclopedia without their pedigree, and now that they’re here, they cast serious doubt on the notion that greatness is inherited. I’ve read about Bartholomew Columbus, Christopher’s tagalong brother, and about a whole bunch of obscure Bachs who are Baroque versions of Tito and Jermaine Jackson.
It’s depressing on a personal level as well, because it brings up a recurring theme in my own life—the fear that I’m a modern-day version of Frances Cornford. No one in my family has created a new scientific paradigm, but I’ve got my dad with his above-mentioned twenty-four books and his reputation as an expert in his field. And I’ve got my grandfather, who is also a genuinely great man. He’s a lawyer named Ted Kheel and he spent the 1960s and 1970s solving strikes, meeting with presidents, working on civil rights. He tells stories about meals with LBJ and Martin Luther King Jr. He’s eighty-eight years old, but he still goes to the office every single day, plugging away on a bunch of causes—conflict resolution, biodiversity, sustainable cuisine, Internet for the third world. He actually makes people’s lives better. And then there’s me, who, uh, chooses whether we should run the cleavage shot or the butt shot of the actress of the month in Esquire. Helps choose, anyway.
I’d like to say that everyone’s successful in his or her own way, that you can’t spend your life comparing yourself to others. But then I read about someone like Emily and Charlotte Bronte’s brother, Patrick Bran-well Bronte, a drunkard and opium addict who was fired from his job as a tutor after “making love to his employer’s wife.”
Dasnami sannyasin
Dasnami sannyasin were naked Indian ascetics who engaged in battles with other Hindu sects. First the Berserkers, now this. I seem to have stumbled on what has got to be one of the stranger little leitmotifs in the EB: naked soldiers.
As a journalist, I’ve got a dozen years of training in spotting trends. Officially, in my profession, you need three instances to qualify something as a trend. If there are two movies coming up about pet astrologers, you pray that someone, somewhere, is developing a third so it can become a trend. At Entertainment Weekly, I eventually got tired of looking for trends of three, and started a feature called “trend of two,” which my bosses promptly killed. So anyway, naked soldiers is, as of now, a trend of two.
death
A Russian nobleman patented a coffin that allowed the corpse—if he regained consciousness after burial—to summon help by ringing a bell. Another good idea. Because that could really screw up your week—to wake up and find yourself in an airless coffin. I guess nowadays they could put cell phones in there.
Descartes, René
René Descartes had a fetish for women with crossed eyes. That’s what it says, right there in the venerable Britannica. The French philosopher loved a lady whose pupils had migrated toward her nose.
I feel a little sorry for Descartes when I learn this, because I can’t imagine there were tons of cross-eyed women in his circle of 17th-century European intellectuals. He should have been a Mayan. Or he should have been born in our era, because nowadays, I’m sure there is a plastic-wrapped magazine called Cross-Eyed Vixens and a subscription-only Web site called hotcrossedeyes.com. But back then, it must have been hard to find an outlet for his fetish. I just hope I don’t learn in the Hs that Thomas Hobbes liked ladies with a harelip.
There is a reason, though, that this cross-eyed fact is in the encyclopedia. Strangely enough, it has profound philosophical implications. In his Principles of Philosophy, Descartes argues that he was attracted to cross-eyed women because, as a child, he loved a cross-eyed playmate. He says that as soon as he realized the origin of his fetish, he was freed from it and could, once again, love women with normally spaced eyeballs. This insight, says the Britannica, “was the basis for Descartes’s defense of free will and of the mind’s ability to control the body.” Jesus. I wonder if his cross-eyed playmate knew she had such a profound effect on Western thought.
I’ve got to respect Descartes (who, incidentally, gets the Britannica’s coveted double treatment, with writeups in both Descartes and Cartesianism). I’m sure when he made his cross-eyed confession, it caused some gentlemen at the local French philosophy club to snicker about René “Le Freak” Descartes. But it’s a nice notion. I like that Descartes has such faith in the power of the mind that he places such high value on self-knowledge. There’s Cogito ergo sum, and apparently there’s also “Cogito about my kinky side, ergo sum free from it.” He was doing Freudian therapy on himself 250 years before Freud bought his first couch.
It’s a nice thought, but I don’t really buy it. I don’t think that you can flip off a passion just because you know where it comes from. If that were the case, there would be a lot fewer bullwhips and fuzzy handcuffs sold in Greenwich Village.
Regardless of whether I agree with Descartes, I’m happy to be pondering heady topics about the power of knowledge, instead of what I used to ponder, which was Wasn’t it funny when that guy on Blind Date last night lost his bathing suit in the hot tub? And if that’s not enough of a good thing, consider this: Descartes liked to stay in bed till 11 A.M.—good ammunition the next time anyone gives me flack about sleeping late.
Deseret News
I always thought the name of Utah’s major newspaper was some sort of weird misspelling of the word “desert.” But no, Deseret is the “land of the honeybee,” according to the Book of Mormon. I guess I should have figured they would have caught a typo in the masthead after 154 years.
diction
As in the correct choice of words in writing or speaking. Samuel Johnson, for one, believed that great thoughts were of a general nature. He said it is not the business of poets to “number the streaks of the tulip.” I couldn’t disagree more. I’m all for numbering the streaks of the tulip. Isn’t that what they tell you in writing class? Write the specifics. Once you’ve put in some time numbering the streaks, then you can draw some grand conclusion about tulips or botany or life. Great thoughts don’t just appear out of nowhere, I think. That’s right. Damn, it feels good to disagree with the towering minds of the past.
Dionysus
Maybe it’s time to join Mensa. This, as most people know, is the society for bona fide geniuses and also Geena Davis. So in my quest to become at least one of those two things, I decide it’d be good to start hanging around some heavyweight brains.
Of course, I’m terrified that I’ll be rejected. In fact, I’m pretty sure that they’ll send me a letter thanking me for my interest, then have a nice hearty laugh and go back to their algebraic topology and Heidegger texts and Battlestar Galactica reruns. But if ever I have a chance of sneaking in, it’s now, when my brain is plump with information.
I log on to the Mensa Web site, and after several minutes of clicking, I discover something strange. You don’t need to take the famously difficult Mensa admissions test as long as you have what is called “prior evidence.” And what is prior evidence? IQ tests, GMAT scores, SAT scores, that kind of thing. I check the SAT scores. If you took the SATs in 1986 as I did, you need a 1250 or above to qualify for Mensa. Twelve-fifty? That doesn’t seem so high. You get 800 just for mastering the art of inhaling and exhaling. I scored a respectable 1410 combined, seeing as I took the test way back when I was still genuinely bright. That’s way over 1250. So either I’m not smart enough to decipher the Mensa Web site or I will soon be discussing Proust with Geena Davis over vodka tonics at the annual meeting. This is far too easy. I feel like I’ve found a huge loophole.
I order my SAT scores and send them to Mensa, and sure enough, a couple of weeks later, I get a bunch of paperwork. I’m in! Well, at least I’m in if I can figure
out how to fill in these damn forms, which are about as intuitive as the blueprints for a supercollider. I was particularly careful in totaling up my membership and subscription fees—$49 plus $14 plus $21 equals $84. I did that seven or eight times. A math mistake on the Mensa form would be grounds for blackballing. I look at it one more time. Eighty-four bucks. Jesus. That could explain why they’re eager to bring in new members, even if their SAT scores are 1250.
Regardless, this is huge news: A.J. Jacobs, Mensa member. I start dropping that fact at every opportunity. At work, when Sarah, the copy editor, questions my overuse of capital letters in a story, I say, “Well, you know, I am a Mensa member.” At home, I trot it out during arguments with Julie, like the time we got in a squabble over the Thai food delivery. I’m on the phone with the restaurant and I’ve forgotten what she wants, even though she’s told me three times.
“Coconut shrimp,” she repeats. Then sticks out her tongue and rolls her eyes, making the universal sign for “nitwit.”
“That was not constructive,” I say, after clicking off the phone.
“What are you? A retard?” she asks.
“Uh, how many retards are members of Mensa?”
“Just one,” she says.
Cute. Well, at least I can retreat to my surprisingly large stack of Mensa literature. I love curling up with the monthly Mensa Bulletin, especially the little announcements in the back for Mensa’s special interest groups. There are Mensans who like tennis, cats, scuba diving, the parody songs of Weird Al Yankovic—any hobby you can think of. More disturbing, there’s M-Prisoned, for Mensans who are incarcerated, as well as a eugenics group, for Mensans who are interested in manipulating the gene pool, if, of course, they ever have the opportunity to breed. But most unsettling of all is the naturist group, which is for geniuses who like to frolic nude. I don’t have firsthand knowledge yet, but I’d say the percentage of Mensans that I’d like to see naked hovers around—let’s see now, carry the seven, okay, right—zero percent. And that’s counting Geena Davis.