by A. J. Jacobs
The museum is located in Peggy’s former home, and in her living room, there’s a famous sculpture called Bird in Space by Constantin Brancusi. Created in the 1920s, this abstract work looks more like a very elegant copper carrot than a bird. I happen to know a good piece of trivia about Bird in Space, which I decide to share with the art-appreciating Peter.
“You know, Brancusi got in trouble when he tried to bring this to the States. The U.S. government accused him of trying to secretly import an industrial part into the country.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, almost got him arrested.”
“That’s fascinating.”
Peter is genuinely intrigued, and seems happy that I taught him something. He is, clearly, far more evolved than me.
number games
It can be a desolate trek, this encyclopedia reading. Yes, I know: I signed up for it voluntarily, which makes it tough to elicit sympathy from friends and family. But it’s still a lonely mission. I’m on the bed in the hotel, an hour after Julie has gone to sleep, reading in silence, no music, no TV, just the Britannica and me, as I wade through sentences such as this one: “During diagenesis, most of the magnesian calcites were transformed into stable assemblages of rather pure calcite, often along with scattered grains of dolomite.” You still there? Good.
I’m tempted to skip. And I have skipped a few times, but I always feel guilty enough to go back to give hoop skirts (or Herbert Hoover or whatever the victim was) a good skim. Or a decent skim. In any case, a man’s got to find ways to keep himself amused. I’ve become a master of this. I’ve developed dozens of little games. Here are just three:
1. The Count the Carpets Game. Every few pages, the Britannica features yet another in a dizzying array of carpet patterns. You’ve got your Bakhtiari, Balochi, Bergama, Bijar, Bokhara, and on and on. It feels like a very well organized Middle Eastern bazaar.
2. The Spot the Celebrity Look-Alike Contest. Here’s a fun visual game based on the little black-and-white pictures in the Britannica. Eighteenth-century French scholar Firmin Abauzit? He looks like Kevin Spacey! Karl Abel, a noted viola player of the 18th-century, is a dead ringer for Drew Carey.
3. The Worst Ruler Competition. History is brimming with evil leaders you’ve never heard of. Early on, there was Jean-Bedel Bokassa, head of the Central African Republic, who, emulating his hero Napoleon, crowned himself emperor in a sumptuous $20 million ceremony that helped bankrupt his country. Though he did find enough money to also kill a hundred students. (On the other hand, he was acquitted of cannibalism charges.) Pretty bad. But then, in the Cs, Bokassa got some tough competition from Chou, king of China in the 12th century B.C. To please his concubine, Chou built a lake of wine and forced naked men and women to chase one another around it. Also, he strung the forest with human flesh. Chou really put some creativity into his evilness, but he’s not unusual. Every letter has at least one truly dark-hearted cretin who somehow ascended to head of state.
Once every few hundred pages, the Britannica will come to my rescue and surprise me with a game of its own. In the C section, you can find an actual unsolved New York Times crossword puzzle. Just take your pencil—or pen, if you’re a real puzzler—and fill it in right there on the page.
Under charades—which was originally the name for a type of riddle, not the pantomime game we know now—I got this brainteaser:
“My first is a Tartar / My second a letter / My all is a country / No Christmas dish better.”
You get it? Turk-E. Turkey! That’s the answer. Ha!
And now, I’ve reached a thirteen-page section devoted exclusively to number games, like this curious pattern, which affords a “pleasant pastime”:
3 × 37 = 111
6 × 37 = 222
9 × 37 = 333
And so on. Believe me, after reading about the Permo-Triassic rock strata of the Karoo system, this is fun stuff. Unfortunately, after number games, number theory is looming, which I don’t expect to be quite the orgy of fun.
numismatics
Back when coins were made of metals like gold and silver, petty thieves would shave off the edges and melt down the valuable slivers. To stop this, mints began putting serrated edges on coins. So that’s the real story behind the cool ridges on quarters. Good to know that security measures can also be aesthetically pleasing.
nursery rhyme
My favorite Mother Goose fact thus far: “Jack and Jill” is actually an extended allegory about taxes. The jack and jill were two forms of measurement in early England. When Charles I scaled down the jack (originally two ounces) so as to collect higher sales tax, the jill, which was by definition twice the size of the jack, was automatically reduced, hence “came tumbling after.” Kids love tax stories. I can’t wait to hear the nursery rhyme about Bush’s abolishment of the estate tax.
Nyx
She’s the female personification of night. It’s about 5 P.M., with Nyx approaching fast, and here I am in an unremarkable hotel room in Venice, perhaps the single most beautiful city in the world, full of gliding boats and striped-shirted men and quaintness around every corner. Instead of taking a predinner walk with Julie and Sharon and Peter to admire the surroundings, I’ve opted to stay and finish the Ns. Julie feared this when I started Operation Britannica, and she turns out to have a point: I’ve got a whole new and compelling reason to stay inside. I’m addicted to this thing. But like most addicts, I feel simultaneously drawn to it and repelled by it.
O
oath
Our stay in Venice over, we say good-bye to Sharon and Peter and take a water taxi to the train station. It’s a quick trip, five minutes tops, and it should cost the equivalent of $10.
Instead, we get there, and the water taxi driver demands we pay him something approaching the gross national product of Bolivia ($8.2 billion). I shouldn’t pay him, but we’re late and he’s a big Italian man. According to psychologist W. H. Sheldon’s classification system, he is an endomorph (with a round head and bulky torso) and I am a wimpy ectomorph (narrow chest, high forehead, long arms). So I give him his ransom and Julie and I climb off.
I wait till the taxi driver pulls away from the pier—until there’s a safe patch of murky Venetian water between us—and then I shout at him: “Hey!” He looks up. If there’s any time to be an ugly American, this is the time—when dealing with an ugly Italian man who just took most of your savings. It’s time to insult him.
Question is, after reading more than half the Britannica, are my insults of a higher quality? I’ve saved up a good one for just these situations. It’s called the “bell, book, and candle,” an oath formerly used by the early Roman Catholic church to excommunicate a Christian who had committed some unpardonable sin.
It goes like this: “We declare him excommunicate and anathema; we judge him damned with the devil and his angels and all the reprobate to eternal fire until he shall recover himself from the toils of the devil and return to amendment and to penitence. So be it!”
Now that’s an insult.
Unfortunately, in the heat of the moment, as I was being ripped off, I had a little trouble remembering the entire bell, book, and candle curse. I knew the word “reprobate” was in there, maybe the devil, but I couldn’t summon the rest of it. And sadly, I couldn’t even come up with the less elaborate backups: “You’ve got cryptorchidism!” (undescended testicles) or even “You’ve got dumdum fever.”
No, in the thick of battle, there’s no time for elaborate insults. So I rely on a standby, and one that probably translates better across the language barrier. I give him the finger.
obscenity
Julie and I checked into the hotel today in Portofino, the site of Rick and Ilene’s wedding. We spend the day hanging out by the pool eating our greasy Italian finger food. We’re sharing an umbrella with another wedding guest, a blond-haired Minnesota native named Trent. He’s a writer for Newsweek, and has just spent eight weeks embedded in Iraq.
Trent has plenty of war stor
ies. Like the danger of eating anything other than the food provided by the U.S. military. If you decide to be adventurous in the culinary department—say, by sampling a little local goat meat—you will pay for your bravery for days. That’s not to mention another risk to journalists: writing anything that could be seen as anti-American. Trent wrote an article implying that his division was a tad trigger happy. For that, not only was he physically threatened, but he was subjected to a xeroxed anti-Trent newsletter created by the soldiers, a publication that included the witty word jumble “E-A-T S-H-T-I T-R-E-N-T.” But the most surprising thing that Trent had to say involved the customs of the American soldiers. The troops, he said, can be a little crude.
“Such as?”
We didn’t want to know, he says. We begged to differ. “Well, there’s mushrooming.”
“Never heard of it.”
Mushrooming, explains Trent, occurs when one of our soldiers is asleep, and his buddy wants to wake him up in a creative way. The buddy unzips his pants, takes out his penis, dips it in ketchup, then thwacks the sleeping guy on the forehead, leaving a mushroom-shaped imprint. Hence mushrooming.
Huh.
Julie and I spend a few moments processing this bit of military reconnaissance.
“Now that’s something that you don’t read in the encyclopedia,” says Julie.
“It’ll probably be in the 2003 edition,” I say.
But it’s true. Mushrooming is not in the Britannica. I’m jealous of Trent. Well, I’m not jealous of the fact that he ate goat meat or showered less often than I go to the opera. I’m jealous because he was out there in the sandy trenches getting firsthand knowledge. He wasn’t reading it secondhand in a wussy book. And the knowledge he picked up was weird, crude, and to my still-adolescent mind, pretty fascinating.
I can console myself, though. At least the Britannica does have plenty of its own weird and crude facts. I’ve learned almost every other bizarre thing men enjoy inflicting on their private parts. They’ve practiced ritualized bleeding to mimic menstruation. A shocking number have been castrated. An equally shocking number have been partially castrated—the 50 percent deal, officially called “monorchidism.” They’ve inserted pebbles, stuck it with a pin, subincised it (cut the underside) and plain old circumcised it. They’ve splattered blood from their pierced penises and offered it to the gods. And the men of the Cobeua tribe of Brazil dance around with large artificial phalli, doing violent coitus motions accompanied by loud groans to spread fertility to every corner of the house, jumping among the women, who disperse shrieking and laughing as they knock phalli together.
So at least I have a little sociological context for the practice of mushrooming. Now, instead of just snickering at mushrooming, I can ponder its place in other penis rituals the world over, then snicker at it.
“Does General Tommy Franks mushroom?” I ask Trent.
“I don’t think so.”
occupational disease
In the past, hatters often became ill because they used mercury salts to make felt out of rabbit fur. The mercury poisoning led to a mental deterioration known as erethism. Hence the phrase “mad as a hatter.” Good to know. If I ever have kids, I’ll make a little note in the margin of their Alice in Wonderland.
olive oil
The wedding itself was gorgeous. A nice traditional Jewish ceremony. Well, traditional except that it was held at a 12th-century Italian monastery. Since I’m pretty well versed in medieval Christianity these days, I can say with 90 percent certainty that monks did not wear yarmulkes, especially not monogrammed ones. But I’m guessing they did love a good hora. Who wouldn’t?
After the vows, I go on the receiving line to congratulate the happy couple. I shake Rick’s hand, then give him a little marital advice I’d picked up from the encyclopedia: Attila the Hun died on his wedding night, perhaps from exhaustion. “So take it easy tonight,” I say. “No need to prove anything your first night.”
“Great tip,” he says. “Thanks.”
I tell Ilene that she looks radiant. Then add: “Just so you know, if you ever need an out, the easiest method of divorce comes from the Pueblo Indians. Just leave Rick’s moccasins on the doorstep. Simple as that.” Ilene says she’ll keep that in mind.
The food is delicious and deeply Italian—lots of pasta, lots of bread, lots of olive oil (which, by the way, the ancient Egyptians used as a lubricant for moving heavy building materials; so without olive oil, no pyramids). The only part of the wedding that is not a complete success—at least for me—is the after-dinner dancing. Julie is looking particularly elegant, with a wide-brimmed hat and black gloves.
“Would you care for a dance, milady?” I ask.
“Why, yes sir,” she says.
So far, so good. But when we get out on the dance floor, I decide to test out some new dance moves. I leap in the air wildly and move my limbs in a convulsive, jerky fashion.
“What’s going on here?” Julie demands.
“Saint Vitus’s dance!” I say. “Come on, join in!.”
I jump up and wave my arms frantically. Julie doesn’t ask for an explanation, which is too bad, because I had one at the ready: Saint Vitus’s dance was an ecstatic dance that spread throughout Europe in the middle ages. It was, says the Britannica, a kind of mass hysteria, affecting hundreds of people and becoming a public menace. Those afflicted would shout and foam at the mouth. I figured: when in a 12th-century monastery, do as 12th-century Christians would do.
Julie turns her back to me and starts dancing with Rick’s friend Ted, who apparently is not afflicted with a medieval seizure. My plan was to spread Saint Vitus’s dance through the entire wedding party. Perhaps I should have gone with the tarantella, a medieval dance used to combat venomous spider bites by sweating the poison out.
Olympus Mons
I think I partially redeem myself when we get back to the hotel in Portofino. Our hotel is a fancy affair with a pool boy and wooden hangers—and really crappy air-conditioning. The thing wheezes like a bypass patient in recovery. The room is far too hot to sleep in. It’s hot as Al-Aziziyah in Libya (136 degrees). Hot as the interior of Olympus Mons (the largest volcano in the solar system, located on Mars). If the room had any sweat bees—insects that are attracted to perspiration—they’d be all over us. I order up an oscillating fan. No help. I complain to the concierge, who sends up a bellboy to inspect the air conditioner. Oh, it’s on, he assures us, and then leaves us.
“You’ve got to do something,” says Julie.
“What am I supposed to do? Fix the air conditioner?”
“Something.”
“Sorry, I forgot to bring my power drill.”
But she’s right. Something has to be done.
A quick but relevant digression: Before we left for Italy, Julie and I rented an old black-and-white movie called Ball of Fire. A friend had recommended it to us because it’s a romantic comedy about encyclopedias—a genre that doesn’t yet have its own aisle at Blockbuster. We loved it. The film—cowritten by Billy Wilder—is about eight professors who live in a brownstone and scribble away day and night on an encyclopedia. These professors, as you might expect, have wire-rim glasses and bow ties and are very adept at bumbling. The only semicool professor is the young one, played by Gary Cooper, who specializes in language. He’s writing the entry on slang, but realizes he’s been locked in this brownstone for so many years, he’s totally ignorant of modern-day slang. So Gary Cooper ventures out into the world, and encounters a hotsy-totsy burlesque singer—played by Barbara Stanwyck—and despite her atrocious grammar and her unfortunate connections to the mob, they fall in love.
The movie is a weird mix, at once deeply anti-intellectual and pro-education. The movie’s anti-intellectual part is smack-you-on-the-face obvious—these professors have filled their heads with information but neglected their hearts, so they know nothing about life. On the other hand, there are some scenes where learning triumphs—specifically a climactic scene (warning: I’m giv
ing away a key plot twist here) wherein the professors are being held at gunpoint by a bunch of thugs.
The desperate professors think back to the story of the Greek scientist Archimedes, who burned the entire Roman fleet by training a big magnifying lens on the ships. So these dweeby men use the lens from their microscope to burn the wire holding up a painting, which then falls and clunks the villain on the head, knocking him out and allowing the professors to escape.
I found a couple of things about this scene interesting. First, I know from the Britannica that the Archmides story was a myth—he didn’t actually burn the Roman fleet—so that felt good. (Likewise, the film’s narrator described these men as “knowing what tune Nero was fiddling when Rome burned.” I told Julie that actually Nero was not fiddling while Rome burned.) But more important, I was jealous. I wanted to use my knowledge like this. I wanted to use it to capture the bad guy or save the heroine. In my constant quest to put my knowledge to work, I’ve had only a handful of modest victories, the herb and crab soup incident being the most impressive.
Which brings me back to the air-conditioning conundrum. What to do? I thought back to the history of air-conditioning. I could remember only that the Graumann’s Theater in Los Angeles was one of the first places to be air-conditioned. And also that, in the days before electricity, Indians used to hang wet grass mats in the window. If life had sound effects, there would be a loud ding right about now.
I took two big white towels from the bathroom, sprayed them down in the shower, and hung them in the open window. I can’t say for sure they lowered the temperature of the room, but I think they did. And regardless, I felt better. I was taking action. I was putting my knowledge to work. I was a hero, just like Billy Wilder’s microscope-wielding professors.