by A. J. Jacobs
Las Vegas
Mormons were the first settlers. Not sure Joseph Smith would approve of today's topless showgirls and liquor. Though he would like the volcano at the Mirage. Everybody likes the volcano.
Lascaux Grotto
A noted French cave with dozens of Paleolithic paintings, including one of a bird man with an erect phallus. I realize halfway through the article that I've been to this cave, though, of course, I'd forgotten its name. (Thanks, Ebbinghaus.)
Julie and I stopped at the Lascaux grotto on our bike tour of southern France a couple of years ago. This was one of those bike tours where you pay a third of your annual salary to huff up hills with a bunch of other helmeted Americans, most of them dermatologists, though with a sprinkling of periodontists to spice things up. We've been on a couple of these tours, and it's always an exercise in humiliation for me. I never train enough beforehand, and end up spraining my knee or ankle, which means I get shuttled from stop to stop in the company van, sandwiched in between the spare parts and picnic supplies. So that's bad enough. But then there's always the eighty-two-year-old retired dermatologist, who rode forty miles without breaking a sweat, who will ask, "How's your knee doing, young fella?" By which he means to say, "What the hell is wrong with you, boy? I've got hemorrhoids older than you, and I still pedaled up those hills, you nelly." At least that's the way I interpret it.
Anyway, I remember pulling up to the Lascaux grotto on our fancy bikes with their--no exaggeration--forty-two gears. (The first successful bicycles in the 1860s, incidentally, had only one gear, and riding them was such a bumpy experience, they were called "bone shakers.") At the cave entrance, we were met by the skinny French anthropologist who was to be our tour guide. He gave us a five-minute course in human evolution--he seemed particularly interested in telling us about humanoid cranial capacity, which has grown over the years from 800 cubic centimeters to 1350 cubic centimeters. He then led us through the tunnel to the prehistoric art gallery.
"Regard the outline of this bull," said our French anthropologist.
The dermatologists all nodded and murmured.
"The horns on this bull are very well defined," he said.
"Where? I can't see it." I said.
"There," he said, pointing. "Those lines."
"Sorry--where, exactly?"
"Don't worry about him," Julie said. "He only has 800 cubic centimeters of cranial capacity."
Our guide laughed his French laugh. "Tres bien," he said. "Tres bien."
I never did figure out which were the horns on that bull, but all the talk of humanoid evolution reminded my tiny brain of something that has haunted me since I was a kid. If humans manage to survive another few thousand years, they'll continue to grow larger and larger craniums. Which means no matter how smart I am, no matter how much I know, how much I read, how much I absorb, how much I think, I'll still be a member of the species that couldn't do differential calculus in their heads. "Oh, look at the way Homo sapiens solved Fermat's last theorem! And it took them only three hundred years. Isn't that cute!"
Which makes me question my current venture. Even if I'm smarter by the end and write a brilliant book about the experience, I'll still be doing the 21st-century equivalent of scrawling bird men with erect phalluses on cave walls.
last words
Another reason I'll never make it into the Britannica, in addition to the fact that I'm not an Arctic explorer or a Swedish botanist: I can't talk like these guys. I don't have the conviction, the passion. This is clearest to me when I read about the last words of great men. Like Georges Danton, a leader of the French Revolution who was beheaded for opposing the extremist faction. When he was about to be guillotined, Danton told the executioner, "Show my head to the people. It is worth the trouble." As opposed to what I would have told the executioner: "Holy fuck! Holy shit!" Or if you want to get technical, "Holy merde!"
Danton has plenty of company. Men like Giordano Bruno, an Italian philosopher and astronomer in the late 1500s, who went beyond the Copernican heliocentric view of the universe, instead arguing that space contained a multiplicity of worlds like the earth. For this, the Catholic Church gagged him and burned him at the stake. When the judges read Bruno his sentence, he told them: "Perhaps your fear in passing judgment on me is greater than mine in receiving it." How can he be that cool under pressure? He's just been told that he's going to be flambeed, and he responds with a noble, coherent, brilliant quotation. Again, I believe my reaction would be, "Listen, I was just kidding about that multiplicity of worlds stuff. Just joking around. Only one world. I take it all back."
learning
There is a short section on IQs in the learning section. It says that high IQs "are strongly associated with the 35-yard dash and balancing on one foot." This is one of the most strangely specific pieces of information in the encyclopedia. Why a thirty-five-yard-dash? I've never even heard of that. Why not a fifty? Why balancing on one foot? What about tether ball? Is that strongly associated with high IQ? Because that would make as much sense. Also, it seems totally counterintuitive; what happened to the stereotype of the sickly weakling genius? But most of all, it seems unfair. It seems wrong that nature makes people smart and fast and well balanced. Can't nature divide those things equally among her brood? Since I don't have the highest IQ--as evidenced by the Mensa test debacle--I should at least be able to be do that balancing crane stance in kung fu.
lector
I had to skip my morning Britannica reading today. A handful of the Esquire editors were required to show up at the ungodly (for us) hour of 9 A.M. to make a presentation to the magazine's advertising staff. We are supposed to present our plans for Esquire's future issues. Sounds relatively simple. Problem is, I've never been a great speech giver, and I'm moderately stressed out about my presentation.
I've been half hoping the Britannica would help me with my oratory. And the volumes are, in fact, packed with information on classical rhetorical devices. My favorite is one called "aposiopesis"--the deliberate failure to complete a sentence, as in "Why, you..." or "Why, I ought to..." (possible Business Idea: print T-shirts with the motto "Aposiopesis makes me want to..." and sell them to rhetorical scholars for a killing). But outside of sputtering fathers in fifties sitcoms and classical debate lovers, aposiopesis wouldn't seem to be very useful in modern society.
I'm also a fan of inversion, the transportation of normal word order, as in the first lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan": "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree." There's something great about that sentence--slightly disorienting, but majestic. Yet when I tried to write something with inversion for today's presentation, it just came out weird: "In the pages of our magazine will appear women with little clothing." I sounded like a perverted Yoda.
In the end, I settle on three rhetorical devices: anadiplosis, or repetition; asyndeton, or lack of conjunctions (as in Caesar's "I came, I saw, I conquered"); and antithesis, the juxtaposition of two opposing ideas (as in the phrase "Life is short, art is long").
I put on a suit--my Gucci wedding suit, the only suit I own--and go down to the Trump Tower, where the meeting is being held. I speak right after my boss, David Granger, which is always problematic, since he's a good speaker, getting as worked up as a Baptist preacher.
I put down my notes and begin: "This year, the front of the magazine will get smarter. The front of the magazine will get funnier. The front of the magazine will get better in every way." I pause, letting my anadiplosis and asyndeton sink in. I felt self-conscious as I was saying it, as if I was reciting lines from a stilted Jacobean play. But I continue with an antithetical flourish: "GQ's front section is good, but Esquire's is great. GQ is moderately interesting, but Esquire is indispensable."
The ad staff is paying attention. Some are taking notes!
And that is about all I can muster, rhetoric-wise. The rest of the speech is free of eloquence and classical devices--just a disorganized and flat-footed list of upcomi
ng articles.
I'd judge my rhetoric a moderate success. But I think it made for a better speech than the usual collection of "um's" and "uh's." Maybe I just have to learn to trust my Britannica more. At the very least, my presentation went better than Benjamin Disraeli's maiden speech in the House of Commons, which was so unpopular he had to end it with, "I will sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me." So I got that going for me.
Leonardo Pisano, aka Fibonacci
Fibonacci was a 13th-century Italian mathematician who invented the Fibonacci series, which goes like this: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. Each of the numbers is the sum of the two preceding numbers. I look at the sequence again. I know I recognize it from somewhere. It takes me a couple of seconds, but then it clicks: Boggle! It's the scoring system for my favorite find-a-word game, Boggle.
Before we go any further, let me defend poor Boggle. I know professing to love this game is about as cool as admitting that I collect Hummel figurines, but it's truly the best word game ever invented. Scrabble involves too much luck; I'm always getting stuck with a bunch of hard consonants that look like they might spell a Slavic factory town, but nothing in my mother tongue. Boggle, on the other hand, just like chess, is all skill. Everyone's crouched over the same little letter cubes trying to unlock the same hidden words. And I'm not half bad at Boggle; it's one of the few things I can beat my brother-in-law Eric at, mostly because I add an "er" to every word. My strategy is to defend the validity of words like "pillower" with such vehemence that Eric will make some skeptical and condescending noises, but not bother to look them up.
Now in this glorious game of Boggle, depending on the number of letters in each of your words, you are rewarded 1, 1, 2, 3, or 5 points. Voila! The Fibonacci series. Or at least the start of it.
Somehow, knowing this makes me happy. I'm not sure why. I think it has to do with being able to see patterns in the world, knowing how an obscure math sequence relates to one of my favorite pastimes, unlocking a code, even if that code is about a silly Parker Brothers game.
Thanks to the Britannica, I now know not only the name of the Boggle scoring system, but also how such a series was first proposed. Fibonacci gave it in the form of a riddle about randy rabbits. Namely: A certain man put a pair of rabbits in a place surrounded on all sides by a wall. How many pairs of rabbits can be produced from that pair in a year if it is supposed that every month each pair begets a new pair, which from the second month on becomes productive? Naturally, I'm jealous of these critters' boundless fertility, not to mention disturbed by the amount of incest involved. But mostly I'm impressed by how this works--the more rabbit couples there are, the more pairs they produce, with the increases occurring at the good old Fibonacci intervals--1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc. The year-end total: 376.
I now have an unexpected link between lascivious rabbits and Boggle. Even better, I know that Boggle connects in some cosmic way to pinecones and seashells, whch also exhibit the Fibonacci sequence, according to the Britannica. It's a nice little quartet: Boggle, rabbits, pinecones, and seashells. Or actually quintet, if you throw in The Da Vinci Code. (A friend tells me that the best seller also includes the Fibonacci sequence. She apparently reads for pleasure--wonder what that's like.)
liar paradox
The ancient paradox goes like this: If the sentence "This sentence is not true" is true, then it is not true, and if it is not true, then it is true. I feel very lucky I am not stoned, because if I had read this after a bong hit, my head would explode.
life span
Tucked in among the other statistics--like the one about the yearlong life span of small rodents and pine trees that can last for forty-nine hundred years--comes a number that shocks me. It says the average human life span in the 1700s was thirty years. Thirty years! I'm thirty-five. I don't need the algebra section to figure out that if I had been a cobbler back in the 18th century, I'd have spent the last five years relaxing in a coffin. Thirty years is nothing--crayfish can live thirty years. This is good information. Useful information. Optimism-inspiring information.
lily
Two errands today, two very different experiences. First, the florist. Julie's taken to calling herself an "encyclopedia widow," so I figure now might be a good time to remind her that I love her, and that I'm willing to spend $45 to back up that fact.
I go to a shop in midtown, a couple of blocks from the office. The first thing I notice is that the florist has dreadlocks that reach down to his waist. I can't imagine that's a huge subset of the population: florists with dreadlocks. Sort of like insurance executives with mohawks.
When I inform him that I want to order a bouquet, he asks me if I want the flowers in a vase. I reply that I do.
"That's called an arrangement, not a bouquet," he says. His tone is surprisingly hostile, with a little boredom thrown in for good measure. I should walk out right now.
I tell him I'd like a hyacinth. "You know, hyacinth," I say. "Named for Apollo's male lover, whom Apollo accidentally killed while teaching him to throw the discus."
The dreadlocked florist gives a half snort, half harrumph.
"And I'd like some dogwood with that," I say.
"Dogwood doesn't go with that," he says.
I tell him that I was just reading about dogwood, and how in Victorian flower language, a lady's returning a dogwood was a sign of indifference. I just want to check if my wife still loves me.
"Dogwood's tall and hyacinth is short," he says.
I won't describe the rest of the flower debacle--during which I bring up the Japanese flower arranging system, something called the Hogarth curve, and the Madonna lily, a symbol of virginity in the middle ages, all of which he seems disinclined to discuss. He asks me what I want to say in my card.
"These flowers are bisexual, but I am straight, and I love you," I say.
He keeps his pen poised, but doesn't start to write, instead glaring at me over his granny glasses. Yes, I've neglected to mention he was a dreadlocked florist with granny glasses.
"Because most flowers are bisexual," I say. "Angiosperms are bisexual."
He has already decided I am a moron. Now I am also a homophobe.
Errand two is a stop at Supercuts for a haircut. My barber is named Steve, a man who has a serious collection of earrings on his ears, but neither dreadlocks nor granny glasses.
I take my L volume out of my bag. As he snips, I read about lighthouses and lightning rods, my hair dropping into the crease between the pages. Steve wonders what I am doing. I tell him.
"What a great idea!" he says. "We should all do that."
Encouraged, I inform him that Roman households often had a barber on staff. Like a butler. They offered haircuts to guests, like we offer them a glass of wine nowadays.
"Wow," he says. "I love that!"
Maybe he is just being polite, but I think he is genuinely interested.
I tell him that archaeologists have discovered a five-thousand-year-old frozen corpse that showed signs of the first haircut, then segued smoothly to Hollywood, pointing out that Greta Garbo's first job was in a barbershop.
"I knew Mariah Carey worked in a salon," he says.
Steve has been kind and receptive and supportive, and I want to hug him. I give him a $10 tip instead, which I think he much preferred.
limerick
Another reason to be happy--the following poem:
A tutor who taught on the flute Tried to teach two tooters to toot. Said the two to the tutor, "Is it harder to toot, Or to tutor two tooters to toot?"
That's just good, clean, non-Nantucket-related fun.
Lloyd Webber, Sir Andrew
I didn't need the Britannica to tell me about this man, the Ray Kroc of musical theater, the man behind such McMusicals as Jesus Christ Super-star and Phantom of the Opera. At Entertainment Weekly, I had to edit a faux-weepy homage to Cats when the producers announced that after 7,485 performances on Broadway, Rum Tum Tugger was going to that kitty-litter box
in the sky. I think I probably used that phrase, come to think of it.
But my most significant Andrew Lloyd Webber memory has to do with a play even campier than Cats: Starlight Express. For those who missed it, Starlight Express was the one about trains. The characters had names like Rusty and Dinah the Dining Car, and the actors played the trains by zipping across the stage on roller skates. As far as skate-based theater about modes of transportation goes, Starlight Express is among the top five.
I saw Starlight Express when I was about fifteen years old. My mom and I had flown to London on a special mother-son bonding trip. After a busy day of examining torture instruments in the Tower of London and getting mocked for ordering ice in our drinks (the waiter brought us our ice cubes in a pail labeled "Yank Bucket"), we went to the theater. Starlight Express sounded like harmless fun.
We watched Greaseball skate and sing about depots and the station, and then we clapped dutifully.
"So what'd you think?" my mom asked, when we got outside.
"Well, it was a little heavy-handed, I thought."
"How so?"
And here I explained that, in my opinion, Starlight Express was actually an extended political allegory. The old steam train was meant to represent slavery. The diesel train was laissez-faire capitalism. And the evil electric train--the one with the lightning bolt on his costume--was fascism. I can't remember the proof I had for my thesis, but I remember being pretty convincing. At the end of my lecture, my mom nodded her head.
"That's interesting," she said. "I never thought of it that way."
This was a huge moment in my life as a know-it-all. Now, it's possible I might have overanalyzed Lloyd Webber, and there's a chance that Mom was just being polite. But I don't think so. I think my mother--a very smart woman with a master's degree and a lifelong New Yorker subscription--was actually impressed with my analysis. And that felt great.
That's the feeling I want to get back. I want the world's hidden meanings to leap out at me like a Chinese jumping mouse. I want to see the grand arcs and the big picture. I want to shock people with the incisiveness of my analysis. On the other hand, I don't really want to see any more musicals about trains.