Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!

by Bob Harris

  There’s not room here to include over forty separate presidential mnemonics—those would belong in yet another book (or someday, perhaps, a series of books someone will write this way, reducing the basic facts of human history into memorable, bite-size nuggets)—but here are a few at random, just to give you the flavor:

  12 = Zachary Taylor. There is a Zin the word “dozen.” Done.

  16 = Abe Lincoln at a Sweet Sixteen party. Make up your own “stovepipe hat” jokes.

  35 = JFK, the youngest elected president. Minimum age for the office: 35.

  It also helps to link not just to the number, but also to what comes before and after. This is pretty much how I finally sorted out Pierce, Buchanan, and Millard goddam Fillmore, a few days after my first Jeopardy! game, using romance as a unifying theme:

  13 = Millard Fillmore. What an unlucky name. Completely unlovable.

  14 = Franklin Pierce. Valentine’s Day (Feb. 14) means hearts pierced by arrows. Better still: a burning hail of fiery arrows, piercing a whole field of Valentine hearts. And I am not bitter.

  15 = James Buchanan. After any romance, once the hail of arrows is over, you need to Jump Back Again.

  This, incidentally, took minutes, once I saw how.

  Scan your brain and find connections between the new material and a list already in your head, and you can do the same thing with any new list you like.

  The existing list—the target of the gluing-on process—can be anything appropriate to the topic. I once tried to memorize the geographic locations of about fifty major Native American peoples. This was easier than I expected; all I had to do was link each group to something memorable in their physical location.

  For example, to remember that the Chickasaw Indians lived along the eastern shore of the Mississippi, near modern Memphis, I just needed to play with Memphis until it connected back with something primal and sticky. This is the thought process that followed:

  Dr. King was shot there. Hmm. Memphis State, the college. That Tom Cruise movie where he played a lawyer with Gene Hackman…hmph…Graceland is in Memphis…Elvis…—and Elvis slept with every chick he saw. Done.

  Like it or not, the Chickasaw Indians and Memphis are now glued together permanently.

  OK, now let’s take on a real challenge. Let’s try that list of UN Secretaries-General, a series of strange names from seven different countries on four continents. In this case, every single syllable is strange, so shorthands can’t be used. This is the worst-case scenario; if you can handle this, you can remember anything.

  WARNING: the following list is so dull that attempting to memorize it without safety precautions could cause injury or even brain death. If you are alone, do not proceed with the rest of this chapter. If you insist, please notify a friend as to your location and intentions, then hold the book lightly in your fingertips with your arms extended. In the event of a UN Secretaries-General-induced loss of consciousness, the book will drop to the floor, releasing your brain from its grip, possibly averting long-term damage.

  We begin by cheating again, even harder. Let’s just say those entire names out loud until they start sounding like English words we recognize. If you don’t know how to pronounce one or two, no sweat. Just plow ahead and have fun. You’ll make more progress than you think, and the real purpose of mnemonics (outside of obsessive Jeopardy! study, anyway) is to help begin learning new data, not as an end in themselves.

  Your list will differ, but here are some half-baked pronunciations that came out of my mouth:

  Trygve Lie

  Truck Valet

  Dag Hammarskjöld

  Dug Hummers Cold

  U Thant

  Ooh, Taunt

  Kurt Waldheim

  Cured For All Time

  Javier Perez de Cuellar

  Heaver Prays To Clear Off

  Boutros Boutros-Ghali

  Butt Rose, Butt Rose, Golly

  Kofi Annan

  Coffee, Anyone?

  Again, stop and appreciate the omnipresence of the human butt, no disrespect intended to the former Egyptian Foreign Affairs Minister, a Fulbright scholar with a doctorate from the University of Paris.

  To remember these in sequence, all we need to do is make up a story. Again: hold the book loosely in your fingertips, preferably with someone else in the room.

  Let’s start with a bad-tempered truck valet, a bullying jerk who really likes Hummers (dug Hummers cold ). He passes a gorgeous woman out on a date with a smart but tiny little man. Naturally, the truck valet who dug Hummers cold stops to wolf-whistle at the girl and pick a fight with—ooh, taunt—the scrawny guy.

  However, the little guy is also a flyweight kickboxing champ. The truck valet soon gets the crud beaten out of him (cured for all time). The bully loses his lunch, then begs to leave (heaver prays to clear off ). But the little guy finishes the job by kicking the truck valet’s nether regions high into the air (butt rose, butt rose, golly), then finally relaxes by sharing a delicious iced mocha with his girlfriend (coffee, anyone?).

  So if you can remember the seven key bits of that one little story—

  Truck valet

  Dug hummers cold

  Ooh, taunt

  Cured for all time

  Heaver prays to clear off

  Butt rose, butt rose, golly

  Coffee, anyone?

  —you now know the complete list of United Nations Secretaries-General. Please put down the book, thank your assistant, and hug your loved ones. Wipe their tears. It is over.

  With practice, something like this takes about ten or fifteen minutes to dream up. Granted, you don’t have it slammed into your head like the other stuff, but this is the Armageddon example. And even so, with just a little review, you can now keep that unlikely-looking list in your head, in order, as long as you live if you choose.

  (There were a few blind alleys, of course. Kurt Waldheim, for example, came out variously as Good Valid Ham or Card Vault Time. These were fun to play with, but didn’t fit. No biggie. It always takes a few tries.)

  Notice that the story is intentionally extra-sticky because of the use of violence, a primal fight to display male dominance for a potential sexual partner (this is the entire function of the date in the story), and even the sensory satisfactions of the taste of strong coffee and the presence of a desirable mate at the end.

  You could flip the narrative a hundred ways. I chose a fairly familiar one; in fact, you’ll see this exact story in multiplexes next year as Speed Reading Made Easy II: The Kick-Boxening.

  This probably seems like a lot more work at first. Make no mistake: it absolutely is. A lot more. There’s an initial investment of time here that you needn’t bother with in the bang-your-forehead-while-clocks-spin approach. The time you’ll save on the far end is enormous, but that can be hard to see at first.

  Worse, studying this way means you have to practice and develop a new set of skills while fighting against old habits. And if you have inhibitions—if you’re afraid someone will mock you, perhaps, if you someday admit that your knowledge of Classical Mythology is (like mine) originally rooted in a lengthy series of unrepeatable dirty jokes—you just won’t want to try this.

  Some folks may even have invested so much time and effort in rote learning that they’ll feel angry at the very suggestion that there’s any other way.

  Since we’re not wired to adopt strange ideas easily, some folks reading this will sniff dismissively, shake their heads, and possibly emit a series of uneasy grrrr noises. I probably would have, too, honestly, if I didn’t have tens of thousands of dollars riding on the need to learn whatever worked fastest and bestest.

  It is not, in fact, a cheap shortcut to encode and recall information in a fashion compatible with your brain’s physical structure, any more than using a highway map is cheating when you’re trying to navigate the layout of a strange city. You’re just helping yourself find the fastest route possible.

  Again, knowing a list of British Monarchs doesn�
��t make you even slightly expert in English history. Of course not. But having the raw material already stuffed into your brain does make picking up all the details and context a lot easier. Eventually, with use, the memory aids begin to fall away, and the information itself has been recorded in your head.

  When I started writing this section, jotting down the names of the UN Secretaries-General was the easy part. I had to look up the story in my notebooks.

  I never would have believed this a decade ago.

  OK, Chuck.

  I had gone to the supermarket and bought a five-subject college notebook with a blue cover, the first of four I would eventually fill. It was open to the first blank page.

  I had a pen in my hand, a large supply of caffeine in the fridge, and a willingness to create as many gratuitous anatomical jokes as necessary.

  I’m ready.

  And so began a daily routine: up at 7:00 a.m. In the books until 7:00 p.m.

  At 7:00 p.m., I would stop, grab my masking-tape buzzer, and play along with the Jeopardy! broadcast. Sometimes I would play along with the tape again a second time or as a break during the following day, simply practicing the timing during the afternoon, the time of day when my games would be played.

  At seven-thirty back in the books. Snooze at eleven.

  At no time did I ever work this hard in high school or college. Of course, at no time in high school or college did studying ever involve making up dozens of dirty jokes and scribbling down large, amateurish, slightly insane-looking drawings.

  Glancing at my notebook entries for Chuck’s list of the major works of American Novelists, for example, we find:

  Piano-shaped people throwing TVs at mountains ( James Baldwin);

  Elmer Fudd shooting arrows at a dodging Bugs Bunny amid downtown buildings, while a slender green dinosaur looks on (Sinclair Lewis); and

  A near-death slalom skier in a bow tie being retrieved from a pile of sawdust after hitting it with explosive force in bright sunlight (William Faulkner).

  I could explain these, but I think you’ll have more fun bouncing them around, working out why each image is there, and possibly questioning my sanity. (There’s a secret decoder ring below if you’re curious.* ) Those of you who actually can eventually decode these should either try out for the show or seek professional help.

  Probably both.

  Getting ready also meant bowing humbly to the gods of state-dependent retrieval.

  The local office supply store had no shortage of cheap pedestal halogen lamps. Five of them were soon scattered across my living room, transforming the ceiling into a blinding source of studio-intensity reflected light.

  My air conditioner, set on “purée,” chilled the living room to a studio-like sixty-five degrees. Videotapes of Jeopardy! played silently on the TV, associating all new information with the show’s colors and scenery. The TV was shifted as far to one side of the room as possible, the better to simulate the actual distance of the game, and the waist-high top of a small bookcase became my makeshift home podium.

  And, of course, as much as possible, I studied while standing up.

  Annika, who had two master’s degrees and spent her days providing basic education in difficult environments, was not enthused.

  Every evening, I would excitedly tell her of the new things I was surprised to find sticking in my head. “Eighty-eight constellations! Twelve birthstones! Four elements named for Greek deities!” I would babble. “Goa was Portuguese! Matisse was a Fauvist! Little Orphan Annie had a dog named Sandy!” If I ever asked Annika how her day was, I don’t recall it specifically.

  Looking back, I must have sounded like the world’s most sophisticated Tourette’s patient: “Sphenoid Bones! Pygmy Shrews! Die Fledermaus! Monkey monkey monkey monkey!”

  Annika usually went to the next room to read.

  The new knowledge, even shorn of all context, was exhilarating.

  Shakespeare, for example, had always somehow been outside my expectations. I knew the plays were great and all, sure; everyone said so. But I also assumed they also would be above my station in life. I never saw a single moment of a Shakespeare play until I was two years out of college.

  It’s not that my parents had anything against the guy; it’s just that he rarely visited the Snow Belt. The closest thing we ever had to highbrow literature was my father’s love for the surreal, silly works of Ogden Nash and Lewis Carroll.

  To put food on the table, Dad spent too many hours lifting things bigger than he was to have much time for reading, but this seemed almost a verbal advantage. For him, words existed as collections of sounds and images, passports to realities skewed from our own.

  While he was alive, it is possible that not a single month of my life went by—ever, during the thirty-two years, one month, eight days, six hours, and forty-five minutes that we shared this planet—that Dad didn’t recite the first words of the poem “Jabberwocky” to me, just for the joy of the apparently meaningless syllables. “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves,” he would begin, and a rare delight would begin to sneak across his face, appreciating each moment of transcendent goofiness, watching my eyes to see if I shared his delight.

  I believe, although I cannot prove, that he had high hopes.

  One evening, when there was only a day or so left of our time together, I recited the poem back to him for the very last time.

  He was sort of asleep at the time, but I wanted to believe I could see him smiling.

  In high school, we barely brushed against Ogden Nash, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, or any of the other so-unserious writers who delight everyone they touch. This was, after all, a very expensive and important school. Instead, I was force-fed a few of Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits, although the English always needed translation, the broad comedy and wrenching drama were lost, and none of the magnificently dirty jokes were ever explained. (Incidentally, Romeo and Juliet, fully appreciated, might be banned in some U.S. states.) This was the Concordance again, and little more. So we’d read all the lines aloud, resign ourselves to a ponderous struggle, and soon give up the plot completely.

  But in the blinding glow of my stage-lit living room, I started sucking down Cliffs Notes and Chuck’s notes about scepter’d isles, pricking thumbs, and miscellaneous Ides of March. This went much more quickly than I once could have imagined. I was kicking Shakespeare’s ass.

  The more I read, the more I could hear a distant voice, repeating every line playfully, savoring every rhythm and pun, enjoying these sticky new stories. As I crammed in each new quote, locale, character, and basic plot point, I also promised to go back someday and study more.

  The voice in my head was pleasant to hear.

  I’d never realized: Dad would have loved Shakespeare.

  Sometimes Annika would emerge, squint through the halogen glare, and ask, with some sincerity, if and how I was managing to remember all this stuff. I would invariably respond by proudly describing a new mnemonic construction in full and glorious detail.

  Perhaps I would describe an important Supreme Court ruling in terms of a dancer with bananas on her head being handcuffed by a cactus. Or maybe I would discuss art history by describing ballet dancers on laughing gas, a man who has just lost one ear gargling the word “Arrrrrrrrl,” or Doris Day being blown to thousands of colorful bits.

  (In case you’re curious: Miranda v. Arizona. Also, the frequent subject matter of Degas; the French town of Arles, where Van Gogh was famously visited by Gauguin; and the pointillist technique of Seurat, whose last name sounds like the lyric in “Que Sera, Sera.”)

  To Annika, I might as well have been describing subatomic physics in terms of billiard balls, tangles of string, and possibly dead cats. I am certain I sounded—and am starting to sound to some of you, reading this—like a complete loon.

  So Annika would look around the living room-turned-soundstage, roll her eyes slightly, and sigh.

  I was sure she’d understand once I became a five-time champ.

  CH
APTER

  10

  THE LONGEST DAY

  Also, I Am Attacked by Ravenous Badgers

  Game day. Already becoming a familiar experience.

  All I wanted to do was try to relax and pace myself. It wouldn’t do to breeze in, win one game in a surge of mental energy, and then flame out before lunchtime. This wasn’t a sprint, the way my single end-of-day win had been weeks before. Jeopardy! was going to be an endurance sport.

  I had three changes of clothing with me, as contestants are always asked to bring. All three of my sport jackets had Kleenex stashed in the right pocket.

  No way I was climbing back into that makeup chair unprepared.

  From the moment I walked into the green room, I could feel the dozen other contestants furtively scrutinizing me, just as I had so recently measured Matt, the returning champion of my own first game. I should have expected this, but it was a surprise nonetheless.

  On camera, Jeopardy! had been a test of knowledge, judgment, timing, and coolness under pressure. Backstage, however, I realized there was another, more primitive, unspoken game already under way.