by A. J. Jacobs
“Blimey, I need a spoon!” I say.
“Okay,” says Julie, “enough with the British talk.”
Dundatree
This the Britannica defines as “the mythical country where large-footed dictators come from.” Huh. That’s an strange concept, I think to myself. I’ve never even heard of it.
The reason I’ve never heard of Dundatree is that … I dreamed it. I read so much that it’s invaded my sleep. I can’t escape those endless descriptions and dates, that little ten-point Times font text, the fancy gold embossing, not even when I close my eyes. And now I’m making up my own facts, which I’m worried I’ll confuse with actual facts.
Dyer, John
I’m relatively sure I didn’t dream this British poet up. He was born in 1699 and he wrote the following verse:
A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam in a winter’s day,
Is all the proud and mighty have
Between the cradle and the grave.
Jesus. That’s disheartening.
On the one hand, I suppose it’s a wisely humbling poem. So what if Donald Trump has dozens of menservants to dust his gold-plated toilet plungers? All he really has is a little rule, a little sway, between the cradle and the grave. But on the other hand, the verse plays to my cynical side, the whatever-you-do-doesn’t-matter-because-you’ll-eventually-die side, which isn’t a healthy mind-set. I need better wisdom.
E
Earth
IT’S FRIDAY NIGHT, and Julie and I are out to dinner with our friends Lisa and Paul. Julie met Lisa at camp, and they’ve remained close for a couple of decades. Lisa looks a bit like Audrey Hepburn, and Paul looks a bit like Lisa, which I guess makes him a male Audrey Hepburn with less hair.
It’s always good to see them, even if we all agree the restaurant’s chef needs some more focus—he’s offering sushi, French food, blintzes, everything but bird’s nest soup (a dish made from the saliva of tiny Chinese birds). The main thrust of our conversation is that we’re all way too busy. This, I’ve found, is one of the absolute favorite discussions of East Coast urbanites in my age bracket, along with real estate prices, smoking laws, and the inexplicable career of bow-tied PBS satirist Mark Russell. Well, maybe that last one is my own little obsession.
In any case, my dinner companions are all complaining about their overloaded schedules. Lisa—who never leaves the house without a camera—has a dozen shoe boxes bulging with photos.
“I just don’t have time to put them in photo albums.”
“I’ll do it for you,” says Julie. She’s the single most organized woman in the world. If given the choice between organizing a closet and going on vacation, she’d have to think about it.
“I might take you up on that,” says Lisa. “I’d do it myself, but I just need more hours in the day.”
“There really should be at least thirty hours in a day,” says Paul.
And here—like a great running back who sees a hole in the offensive line—I make my move. “You know, if you just wait a bit, there will be more hours in the day.”
No one responds, so I continue.
“The days are getting longer because of the drag on the earth. So just wait a few million years. I mean, you’re lucky you didn’t live half a billion years ago. There were only twenty hours in a day.”
“You sure do know a lot,” says Paul.
I have to say, he’s right. I learned that fact in the entry on our planet Earth. It was a fascinating essay—but also more than a bit disconcerting.
It’s not just the length of our days that is shifting. There’s also a disturbing phenomenon called “polar wandering.” Apparently, the North and South Poles are restless little buggers. The magnetic South Pole cruises about eight miles to the northwest each year. Give it a couple decades and it’ll make its way to Baton Rouge. After that, I hear it’s heading to the Jersey shore.
This I don’t get. Stray cats are supposed to wander. Maybe dazed hippies in search of a Phish concert. But the poles? They’re supposed to be stable and solid and frozen, like the red-and-white striped poles I used to see on Rankin-Bass Santa Claus specials.
That’s not to mention what’s known as the procession of equinoxes: the earth is wobbling on its axis every 26,000 years. And there’s more. The earth’s magnetic field reverses direction every 300,000 to a million years. There’s something called azimuthal drift, which involves shifting particle streams. And many other things I barely understand.
The point is, the earth’s not solid as a rock. The earth’s not firm. The earth is a big wobbling, wandering, reversing, shifting sphere of Jell-O. I suppose I should have known from elementary school that my world wasn’t completely stationary. I knew about the revolving and rotating and had a passing acquaintance with plate tectonics.
But the volume of instability and flux—that’s what threw me. It makes me feel like I’m walking on a half-melted ice pond.
And by the way, in case you’re under the impression that the earth is a sphere, you’re wrong. It bulges in the middle, like Alfred Hitchcock after a couple too many helpings of kidney pie. It’s a wobbling, wandering, reversing, shifting sphere of Jell-O with a weight problem. But it’s all we’ve got.
After dinner, as we walk along the rickety West Side streets, Julie says: “Honey, I think you need to restrain yourself a little with the facts.”
Damn. I was riding high from my cilantro victory. Now I’ve gone and blown that goodwill. “But I did restrain myself,” I say. “I had a lot more facts about the earth I didn’t mention.”
“Well, thank you for that.”
“You didn’t find that interesting at all?” I ask. “That our days are getting longer?”
“I’m just saying, you seem to be losing your ability to interact with human beings.”
“So you’re saying I once had ability to interact with human beings?”
I got her there. Ha! But Julie does have a point. Maybe I need to control myself a little more. It’s just so hard—I’ve crammed so much info into my brain, I feel that I need to get it out whenever I can. It’s so damn cathartic (as are certain noxious members of the buttercup family when ingested).
Ecclesiastes
This is a book of the Old Testament. I don’t believe I’ve ever read this section of the Bible—I know my Genesis pretty well and my Ten Commandments (I like lists), but I’m hazy on a lot of the other parts. Here, the Britannica provides a handy Cliffs Notes version of Ecclesiastes:
[The author’s] observations on life convinced him that “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all” (9:11). Man’s fate, the author maintains, does not depend on righteous or wicked conduct but is an inscrutable mystery that remains hidden in God (9:1). All attempts to penetrate this mystery and thereby gain the wisdom necessary to secure one’s fate are “vanity,” or futile. In the face of such uncertainty, the author’s counsel is to enjoy the good things that God provides while one has them to enjoy.
This is great. I’ve accumulated hundreds of facts in the last seven thousand pages, but I’ve been craving profundity and perspective. Yes, there was that Dyer poem, but that was just cynical. This is the real thing: the deepest paragraph I’ve read so far in the encyclopedia. Instant wisdom. It couldn’t be more true: the race does not go to the swift. How else to explain the mouth-breathing cretins I knew in high school who now have multimillion-dollar salaries? How else to explain my brilliant and kind friends who are still stuck selling wheatgrass juice at health food stores? How else to explain Vin Diesel’s show business career? Yes, life is desperately, insanely, absurdly unfair. But Ecclesiastes offers exactly the correct reaction to that fact. There’s nothing to be done about it, so enjoy what you can. Take pleasure in the small things—like, for me, Julie’s laugh, some nice onion dip, the insanely comfortable beat-up leather chair in our living room.
ecstasy
I learn that ecstasy was patented as an appetite suppressant by Merck in the 1920s. Incidentally, I took Merck’s appetite suppressant when I went to visit Brown University as a high school senior trying to figure out where to go to college. Damn, that was a great visit. Brown should give out ecstasy to all prospective applicants.
I couldn’t believe how wonderful everything at the school was. “I love this cafeteria! This is the most beautiful cafeteria I’ve ever seen. And this baked ziti—this is fucking delicious! You get to live in these dorm rooms? They’re palaces. And your library carrels are so well designed. What beautiful fluorescent lighting! God, look at that pile of bricks in the yard. That’s the most gorgeous pile of bricks at any college I’ve ever seen.” I think I gave out about fifteen hugs to surprised and apprehensive students who made the mistake of wandering within a twenty-foot radius of me.
Unfortunately, the ecstasy had worn off by the time I actually became a freshman at Brown and learned that the baked ziti actually tasted like Styrofoam dipped in ketchup.
eggplant
It’s our apartment-warming tonight—we moved in six months ago, but never got around to throwing a party till now. It’ll be our first catered affair. A real adult party with men in tuxedos passing out skewered coconut chicken and grilled eggplant roulade (eggplant’s name, by the way, comes from the white egg-shaped variety, which I’ve never seen). We spend the day cleaning up. I, for one, make sure my Britannica volumes are neatly lined up, ready for their debut in polite society.
The party seems to go well. People love the skewered coconut chicken, and the dreaded mixing of friends seems to be going along without incident.
Midway through the party, I see Dad talking to one of Julie’s former coworkers, a banker named Jeff. Jeff motions me over.
“When’s your birthday?” Jeff asks.
I look at Dad. His face is poker serious, but I can see it in his eyes. The glint. I know what I’m supposed to say. I’m supposed to say February 29.
My father has been telling Jeff one of his classics, namely, an elaborate story about how the entire Jacobs family shares the same birthday: leap year day. My dad has no doubt informed Jeff that his own birthday is February 29, 1940 (he was actually born on February 26), and that he met my mom at Cornell because they were both members of a club for students born on leap year day, and that she was born exactly four years after him (she was born on February 3). In the story, they got married and timed the conception of my sister and me so that we too were born on leap year day. Well, they had to do cesareans on us, but we still qualify as February 29 birthdays. So we were, he told Jeff, the only family in the United States with all four members born on leap year day. The odds of that, my father has calculated, are 4.6 trillion to one.
Jeff is no doubt conflicted. On the one hand, my father—a man he barely knows and who has no reason to lie to him—is telling this story without a hint of a smile and in remarkably convincing detail. On the other hand, it sure seems like a crock.
“What’s your birthday?” says Jeff again.
I just couldn’t do it. “March 20th.” I say.
I think this is my father’s greatest disappointment with me—that I don’t collude with him on his practical jokes. Those jokes are his favorite form of social interaction. He tells them at every opportunity in his low-decibel voice, two notches above a mumble.
Sometimes they can be simple, these jokes: he’ll introduce himself to strangers at a party by saying, “Hello, I’m Sam.” Or Harvey or Edgar or whatever name strikes him.
But those are just throwaways. My dad prefers the more complex ruses. When asked his occupation, my father will say, “I sell cemetery plots.” And then he’ll describe a nice space he can offer his conversation partner, something with a lovely view of a lake.
Then he might ask what his conversation partner does for a living. Whatever the answer, my dad will always feign ignorance about the firm.
“Time Inc.? Is that a clock company?”
“Harvard? Is that in Pennsylvania?”
No, the person will patiently explain. It’s a magazine company or it’s a college in Massachusetts, or what have you.
“Oh, yes,” my dad will say. “I think I’ve heard of it.”
And then there are the carefully premeditated jokes. My father is a teetotaler, but if he’s at a dinner party—preferably hosted by someone who doesn’t know him very well—and offered a drink, he’ll inevitably order a Yellow Lightning.
“Yellow Lightning?” the host will say.
“Yes, please.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not sure what a Yellow Lightning is.”
“Oh, it’s two parts lemon Kool-Aid and one part tequila.”
My dad has concocted the Yellow Lightning on the theory that no one in America has both necessary ingredients. The apologetic host will inevitably return from the kitchen to explain that they can’t find any lemon Kool-Aid in the cupboard.
“Well, nothing for me, then,” my father will sigh. “Thanks anyway.”
And then, at the far end, are those lies that are so byzantine, so full of twists and nuances, that I can never remember how they go, even though I’ve heard them recounted a dozen times. I know, for instance, he somehow convinced a fellow lawyer that her tip at a restaurant hadn’t been big enough, which caused the waiter to go postal and punch out all the eatery’s windows, which got him arrested and ruined his life. M&M’s were somehow involved. So were wooden boards. She called the restaurant to apologize, and the maitre d’, of course, was baffled.
As I said, I never play along with Dad’s games. Like when he introduces me as his son-in-law Willy, I just say, “Hi, I’m A.J.” He always looks a little crestfallen. I’m not sure why I do it. Maybe it’s because I know that I can’t compete with him in this arena. Or maybe it’s a remnant of my adolescent rebelliousness—my dad puts so much energy and thought into these fabrications, I just want to throw cold water on them.
But anyway, back to Jeff, who is shaking his head and chuckling politely. He knew something was fishy.
“Your dad almost had me there,” he says.
Well, I tell him, he can be always be sure of one thing: if a stranger says he was born any day between October 4 and October 15, 1582, he’s lying. Why? Because there were no such dates. That’s when most of the world switched to the Gregorian calendar, and they skipped those ten days. Never happened. Jeff makes that face that I’ve come to know well from other people: he purses his lips in a sort of half frown, raises his eyebrows, and nods his head. The universal symbol for “Isn’t that something.”
My dad and I are similar in that respect—we’ve each found a way to deal with our innate social awkwardness: he with his practical jokes, I with my facts. We’re quite a duo. We even look alike—lanky, brown-haired, bespectacled. And our combined conversational tactics have apparently given Jeff an appetite. He excuses himself to get some more eggplant roulade.
elf
Not the cute creatures we’ve been spoon-fed by the media. Elves in traditional folklore sat on people’s chests while they slept to give them bad dreams. They also stole human children and substituted deformed fairy children. Wonder if Santa is really a crack dealer.
embalming
I’m still worried about myself. Remember that problem I had with Aristotle? That I was more interested in how he chased young girls than in his metaphysics? I’m still suffering from that same handicap. I should be grappling with quasars or learning secrets behind the human genome, and yet, here I am, fourteen thousand entries in, and my favorite article so far is this one—the history of embalming. An
d yet I can’t help it. I find it fascinating.
First off, the embalming article has plenty of new uses for the basic items found right in my own kitchen. For instance, Alexander the Great’s body was returned from Babylon to Macedonia in a cask of honey. And when British admiral Lord Nelson’s body was shipped back to England from Trafalgar, it was pickled in brandy, much like Lee Marvin’s.
Second, since everyone likes easy-to-follow recipes, the Britannica offers this one, courtesy of Egyptian mummifiers: Remove the brain and intestines, wash in palm wine, and place in vases. Fill body cavity with perfumes. Stitch incisions and place body in potassium nitrate for seventy days. Remove. Wash and wrap in cotton bandages. Enjoy.
But my favorite part of the embalming entry was a man named Martin Van Butchell and his ingenious loophole. Before I get to that, a quick detour, because loopholes deserve a little attention of their own. I’ve been keeping track of loopholes, and have come to the conclusion that humans are a sleazy, slippery, tricky, untrustworthy species. The Bible says that men of the cloth cannot take up the sword. So what’d medieval bishops do? They took up the club. They figured, apparently, that it’s perfectly okay with Jesus to bash in the head of the enemy, as long as it’s not with a long metallic blade. Speaking of religious men, monks were banned from eating meat on Friday. Somehow—and there’s no explanation of the logic behind this one—the monks decided that baby rabbits were fish. And in colonial America, legend has it that the authorities outlawed nine-pin bowling. So what’d bowling fans do? They added another pin and invented ten-pin bowling. Voilà! That’s not illegal.
So as you can see, if there’s a law, rule, or order, someone’s going to find the loophole. Which brings us back to Martin Van Butchell. Van Butchell was a widower in 18th-century England. His wife—a wealthy lady—had specified in her will that Van Butchell could have access to her money only as long as her body was aboveground. I suppose she didn’t want him spending it on gold snuffboxes for his second wife. Problem is, when Mrs. Van Butchell died, her husband found perhaps the best loophole in the history of wills. He hired a man named John Hunter to perform one of the first arterial embalmings ever, then placed Mrs. Van Butchell’s fashionably dressed body in a glass-lidded case in a sitting room and held regular visiting hours. Her body remained, technically, aboveground, and he was free to frolic in her bank account.