The Know-It-All

by A. J. Jacobs

3. Mensans love grand theories. One fiftyish woman explained to me her Bonsai Tree Theory of Human Nature. “Plato has his cave. I have my bonsai tree.” I can’t repeat her theory here since I have no idea what she was talking about, but it’s apparently the equivalent of Einstein’s E = mc2 for human behavior.

  I decide to continue my own study of human behavior in the Mensan game room, which is down the hall in something called the Verrazano Room. Here I find an impressive stack of games: Scrabble, Boggle, Taboo. You name it, they got it. I watch a game where a gray-haired man is trying to get his teammates to guess a word.

  “It’s a space between two things,” he says.

  “Interstitial!” shouts a woman.

  “No,” he says. “A space between two things.”

  “Interstices!” she tries again. “Interstitial! Interstices!”

  “No!” he says.

  Time’s up. The word was “gap.” This makes me happy for some reason. This woman is throwing out four-syllable Latinate words, and the answer is the beautifully simple “gap.” Some people, I conclude, try way too hard to be smart.

  In another corner of the game room, two Mensans have taken a break from gaming to engage in what seems to be a fierce conversation. I drift over to eavesdrop. Now, I’m not out to reinforce stereotypes here, so I wish I could report that the argument was about post-Clintonian foreign policy or the relative merits of Mozart and Tchaikovsky. But the actual topic of their debate was Star Trek: The Next Generation. Specifically, Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

  MENSAN ONE: I just don’t understand why Picard is bald.

  MENSAN TWO: What’s the problem?

  MENSAN ONE: Because wouldn’t they have a cure for baldness by the twenty-second century?

  MENSAN TWO: Yes, they would.

  MENSAN ONE: So why is he bald?

  MENSAN TWO: Because it’s a personal style choice. He chooses to be bald.

  MENSAN ONE: I still think it’s strange.

  Since I’m not a Trekkie, and no one’s inviting me to join their game, I wander back to the Harbor Room to see if I can score another pizza slice. I sit down at a table with two men, both of whom have unorthodox hair. The topic, I’m happy to hear, isn’t Star Trek. It’s calculators.

  They compare notes on what words you can spell if you punch in the right numbers and turn the calculators upside down—“Shell Oil”, “hello”, “hell”, et cetera—before one of them takes it to the next level.

  “You know what I like to do?” says the guy with the mini pompadour. “I like to get a calculator and ask for the square root of negative one and see what the calculator does.”

  “What happens?” asks the other guy, who has a beard that is creeping north of the cheekbones and heading for his forehead.

  “Depends on the calculator. If it’s a good one—over twenty dollars—it’ll say it’s an error. If it’s under twenty dollars, it has a nervous breakdown.”

  The bearded guy is impressed. That’s good calculator information. For the next twenty minutes, I sit quietly as the conversation turns to 20th-century physics. They talk confidently about quanta, wavicles, Max Planck, superstrings, alternate universes, quarks, the double slit experiment. I want to jump in—I know enough physics from my Britannica to keep up—but they never glance my way. I feel locked out.

  A brunette woman sits down next to me. Fresh meat. She has just come from the game room.

  “Ah, the Verrazano Room,” I say. “Giovanni Verrazano.”

  “Yup,” she says.

  “You know, he discovered the Hudson River before Henry Hudson.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “On top of that, Henry Hudson was a real bastard. He was so stingy, he took back a gift from a crew member, which led to an uprising. His crew mutinied him. Sent him off to die in a rowboat. So in my opinion, it should be called the Verrazano River, not the Hudson River.”

  “I hadn’t heard that before,” says my table mate.

  Ha! I look over at the two calculator jocks, hoping they’re hearing my knowledge. No acknowledgment. They’re still nattering on about Neils Bohr. As for the woman, she’s looking around for escape routes. I have succeeded in boring a Mensan.

  Lucky for her, someone’s just announced that the trivia contest will be starting momentarily in Parlor 902. I’m there. Here, a perfect chance to show off my Britannica-earned knowledge.

  Parlor 902 is chock-full of Mensans sprawled on the couch, sitting on the floor, and passing around pencils and paper. “Does everyone have a pencil?” asks the emcee. He looks like he could be an up-and-coming orthodontist in Great Neck—but because job questions are taboo, I’ll never know. “Everyone have a pencil?”

  Everyone does have a pencil. And so we begin. I’ll say this for the Mensan quiz: it’s damn hard. A sample question: “Whose last words were ‘The world has lost a great artist’?” (Nero, I would learn later.) Another: “What is the meaning of the mnemonic ‘Oh be a fine girl kiss me right now sweety’?” (The spectral class of stars.) I would be freaking out about my lack of intelligence if the rest of the geniuses weren’t complaining so loudly. “Who the hell wrote these questions!” demanded a woman in the corner who looked to be about the size of a spectral star class K.

  If not for the Britannica, I would have gotten maybe one question out of seventeen. But thanks to my diligent reading, I scored a respectable 4.5 out of seventeen, which I hoped might just be enough to give me the victory (the half point came from knowing that Ben Franklin endorsed the turkey as the national bird, though not knowing it was because he considered the eagle “cowardly”).

  One of my proudest quiz moments was knowing the origin of the phrase “dog days of summer.” (It derives from the ancient belief that the Dog Star, Sirius, gives off the heat of a second sun, so when it’s rising it causes the weather to be particularly hot.) But I also knew the punishment inflicted on Abelard: castration.

  “I don’t even know who Abelard was,” says the emcee, as he reads the answer. The crowd murmurs and shakes their heads.

  “He was an 11th-century Christian theologian,” I say. This should have been my big moment—giving a history lesson to a bunch of Mensans who know less than me. But for some reason—acoustics, my tendency to mumble, a combination—no one seemed to hear me.

  I say it again. “He was an 11th-century Christian theologian!” Again, nothing.

  The emcee is already on to the next question: “The original definition of pedagogue is—”

  “HE’S AN 11TH-CENTURY CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIAN!” Not only is my timing off, but the Mensans can sense the anger and bitterness in my voice. They are frightened. The emcee pauses and makes a mental note to put me on the handle-with-care list, right next to the guy who didn’t clean up the crap of his Bernese mountain dog. Then he continued.

  In the end, I lose to a guy who scored seven. He is a cocky dweeb with a haircut in the shape of a wedge and the posture of a proboscis monkey. He doesn’t even acknowledge my respectable 4.5.

  Soon after, I find myself on the Staten Island ferry, returning to my life on Manhattan with non-Mensans. I am in a sour mood, and not just because I’ve lost the genius trivia contest. After a day of intensive Mensa, I feel annoyed at the club for being so elitist and self-congratulatory—and angry at myself for so desperately wanting to be a part of it. That feeling, in turn, is tempered by pity, seeing that many of these people are even more socially maladjusted than I am, and definitely more in need of career counseling. That is then colored by bitterness, since they’d probably pity me if they knew that I sneaked in on my SAT scores.

  The convention, I decide, brought out an unattractive side of me. I’m thinking in particular of my final few minutes, when a fellow Mensan and I were approached by a guy from New Hampshire who happened to be staying at the hotel and who had a question for us.

  “You guys with that Mesna?” he asked.

  “Yes, Mensa,” said my fellow genius.

  “Okay, I have a serious question for you:
what is the fancy name for an outhouse?”

  “Water closet?” I offered up.

  “No, it wasn’t that. It begins with P. I heard an interview with this archaeologist on the radio. He digs up old outhouses, and they used this word.”

  “Privy,” my fellow genius said.

  “Yes! That’s it!” said the New Hampshire man.

  “That’s why they call it the privy council in governments,” the genius said, following the Mensa bylaw that all conversations must include a pun.

  The New Hampshire man was satisfied and wandered off, at which point my fellow Mensan and I laughed and shook our superior heads. Oh, the regular people. Aren’t they silly with their lack of synonyms for plumbing? Yes, maybe. But at least they don’t need stickers to decide whether or not to hug.

  intercourse

  Julie and I, in our quest to get pregnant, are having an awful lot of sex. The rumor is that sex is supposed to be fun, but we’ve long since passed that phase. We have purposeful sex. For us, sex is about as entertaining as taking the crosstown bus—it’s merely a vehicle to take us where we want to go. This doesn’t seem fair. Why can’t there be a more even distribution of sex throughout a man’s life? Why couldn’t I have had some of this sex when I really needed it, like during some dry stretches as a single man in my twenties? Instead, it’s all clumped up in my mid-thirties, like a steep bell curve, proving too much of a good thing is exhausting. At times, I wish Julie were like a queen bee, which has sex only once in her life, but stores the sperm in a pouch for use throughout the next five years.

  Tonight, though, I’m going to put some spice back into our sex life. Julie is in bed already, reading her novel. At about ten-thirty, I lay down my Britannica and come into the bedroom. I stand at the foot of the bed and start stomping my feet—left, right, left, right—then pointing my head at the ceiling. Julie looks up from her book.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “Are you getting turned on?” I ask.

  “Oh, I’m hot.”

  I stomp my left, then right, foot again. “It’s the mating dance of the blue-footed booby. It’s called sky pointing. I thought you’d like it.”

  “Yes, it’s extremely arousing.”

  “Perhaps you’d prefer a visible dung heap, as left by rabbits to indicate they’re ready to mate?”

  “Uh, how about you just come here and get me pregnant.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I climb into bed and we get down to business. Julie stops kissing me for a second, pulling her head back.

  “Are you thinking about the Britannica?” she asks.

  “No,” I say. Which is a lie. Because I am thinking about it. I can’t help it. Even in this, the least cerebral of pursuits—not counting the Jim Belushi show—I’m mulling over my new knowledge. I’m thinking about how damselflies mate in the air and amphibians have sperm packets and female button quails sleep around. I’m thinking about how engaged couples in Scotland were allowed in the same bed—but were sewn up in separate sleeping bags (the practice is called bundling). I’m thinking how male and female bony fish have sex organs oriented either to the right or left and that only opposite-oriented individuals can mate and that it’d be really sad if a male bony fish with a left-oriented penis fell in love with a female bony fish with a left-oriented vagina.

  Julie returns to kissing me. She knows I’m lying, but she’s come to accept it.

  Iraq

  It’s clearer and clearer that we’re going to war with Iraq. I half expect our TV Guide to give a time and day so we can program our TiVo to record it.

  I’m extraordinarily stressed out about it. It’s going to be ugly. I said over drinks with my colleagues the other night that I fear this war will open a Pandora’s box of terrorism. (Though I wanted to say Pandora’s jar; that’s what the EB calls it, a jar, not a box, but I thought they’d look at me funny, so I stuck with box.)

  I spend my little free time worrying and clicking on Yahoo! to check the terror alert level, and figuring out ways to avoid taking the subway.

  Julie tells me to stop wasting my time. The worrying doesn’t help anyone. She tells me I could either sign up for the marines or else join one of those protests where they throw Dumpsters through McDonald’s windows. Then at least I’d be doing something. But fretting about terrorism doesn’t help anybody. She’s right, and I know it, but still I can’t stop. I’m addicted to worry.

  I was hoping the EB would help me come up with a clear solution for the Iraq crisis—or at the least clarify my opinion about the war. But that’s just not happening. I read the twenty-five-page Macropaedia article about Iraq just now. I know a lot about those 167,975 square miles in the eastern Arab world—at least until the Ebbinghaus curve kicks in. I know it was called Mesopotamia until the 7th century. I know that aside from oil, date palms are its major export. That Baghdad has red double-decker buses, a holdover from the British occupation. I know there was a fertilizer shortage until 2000. That there’s a big monument to Ali Baba’s housekeeper in Baghdad. I know the Tigris and Euphrates formed one of the early cradles of civilization—which, I figure, might make for some nice closure; the world started there and might end there. And I have some historical perspective on the war: I know that this land has been sacked just about every other year for the last eight hundred years. Oh, it’s Tuesday, time for another upheaval in Iraq. I know, most pertinently, about the Christian-Islamic feud that stretches back before the Crusades.

  But how should we deal with Saddam? That I don’t know. Frankly, I’m not sure what I was expecting. Was I expecting the Britannica to finish the Iraq entry by saying, “Plus, the United States should not go to war with Iraq because it would be a disaster”? Or, “In conclusion, nuke ’em”? Still, I’m disappointed. I suppose it goes back to something I was reading about in the ethics entry. There is a gap between “is” and “ought.” The facts are on one side of the canyon. And there, on the other side, across the river, are your ethical options. No logical syllogism can bridge the two.

  The only thing I can say for sure is this: we should all go back to the type of warfare practiced by many Native Americans—counting coup. Back then, warfare was sort of an elaborate game of tag. The touching of one’s enemy was considered the greatest coup. Not scalping, not murder, but touching them. That I’d like to see. General Tommy Franks going into Baghdad, poking Saddam in the ribs, then running away laughing victoriously.

  irony

  The French horn is from Germany. The Great Dane has no connection to Denmark. Cold-blooded animals often have warmer blood than warm-blooded animals. Softwood is often harder than hardwood. Catgut is made from sheepgut. Caesar was not born by cesarean section. A cold is not caused by the cold (Ben Franklin pointed this out). Death Valley is teeming with life (more than two hundred types of birds, several types of fish, and so on). Heinz has several hundred varieties, not its advertised fifty-seven. Starfish are not fish. The electric eel is not an eel. The anomalous Zeeman effect in atomic physics is more common than the regular old Zeeman effect.

  These are all things I’ve been keeping in my little “Ironic Facts” file on my computer. Irony is named for “the Greek comic character Eiron, a clever underdog, who by his wit repeatedly triumphs over the boastful character of Alazon.” But the stuff above is a different kind of irony. These ironies are a function of our ridiculously imprecise language. I feel we need someone to come in and clean it all up, a Rudy Giuliani of English who would crack down on all lazy, loitering, leftover-from-other-eras words. But that’ll never happen. As I learned in Fahrenheit, the inertia of bad ideas is a powerful force.

  J

  Jackson, Reggie

  REGINALD MARTINEZ JACKSON of Wyncote, Pennsylvania. My hero. Back when I was a Yankees-obsessed prepubescent, I loved my Reggie Jackson. I had my Reggie posters, knew my Reggie stats, ate my Reggie candy bars, even though they tasted like fourth-rate Snickers and looked like a clump of guano from the Peruvian cormorant (an effectiv
e fertilizer).

  I’m glad to see the Britannica has written him up, since my other favorite Yankee—Bucky Dent—didn’t rate a mention. It’s a joy to read about Reggie in these illustrious, oversized pages and how he played for Arizona State, joined the A’s, excelled as a base runner, and in the momentous year of 1977, signed a five-year contract with the New York Yankees and smacked a record three home runs in a World Series game.

  I remember that World Series game. I was there. This is the only piece of history in the encyclopedia that I actually got to witness live and in person. I wasn’t at the Battle of Waterloo. I missed the Crusades. But I did see Reggie Jackson play that epic sixth game of the 1977 World Series at Yankee Stadium. Well, almost.

  Here’s what happened. When I was nine, Dad somehow scored tickets to the big game. My parents were no sports fans, but they wanted to give me an all-American childhood, so once in a while they’d suck it up and take me to the stadium. So there I was, with my mitt on my left hand, my Yankees yearbook on my lap, gloriously giddy.

  My hero, Reggie, steps up to the plate in the fourth inning, and bam, hits a home run. Sails it over the right field wall. Awesome. The very next inning, crack! Another home run. Unbelievable. I’m in heaven. Two home runs! And then—Dad decided it was time to leave and beat the traffic. We wouldn’t want to be jammed into a subway with all the other people, right?

  “But Dad, what if Reggie hits another home run?”

  “Oh, he won’t,” Dad assured me, as he tugged me out of the packed stands.

  We were on the subway platform when we heard it—a stadium-shaking roar from the crowd. A roar like I’d never heard before. Reggie had hit his third home run. History had been made. People would be talking about that homer forever. And I would not be speaking to Dad for several days. Though we did have the subway all to ourselves, which was nice.

  My attendance at two-thirds of this historical event is in one sense disappointing—like leaving Iwo Jima right before the flag was planted. But it also makes makes me think that I had an impact, ever so slight, on the Britannica. If I hadn’t been cheering so dutifully in the stands, Reggie might not have hit those two home runs. The third I can’t take credit for, as we know.