The Know-It-All

by A. J. Jacobs

  Julie likes the Tajal people, but I’ve got to prefer the Kamchatka. The Kamatchka believe that dreams demand fullfillment, sort of a literal “make all your dreams come true” rule. Here’s the sentence that got me: “Among some natives of Kamchatka a man need only dream of a girl’s favour for her to owe him her sexual favours.”

  You have to admit, that’s a pretty interesting idea. In my case, this would have come in extremely handy in high school. I can imagine any of dozens of conversations like this one:

  “Hey Isabel, you busy after school? Well, you might have to cancel that. Because I kind of had a dream about you last night. So why don’t you come on over wearing a very tight meter maid’s outfit? And maybe bring some pancake batter. And why don’t you invite your sister Alison along. Sorry, but I did dream it. See you then!”

  Of course, there is a little downside to this fulfill-your-dreams idea, which the Iroquois Indians apparently got to see up close. They had a similar dream philosophy to the Kamatchka, and as the Britannica says, “One Indian was said to have to have dreamed that 10 friends dove into a hole in the ice of a lake and came up through another. When told of the dream, the friends duly enacted their roles in it, but unfortunately, only nine of them succeeded.”

  So maybe that’s not the best idea. Maybe I should focus instead on creative dreaming. The Britannica lists all sorts of people who have used their dreams to help them work. Samuel Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan” after composing it in his dream (he had fallen asleep while reading about the Mongol conqueror). Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, said that his writing was helped by “little people” in his dreams. A German chemist figured out the structure of benzene by dreaming of a snake with its tail in its mouth.

  Excellent. Sleep doesn’t have to be a waste of time. I’m going to use those eight hours to finish everything in my in-box. To quote Lorenzo de’ Medici, who was berated by a friend for coming to work late: “What I have dreamed in one hour is worth more than what you have done in four.”

  Over the next few nights, as I’m falling asleep, I promise to do some creative thinking. Namely, I decide to think about how I can turn my encyclopedia facts into a great poem or a new scientific theory. But the only dream I can remember involved Benedict Arnold retiring to a Florida condo, the kind with shuffleboard and bookmobiles. I think my “little people” need to be fired.

  snails

  They can actually jump quite rapidly, by a violent flexing of their foot. Good for snails—smash that slow-as-snail stereotype to bits.

  snorkel

  I’ve got an idea: maybe names of objects should be reassessed every fifty years or so. If they’re named after something evil, then they get a new name. The word “snorkel” came from the ventilating tube used by German submarines in World War II. That’s pretty evil. And “sandwich”—well, we all know about the earl of Sandwich, but I didn’t realize he was such a miscreant. He was a bribe taker, a backstabber, a gambling addict (the eponymous sandwich came from his snack while he was at the gaming table for twenty-four straight hours), an enemy of American independence, and a terrible tactician to boot. We should come up with an American name for it. Maybe after Robert Morris, underappreciated financier of the American Revolution. Give me a ham and cheese Morris.

  socioeconomic doctrines and reform movements

  My favorite reform movement leader is a Frenchman named Fourier, whom this Britannica entry matter-of-factly describes as “more than a little mad.” In Fourier’s utopian vision, humans would live in cooperative groups, called “phalanges,” where they would “cultivate cabbages in the morning and sing opera in the evening. … Love and passion would bind men together in a noncoercive order.”

  His anticapitalist plan called for not just social but natural and cosmological transformation: wild animals will turn into anti-lions and anti-tigers, serving mankind, and the ocean will be changed into lemonade. It’s a lovely vision and, of course, completely bonkers. In reality, as we all know, the ocean will be changed to tomato juice.

  Fourier didn’t convert me. I’m still a capitalist. But I will say that reading the Britannica has stirred up quasi-radical political feelings I haven’t experienced since those dreaded Marxist days in high school. For the last few years, I’ve been mostly successful in cocooning myself in the comfortable first world, with its abundance of chain stores and restaurants and catalogues. When most of your reading consists of celebrity autobiographies, you can go for long periods without confronting the horrors of famine. You shouldn’t underestimate my ability to come up with blinders. But here, every day, I read about countries where the average annual salary barely breaks double digits, where the life expectancy hovers in the forties, where thousands of children die of dysentery. I can’t help but grapple with this stuff again. I can’t help but realize the world needs saving. I should be more like my sister Beryl, who spent several years in Peru working in shanty-towns, sort of a one-woman Peace Corps. She’s got a powerful moral sense, and she don’t need no Britannica to awaken it.

  Solomon

  I knew he was wise. But I didn’t know that he was so busy. The biblical king had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines—sort of the Larry King of his day.

  sound

  That old question—if a tree falls in a forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?—hasn’t kept me up at night in a long time. But it’s still good to know the unequivocal answer: yes. Yes, it does make a sound, says the Britannica, because a sound is defined as a mechanical vibration traveling through the air or another medium at a frequency to which the human ear is sensitive. So a falling oak makes a pretty serious sound. Done.

  Spanish-American War

  Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill is a good yarn, as is William Randolph Hearst’s warmongering yellow journalism. But my favorite fact about the war is this one:

  “Spain declared war on the United States on April 24, followed by a U.S. declaration of war on the 25th, which was made retroactive to April 21.”

  Now that’s a handy trick—retroactive declarations. If my boss ever fires me from Esquire, I figure I’ll just say, “Well, that’s nice. But I quit, retroactive to last Tuesday. And I’m retroactively telling you to go screw yourself.”

  America’s retroactive declaration is a fine example of the impeccable logic I’ve noticed throughout the history of warfare. True, men in wartime sometimes act nobly—but more often they act like tantrum-throwing kids. Geopolitics reminds me of fourth grade, except that the titty twisters and swirlies more often result in death.

  To prove my point, I’ve been keeping a list of my favorite absurdist wars, wars worthy of a Joseph Heller novel. There’s the Pastry War. This was an epic clash between Mexico and France that began when a French pastry cook living in Mexico City claimed that Mexican army officers had damaged his restaurant. I feel bad for the men who died in this war. There’s just not a lot of dignity to losing your life over dessert, even if it’s a really good éclair. And then there’s the War of Jenkins’s Ear. This one—between England and Spain—started because a British sailor named Jenkins claimed his ear was cut off by the Spanish coast guard. He even presented the remains to Parliament. And that’s not to mention the Pig War, which occurred between the British and the Americans in 1859 in the San Juan Islands over a marauding British pig in an American potato patch. And finally, the Beer War, which had nothing to do with keggers or the classic tastes-great/less-filling debate, but happened in 15th-century Germany over a beer tax.

  speech disorder

  Julie’s cousin Andrew visited our apartment the other night. Andrew—a lawyer and film professor—is one of the best talkers I know, so his revelation that he was a star of the Columbia debate team made a lot of sense.

  “You should take them on, smart guy,” Andrew told me.

  This is not a bad idea. The debate team—that’d be a nice and rigorous test of my intelligence. If I can beat the vaunted Columbia team, who’s to say
I can’t take down my brother-in-law?

  Now I’m not exactly a veteran debater. The only official experience I’ve had was a particularly disastrous appearance on CNN’s Crossfire. The topic was “Are movie prices too high?” (apparently, it was a slow news day over at CNN). I had written an article on box office prices for Entertainment Weekly, so I was chosen to represent the point of view of the consumer. I knew the show was called Crossfire. I’d seen an episode or two, and was aware that it had a debate format. But somehow I thought, since the subject was the movies, this was going to be more along the lines of a fun and friendly chat. Maybe host John Sununu would tell us about his favorite Bond villain or quote lines from The Godfather.

  Instead, as soon as the red light appeared on the camera, Sununu began barking at me. The man seemed genuinely upset with me, as if I had just fondled his teenage daughter’s breasts or urinated on his BMW. Prices too high, are they? So you don’t like capitalism? You want the government to regulate movie prices? What the hell’s the matter with you, boy? I felt as if I was one of those shell-shocked shlubs at the McCarthy hearings. So how long have you been subscribing to Pravda, Mr. Jacobs?

  The producer in my ear tried to help. He’d say, “Now might be a good time to defend yourself.” Or, “Feel free to jump in.” Or, “Please, just say something.” With me on, it wasn’t so much crossfire as receive fire. When I did get around to responding, the main thrust of my argument was that the new movie Lost World—the sequel to Jurassic Park—cost $9 to see, but still kind of sucked. Socrates I wasn’t.

  When I got to work the next day, my colleagues couldn’t even muster a fake “You did great!” Instead, I got: “Are you all right?” “You looked stunned out there.” “At least you have your—well, I guess you don’t have that … um, okay, see you later.”

  The Columbia students seemed a lot more polite than John Sununu. When I called them up, dropped Andrew’s name, and explained my plan, they seemed to think it was a capital idea. I was told to show up on a Tuesday night at Columbia.

  I expected somehow a grand debating coliseum, but the actual debate is held in an institutional-looking room on the fourth floor of the student center. The debate’s topic is “The death penalty can be justified.” I am given a teammate—it’s a two-on-two affair—and we are assigned the pro-death-penalty side.

  The first debater is a tall senior named Evan, who steps up to the podium and delivers an excellent seven-minute speech. He enunciates, he projects, he talks about the Rousseauian social contract and cost-benefit analysis, about rehabilitation and individual rights and several other grand philosophical ideas. Damn, he’s smooth.

  “Hear, hear!” Evan’s teammate bangs his hand on the table. This is a clever trick, the “Hear, hear!” Very debaterly. Also, I learn the phrases “point of order” and “on this side of the house,” both useful ones. And best of all, if you stand up to make an objection, you must put your hand on top of your head. (This dates back to the British Parliament, where the members had to make sure their wigs didn’t fall off.) Throughout the debate, these college kids constantly pop up with their hands on their skulls to interrupt one another, reminding me of very articulate chimps.

  My teammate, Gary—who is a fast-talking, energetic senior—is a particularly good objector. When he rebuts points, he presses two of his fingers on his neck as if he’s taking a pulse. I’m not sure whether this is proper debate procedure, but it looks kind of cool. Gary makes some excellent points about how there needs to be another level of punishment besides prison. “Hear, hear!” I say, banging my hand on the table. “Hear, hear! Hear, hear!” I’ve got that down.

  But unfortunately, the rules of debate procedure say that I too must make an argument. When I get to the podium, I grab the sides of it, since that seems to me stern and decisive. I look down at a piece of paper on which I have scribbled some death penalty facts. I begin: “In Mesopotamia, under the Code of Hammurabi, the first legal code, bartenders could be executed for watering down the beer. Watering down the beer was a capital offense.”

  I pause. An interesting start—but I’m not really sure where to go with it. How about this: “Am I suggesting that we should execute bartenders on the Upper West Side for watering down cosmopolitans? Not necessarily. But I am saying that you can bet that the beers in Mesopotamia were pretty damn strong.”

  The crowd was very gracious, if a bit skeptical about my innovative logic. There were no “hear, hear’s,” but at least there were no vegetables hurled in my direction. There were even some polite chuckles.

  “Let’s turn to ancient Rome. In ancient Rome, the punishment for parricide—the murder of your father—was getting thrown in the river. But you didn’t just get thrown in the river alone. You were thrown in the river in a bag that also contained a dog, a rooster, a snake, and a gorilla.”

  I pause again, partly for dramatic effect, but mostly because I am trying to figure out what conclusion to draw. “What am I saying? Well, I’m not saying that we should throw modern-day criminals in the Hudson with a bunch of animals. But I am saying that Roman fathers felt pretty safe.”

  I’ve got more time to fill, so I look down at my scrawlings. “Let’s talk beheading,” I say. “In ancient times, beheading was seen as a privilege of the upper class. Then came the French invention of the guillotine. This made beheading much more practical. Now everyone from king to peasant could be decapitated. One man proposed a steam-powered guillotine to make beheading even easier. But that never got implemented.” Uh-oh. I seem to be wandering off point. I don’t help matters when I start in on the topic of benefit of clergy, the 16th-century capital punishment loophole. I pronounce studying Latin a good thing and thank the audience.

  I return quickly to my seat. In support of myself, I bang my hand on the table and say “Hear, hear! Hear, hear!”

  My opponent Max takes the stand and proceeds to pick apart my points without difficulty. He points out that Iraq is hardly a model of justice, so I shouldn’t be citing the Code of Hammurabai in glowing terms. He points out there are plenty of other ways to deter people besides throwing them into a river with a dog and a rooster. Then, he and Evan conclude with a flurry of facts about xenophobia, torture, and zero gain—all from the last chunk of the alphabet. Having fun at the old man’s expense. I have to be flattered.

  These kids were smart. Smarter than I was in college, and quite possibly smarter than I am now. At least they are better at forming a logical argument. That wasn’t so good. I had genuinely gone into this experiment hoping to dazzle them with some syllogisms and QEDs. I had the proper weapons and ammunition, but I didn’t know how to aim and fire, so I ended up spraying a bunch of cannonballs into the water. Still, at least I made a loud bang. And it sure was better than my Ishtar of a CNN debate.

  spice trade

  I promise myself not to take cinnamon Pop-Tarts for granted. Or Big Red gum or Quaker Oats cinnamon-and-spice-flavored oatmeal. As a 21st-century American—an upper-middle-class New Yorker with massive chain stores dotting my neighborhood—I live in a place and time of huge bounty. I live in a consumer culture where everything is available—probably cinnamon-flavored reindeer sausage, if I look hard enough on eBay. I’ve got to appreciate this, I decide. The encyclopedia makes that clear.

  Because four hundred years ago, I’d have had to spend my monthly salary to get a pinch of cinnamon. The spice trade, I learn, was a big morass of deceit and corruption, sort of like the drug trade nowadays. One of its prized substances was cinnamon, which was more valuable than gold. To discourage competitors, spice traders spread tales that cinnamon grew in deep glens infested with poisonous snakes. They also said that the cassia spice grew in shallow lakes guarded by winged animals.

  If I put my cinnamon into a mug of hot chocolate, I promise not to take the chocolate for granted either. The conquistador Cortés introduced chocolate to Spain—but Spain kept it secret from the rest of Europe for more than a hundred years. So that’s it. No more entitlement. I p
ledge to appreciate chocolate and cinnamon as I’ve never appreciated them before.

  sporting record

  Sixty-six solid pages on the topic of sporting record. There are forty-five sports covered, from archery to yachting—and let me tell you, this is a tough read, an endless stream of names and scores and dates.

  You want to know who was the Tiger Woods of badminton in the 1920s? That would be J. F. Devlin of Ireland, a master of the shuttlecock. The winner of baseball’s first World Series in 1903? The Boston Pilgrims. Maybe if the Red Sox renamed themselves the Pilgrims, they’d break their little curse. The Canadian Football League, I notice, has a team called the Ottawa Rough Riders as well as a team called the Saskatchewan Roughriders, which could be a record of its own for lack of imagination.

  I do like reading the names of champion horses. Like Gay Crusader from 1917. Or Pope from 1809. Or the strangely modern-sounding Skyscraper, which took a British Derby title in 1789. It reminds me of the time, back when I was a know-it-all wiseacre kid, that my grandfather bought a share in a racehorse. I was particularly excited about the prospect of naming the horse. I submitted a long list of potential names to my grandfather—all of which were designed to trip up the announcer and confuse anyone listening to the race on radio. Names like “Three Furlongs” and “Muddy Conditions” and “By a Nose”—that kind of thing—so that the announcer would have to say, “It looks like By a Nose by a nose.” Looking back, it’s remarkable what a jackass I was. Thankfully, my family overruled me.

  sports

  More ammunition for those dreaded sports conversations at work: The first basketball game—played with a soccer ball and peach baskets—took place in 1891 in Springfield, Massachusetts. The score was 1–0, thanks to a midcourt basket by William R. Chase. I assume Chase immediately got a multihundred-dollar cream soda endorsement.