A.J. Jacobs Omnibus: The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically, My Life as an Experiment

by A. J. Jacobs

  And yet just as I was feeling pathetic and totally un-phat, I read the Britannica’s assertion that Public Enemy and Wu-Tang Clan “were among the popular purveyors of rap during the 1980s and 1990s.” Purveyors of rap? Now that’s got to be the whitest phrase I’ve ever read. Yo, what up, dawg? Just hanging with my posse, drinking my Chivas, purveying some rap.

  Hogan, Ben

  Hogan was the most famous golfer from the forties. The Britannica says: “His exceptional will enabled him to play winning golf after an automobile accident in which he was injured so severely that he was not expected to walk again.”

  What a sentence.

  I need this sentence. I need some positive overcoming-hurdles stories. I’ve got hurdles aplenty in my own life, the tallest of which seems to be whatever is preventing Julie and me from getting pregnant. We try not to talk about it too much, but it’s always there, permeating our apartment. The apartment has three bedrooms, one for us and two for the kids that don’t exist. So those empty rooms are an ever-present and expensive reminder of our infertility. Oh, and then there’s that little apocalypse hanging over our head: it looks like we’re going to war with Iraq, and God knows what’s going to happen.

  So thank the Lord for Ben Hogan and his exceptional will. And thank the Lord for all his fellow overcomers. There are heaps of dismaying stuff in these volumes, but there are also these incredibly inspiring stories compressed down to a paragraph or a single sentence. It’s like watching a particularly sappy Robin Williams movie in ten seconds.

  The great Greek orator Demosthenes suffered from a speech defect—he stammered and had terrible pronunciation—but he overcame it by speaking with pebbles in his mouth. John Fielding—one of the founders of the London police—was blind but could identify three thousand thieves by their voices, sort of a primitive but effective fingerprinting system. It’s like chicken soup for the soul, the microwave version. Francis Ford Coppola got interested in directing when he was laid up with polio and put on puppet shows for himself. Chester Carlson, inventor of the Xerox machine, was turned down by more than twenty companies before he finally sold it. And on and on. Did you know that Che Guevara had asthma? So you shouldn’t let wheezing stop you from leading a violent revolution.

  I’ve got to have exceptional will like Ben Hogan. No matter what, Julie and I are going to have a child—and if we can’t biologically, then we’ll battle through the paperwork and adopt one.

  Holland Tunnel

  Here, some good, calming information. One less thing to worry about. The Holland Tunnel—which connects Manhattan and New Jersey and which, by the way, was not named for the country, but for an engineer, Clifford Holland—has a remarkable ventilation system. It refreshes all the air in the tunnel in ninety seconds. Remember my mortal fear of carbon-monoxide-induced brain damage? Well, it still lingers, twenty years later, and I tense up whenever we drive through a tunnel. So this information is good stuff.

  Hollywood

  This was founded by a man named Horace Wilcox, “a prohibitionist who envisioned it a community based on his sober religious principles.” Well, I know that a lot of Hollywood types are in AA. But other than that, Mr. Wilcox would probably not be overjoyed.

  hoop skirts

  In the 18th century, some hoop skirts were an astounding eighteen feet wide. And satirists talked of hoop skirts that were twenty-four feet wide. Frankly, I think those satirists need a little punching up. Adding six feet just doesn’t do it for me. Maybe they could have gone with twenty-eight or twenty-nine feet. Then they’d be funny.

  Hoover, Herbert

  We were walking along Columbus Avenue, and I asked Julie to quiz me today, to see how my memory was doing. She gave me Gibraltar. I had a good response: it’s the only place in Europe to have wild monkeys. She nodded her head, sort of impressed. She asked me about Herbert Hoover. I replied he was president—and an orphan. Raised by an uncle. She asked me about Halifax. This one was a little foggier.

  “It’s a town in England,” I say.

  “Noooo,” she says. She looks at me, concerned.

  “Is it one of the Carolinas? A town in North or South Carolina?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know. Where is it?”

  “It’s a town in Canada. You didn’t know that?”

  Oh, yes. I knew that, I tell her.

  When I got home, I looked up Halifax. There were three separate entries for Halifax. There’s a Halifax, England; a Halifax, North Carolina; and a Halifax, Canada. I had just filled my brain up with the two piddling Halifaxes and neglected the big Halifax, the one everyone knows. My mind is working in strange ways.

  hummingbird

  Hummingbirds beat their wings up to eighty times a second, which is astounding. But even more astounding: they are extremely territorial, and have been known to chase off crows, hawks, and even humans. They’ve got what my father’s mother called chutzpah. These birds the size of grapes take on humans—and win. An inspiration to tiny organisms everywhere, including my wife’s favorite actor.

  humor

  You had to be there. That is what I’ve learned from the history of humor. If you don’t believe me, try to tell this Japanese joke from the 1700s in the locker room: “The boss of the monkeys orders his one thousand monkey followers to get the moon that’s reflected in the water. They all try and fail. Finally, one of the monkeys gets the moon in the water and respectfully offers it to the boss. ‘This is what you asked for,’ he says. The boss is delighted and says, ‘What an exploit! You have distinguished yourself!’ The monkey then asks, ‘By the way, Master, what are you going to do with the moon from the water?’ And the master says, ‘Well, yes…I didn’t think of that.’ ”

  I tried it on my fellow Esquire editors Andy and Brendan, who coined a new name for me: the Great Conversation Stopper.

  hunting

  People sure do love to kill animals. Kings of Central European countries seemed especially fond of the practice. The Britannica says that John George II the ruler of Saxony in the 17th century, killed an astonishing total of 42,649 red deer. “He refused the crown of Bohemia not for political reasons but because Bohemian stags were smaller than Saxon ones”—and he erected a fence between Saxony and Bohemia to keep out those stunted Bohemian mammals. Louis XV of France was another fan of the chase: in 1726, he spent a total of 276 days hunting. He worked fewer days than George W. Bush.

  I’ve never been a fan of hunting myself—for one thing, I don’t like loud noises or sports that require a lot of equipment. Also I try to avoid gutting mammal innards in my leisure time.

  But in my bleaker moments, I feel like hunting is the most appropriate metaphor for my quest. I’m worried I’m not much better than John of Saxony. I’m just trying to fill my wall with the stuffed heads of deer and lions and bears, though in my case, my wall would be filled with facts about lions and bears (e.g., bears are not true hibernators—their body temperature doesn’t dive and they are easily awakened. You want true hibernators, think bats and hedgehogs and squirrels.) Is this all a macho accumulation?

  hurling

  My friend Jamie has invited me to come with him to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. This is an invitation I wasn’t expecting. I met Jamie years ago—he was my editor at Entertainment Weekly—and I thought I knew his secrets. I knew he had seen and enjoyed the Spice Girls movie. I knew he had a handful of stalkers—he writes a funny sex column for a local magazine that inspires overzealous fans. I even knew he liked atonal jazz. But his crossword puzzle hobby—that was new to me.

  Jamie tells me he’s been a fan for a long time. He’s spent dozens of Saturday nights at home deciphering clues. “It’s easier than meeting people,” he tells me, “and more enjoyable.” (He pretends to be a misanthrope.)

  I decide to accept his invitation. I’m no crossword expert. I’ve sampled maybe three in my life—nothing against them, I just never got in the habit, the same way I never got interested in racquetball or methamphetamin
es. But I did have that glorious victory with Julie and Frederick Austerlitz, so I figure this will be an excellent test of newly acquired knowledge. I’ll teach these pencil-pushing dorks a thing or two.

  On Saturday morning, Jamie and I take the 8:10 train up to Stamford, Connecticut, and it is then that I began to realize I am in some serious trouble. Jamie has brought me a copy of the Saturday New York Times crossword, and I am having difficulty with a couple of clues. Namely, 1-through 57-Across and 1-through 53-Down. I look at Jamie, who is sitting next me, confidently scribbling away.

  “I have a question about strategy,” I say.

  “Yes?”

  “How do you know which letters to put in which boxes?”

  Jamie isn’t quite sure how to answer that. And I’m not sure what I’m saying. I just know that my knowledge—vast as it is—does not include 29-Down: “Character in Chesterton’s ‘What’s Wrong with the World.’ ” At least I eventually figure out 32-Down: “Relative of hurling.” Since I recently read about the Irish stick-and-ball sport, I deduce the answer is lacrosse.

  When we get to the Stamford Marriot, we join four hundred other crossword competitors milling about the lobby and coffee shop. The first thing that impresses me is the variety of crossword puzzle accessories. There are crossword ties, crossword tote bags, crossword notebooks, crossword scarves, and crossword T-shirts (“Real Women Use Pen”). One particularly gung ho competitor is wearing a crossword bandanna around his head, Deer Hunter–style. This man would later threaten to poke his pencil into Jamie’s neck because Jamie was taking too long at the pencil sharpener. He pretended to be kidding, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t. I noticed he didn’t blink very much.

  The only other people in the hotel lobby are, oddly enough, a team of high school lacrosse players in town for a big match. They are looking at the crossword crowd with a mixture of fear and bewilderment.

  “Good luck with your ‘relative of hurling’!” I shout across the room. Jamie and I giggle—that’s the only word to describe it—then realize that we are a couple of six-letter words beginning with L and ending with O-S-E-R-S.

  We end up talking shop with a woman who looks remarkably like Rhea Pearlman. Apparently we missed some good puzzling last night. (The competitors love to use “puzzle” as a verb. Also, “puzzler” is a very popular noun, as in “I’m just a leisure puzzler.”) The head of the French crossword puzzle society had given a hilarious post-dinner lecture on French puzzling. He had told them that French tournaments are held only in towns with two letters in the name. Jamie and I smile blankly.

  “Because two-letter towns show up a lot in French crosswords,” she says, annoyed at our thickness.

  “Ohhh,” we say.

  She walks away in search of smarter people. But no matter, there are plenty of other puzzlers to mingle with. We meet a New York Times puzzle constructor—“constructor,” I learn, is the preferred term—who tells us it’s not an easy life. The complaints kill him. He had a clue that said “24 hours” and the answer was “rotation,” as in the rotation of the earth. Someone wrote an angry letter pointing out that, actually, the rotation of the earth is just 23 hours and 56 minutes and 9 seconds, because the earth is simultaneously revolving around the sun.

  As I try to process this, we are approached by a balding, bespectacled man whose jacket is blanketed with buttons. One says, “I used to procrastinate but now…”, another says, “Knowledge Is Power. Power Corrupts. Study Hard and Be Evil.” He’s not a competitor, just here to observe and volunteer as a proctor.

  We ask why he decided not to compete.

  “I don’t do crosswords,” he informs us in a brisk staccato. “At least not the American kind. They aren’t difficult enough in an interesting way. I prefer the British cryptic.”

  The British cryptic?

  Well, he just happens to have one with him. He unfolds the paper and shows it to us: “Okay, the clue is ‘Late bloomer, finally flown, in back.’ Aster is a flower that’s a late bloomer. N is the last letter of ‘finally flown.’ And a stern is in back. So the answer is ‘astern’.”

  He looks at us expectantly, as if we should burst out laughing and shake our heads in wonder. First Benny Hill, now this! Those Brits are brilliant.

  Luckily, before we have to respond, we are told the first of several tournament puzzles is about to start.

  “Let’s hit the grids!” says Jamie.

  “Let’s cruciverb it up!” I respond.

  We realize that we might just have made the button-wearing cryptic guy look cool by comparison. But that’s okay—we are ready. We file into the grand ballroom and sit at a long table in the front, placing our arsenal of Sanford American pencils carefully in front of us. I’m trying to feel cocky, hoping my debacle on the train was some sort of weird anomaly. After all, I know 28 percent of all knowledge.

  The director of the tournament—the velvet-voiced, mustachioed Will Shortz, the man who edits the New York Times crossword puzzle and who, to this crowd, is cooler than Lou Reed—tells us that we will be judged on speed and accuracy. We have fifteen minutes. Now puzzle!

  Okay, here’s one I know: “Radar screen indicator” is a blip. B-L-I-P. Let’s see, let’s see. “Roswell sightings” are U-F-O-S. Okay. Let’s see. At which point I notice that hands start shooting up all over the ballroom. That means the person attached to the hand is finished with the crossword. Who are these people? A couple of minutes later Jamie slams down his pencil and raises his hand. Shit! After what seems like significantly less than fifteen minutes, Will Shortz instructs those who haven’t finished to put their pencils down. I look at all the white boxes in my unfinished puzzle. A lot of white. As much white as the Vostok Station in Antarctica. This is bad. I’m not sure why the Britannica is failing me, but I’m not pleased.

  The second puzzle is even more of a disaster. What the hell is the river to the Bristol Channel? One of Jupiter’s smallest moons? I’m blanking. Must be because I’m not up to the Js. I’ve finished barely a third of puzzle when Will Shortz tells us with his gentle, pediatrician-like voice that time’s up.

  I decide I’m going to blame my failure on the woman next to me and her extremely distracting and persistent cough. It wasn’t just your average cough, it was a deep gurgling cough involving lots of viscous fluid and several internal organs. How can I puzzle with that around me? Jamie and I agree there should be a separate section for consumptives.

  The third puzzle is a little better, the fourth is about the same, but the fifth—with its “ ‘Uncle Vanya’ character” and “Former Bud Grace comic strip”—plunges me into a black mood. I should have known it would be bad: when the name of the constructor was announced, the crowd let out a respectful “oooh.”

  So what went wrong? Why was my crossword puzzle adventure such an aggressive failure? If anyone could give me an insight, it would be John Delfin. John is the Tiger Woods of the puzzle set, a seven-time champ and the winner of the tournament in which I placed an impressive 510 out of 525. He’s polished off a Monday New York Times puzzle in two minutes flat. He’s done a Sunday one in six minutes. He owns fifteen dictionaries.

  John is disturbingly ungeeky. He seems perfectly socially adept, looks a bit like Paul Simon, and makes his living as a pianist. And instead of gloating, he’s graciously comforting about my loss.

  “Crossword is a language,” he tells me. “And once you learn that language, you’ll be able to speak it fluently.”

  The point is, general knowledge rarely comes in handy in crosswords. You need a very specialized knowledge. Namely, you need to know nouns of about four letters with a high percentage of vowels. You need rivers named Aere or Uele. You need the African antelope called an eland. You need to know all your Aidas and Oonas and Ermas—whether it’s Erma Bombeck or Erma Franklin (Arethra’s sister). So I may know almost everything in A–I, I just have a little weakness in vowel-heavy nouns. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. And it’s true—generally, I’m not a fan of vowels, the
y seem so soft. Give me a good hard consonant. I long for the days when alphabets—like the Etruscans’—had no vowels at all.

  I’m ready to take the train home with my lepton-sized shred of dignity intact, but Jamie wants to stay for a night of word games—namely, a crossword-puzzle-themed version of the TV show Family Feud. Somehow I agree, somehow my name is chosen from a hat, and somehow I find myself onstage in the grand ballroom in front of four hundred competitive puzzlers. I’m a member of the Cross family and am facing off against the Downey family. Jamie, the lucky bastard, just gets to sit in the audience.

  The question is, “Name another type of puzzle that crossword puzzlers enjoy.” My teammates do admirably—they guess anagrams and find-a-word, both of which are correct. It’s my turn now. The host repeats the question. The pressure’s on, my team is counting on me—and my mind is a blank. Nothing. Blank as the upper right corner of my answer sheet to puzzle three. I feel I’ve got to say something. So I lean into the microphone and give my answer: “Puzzles involving card games.”

  Huh. Puzzles involving card games. I’m not even sure what that means and I’m the one who said it. The host looks at me as if I’d just said something in the rare Andamanese language (which, by the way, has words for only two numbers—one and more than one). I turn around to gauge the reaction of the crowd. Four hundred faces of confusion and concern. They’re all wondering why I didn’t say “Jumble” or “Cryptics”—or anything that makes a glimmer of sense.