by A. J. Jacobs
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, they 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 b
allroom 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.
"Ooooooooookay," says the host. He turns to the answer board. "Puzzles involving card games." A big fat buzzer.
I slink back to my seat. "Puzzles involving card games?" says Jamie. I don't know what to say. My brain just froze. I was so desperate to impress, I put so much pressure on myself, I temporarily lost all ability to carry out simple mental functions. "When we leave," asks Jamie, "can you walk out fifteen feet ahead of me?"
I
identity
I'm told it's a good thing to know thyself.
Nowadays, I know myself better than I've known myself ever before. I've become quite intimate with myself. I know dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of facts about myself that I never knew before.
I know that I'm a collection of seventy-five trillion cells, which seems like an alarming amount. (Worse, since I barely ever use the Stairmaster anymore, I think I've added another hundred million cells to my midsection). I'm 60 percent water by weight. I'm a bipedal mammal, a distinction unique to humans (kangaroos don't count because their tails act as third legs). I have about a hundred thousand hairs on my head that grow at a rate of a half inch per month. My phylum is Chordata, which was a shocker. I knew my kingdom and species and probably could have come up with my class and order. But my phylum was news to me.
If I went into boxing, I'd be a junior middleweight (148-154 pounds). When I was born I had 20/800 vision--and I had gill slits in utero. When I breathe, I suck in trace amounts of fun-sounding gases like krypton and xenon along with boring old oxygen. As for my address, you can find me in the Local Group of galaxies, in a spiral galaxy about a hundred light-years across. I live on Earth, a planet about twenty-five thousand miles in circumference and tilted at 23.5 degrees. More specifically, I'm on North America, a continent supported by the Canadian Shield.
Along with 350 million other humans, I speak the English language, specifically the Inland Northern dialect (unlike those pompous British Received Pronunciation folks, I pronounce the t in motor like a d). I'm a member of the Ashkenazi tribe of Jews, which started out in what is now Germany and France (though that doesn't make me French, mind you). I work in magazines, the first of which was the British Gentlemen's Magazine, founded in 1731, which had the familiar-sounding motto "e pluribus unum."
On the one hand, I like this. There's something comforting about being defined within an angstrom of your life. The stuff that freaks me out is the biology. I haven't thought this much about the workings of my seventy-five trillion cells since high school. I probably should be in awe at the miracle that is my life. But instead I'm terrified. Last week, I spent ninety minutes lying awake in bed, worrying about my bodily organs. Especially the heart. Mine beats at seventy beats per minute. Seventy beats per minute seems so many--not as many as canaries, with their thousand beats, but far more than elephants, with a pathetic twenty-five. It's been going on for thirty-five years without stopping--but how many more beats can it continue without something going wrong? It's got so many delicate moving parts--the sino-atrial pacemaker, the papillary muscle, the tricuspid valve. I stayed motionless in bed for ninety minutes with my hand on my heart, making sure it kept pumping and that I was still alive, until slowly, finally, I dropped off to sleep.
illusion
We went to the wedding of Julie's family friend. It was a happy occasion, but one made much happier by a conversation I had with Eric's wife, Alexandra.
Alexandra is a great woman. Julie and I have canonized her Saint Alexandra for putting up with Eric. They met while Eric was doing foreign service duty in Colombia, and when Alex moved to the United States a couple of years later, she spoke about fourteen words of English. Now, she talks fluently, despite her accent and the occasional word mangling (she thought "homely" meant pretty, which caused some problems when she complimented the neighbors on their very homely children).
Anyway, at the cocktail party, over our little plates of grilled asparagus, I was complaining to Alexandra that I'd never catch up to Eric, knowledge-wise. He has too much of a head start in that head of his.
Alexandra told me a story to make me feel better.
A couple of years ago, Alexandra and Eric went out to dinner with another couple. After their waitress took their order and left, Alexandra was all atwitter.
"That's a Colombian accent on that waitress," she said. "Not just that--I think she's from my hometown of Cali."
Eric shook his head emphatically. "That's not a Colombian accent. That's a Slavic accent." After which he proceeded to give a speech about the linguistics of the Balkan states.
When the waitress came back with their appetizers, Alex said, "Where are you from?"
"Colombia," said the waitress.
"Which town in Colombia?"
"Cali," said the waitress.
Alex was floating on air. Eric shrugged it off.
It's a fascinating story. Not just because Eric was wrong, which is nice, no doubt. I'm fascinated by the fact that he pooh-poohed his Colombian-accented wife on the topic of Colombian accents--that takes some cojones.
No doubt he declared the waitress's accent to be Slavic with absolute confidence. Not a moment of hesitation. The same tone he'd use to state his eye color, or that the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066. Now, I'm not saying that Eric doesn't know a lot. He's accumulated an obscene amount of data. But what about those rare occasions when he's not sure of something? Well, he's not going to let a little detail like that stop him.
It's confirmation of something I've been toying with for a couple of months: one secret to being a successful know-it-all is extreme confidence. Just state your fact loud and proud, even if, as is the case with me, the details are often faded and jumbled up. As my friend the financial analyst once told me about his line of work: sometimes right, sometimes wrong, always certain.
The other day, someone at the office brought up twins. I had a beauty of a fact for him. "Did you know that in traditional Vietnamese society, boy-girl twins were forced to marry?" I said. "Because it was assumed they had sex in the womb." A good story--but it was actually Balinese society. I knew it wasn't Vietnam, but I couldn't remember the country of marrying twins. So I just made it up. I guessed my conversation partner did not have a doctorate in East Asian obstetrics. I guessed right.
Indian Mutiny
This was a failed rebellion against the British regime in 19th-century India. The Indian Mutiny was notable for the strange way that it began. In 1857, the Brits employed Indian soldiers--called sepoys--to serve the British East India Company. But the Brits made the mistake of introducing the new Enfield rifle to their Indian troops. This gun required the soldiers to bite off the ends of lubricated cartridges. The lubrication in question? A mixture of pig and cow lard, which managed the neat trick of offending both Muslim and Hindu soldiers, who were prohibited from eating pig and cow, respectively. The Indians rose up and killed British officers, but the English put down the rebellion with biblical ferocity. To quote
the Britannica: "In the end the reprisals far outweighed the original excesses. Hundreds of sepoys were shot from cannons in a frenzy of British vengeance (though some British officers did protest the bloodshed)."
First, the image of people being shot from cannons has to be one of the most disturbing things I've run across. But also, I noted the parenthetical remark: some British officers did protest the bloodshed. That's classic Britannica. The EB is the single most fair, even-handed book in the history of publishing. Everything has two sides. Even the most evil deeds, the most dark-hearted people have their redeeming qualities.
The Black Death, admittedly, wiped out a third of Europe, but it also raised wages for those still breathing by opening up the labor market. You take the good, you take the bad.
Attila the Hun? Sure, he was a vicious barbarian with the decidedly uncuddly nickname of Scourge of God. Yes, he murdered his older brother Bleda so that he could rule alone. And there's his resume, which includes raping and pillaging pretty much every inhabited acre of eastern Europe. Oh, and when Attila died, the saps who buried his body were later put to death so the location of his grave would never be discovered.
Fine. He's got his flaws. And yet, and yet...you catch him on the right days, and he could surprise you. Attila "was by no means pitiless," says the Britannica, and at banquets he was "served off wooden plates and ate only meat, whereas his chief lieutenants dined off silver platters loaded with dainties." See? He ate off wooden plates. Would you eat off wooden plates if you had worked up a hearty appetite conquering all of Europe? Probably not.
It may not be much, but it's something. The EB is very proper, a perfect gentleman. I imagine if it bumped into you, it would say, "Terribly sorry, old chap." Read it for five hours a day, and you start to be brainwashed by its constant pro/con tone. Yes, you'll think to yourself, Rush Limbaugh can be a bullying jackass, but he's also got some fine points about the importance of patriotism and a clear speaking voice.
