The Know-it-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

by A. J. Jacobs

  This was troublesome. Italy was beautiful and all, and the food was tasty, but I felt helpless, more helpless than I'd felt since this project began. Just finding our hotel in Venice took an exhausting variety of verbal gymnastics and hand signals and maps.

  My insecurity only got worse when we met up with our friends Peter and Sharon and their new baby boy, the three of whom jetted down from London, where they are currently living, to join us for a couple of days. Peter--a tall and chiseled tax lawyer--is a smart one. Whenever we play charades, Peter always puts in obscure historical figures instead of the accepted fare of former MTV veejays or eighties pop stars. His Tenzing Norgay--the Sherpa who accompanied Edmund Hillary up Mount Everest--caused an uproar. Naturally, Peter also speaks fluent Italian. At meals, Julie and I would haltingly place our orders, and then Peter would converse with the waiter for several minutes, spitting out rapid vowel-filled Italian, and the waiter would laugh and slap Peter merrily on the back. Then Peter would turn back to us as if nothing had happened. No translation. What the hell was he saying? I worried it was some variation on "Did you notice that the guy I'm with is a hairy little Jew? Check it out. It's true."

  As is customary in Italy, we spend a lot of time eating. We sit for hours in restaurants on various piazzas, with Sam, their baby boy--just six weeks old--alternately attaching himself to Sharon's breast and speaking loudly in what sounded like Hokan Native American language.

  "Hey, Sam," says Sharon. "Look over here! Look at Mommy!" Sam turned his eyes toward Sharon, but then rolled his head back and began studying the ceiling.

  "If you want him to look at you, you should probably wear more red," I say. "Studies show that babies are attracted to the color red."

  I look around for a prop. Our napkins are red, so I wave mine in front of Sam's face until his eyes wander over to it.

  "See?"

  I've been paying close attention to the child-rearing sections, as Julie and I are hoping to have a breast-loving, head-rolling infant of our own soon.

  Sharon says she'll think about my tip.

  "He's getting enough vitamin K, right?" I ask. "Because infants' large intestines don't have the bacteria needed to produce vitamin K."

  "Well, he's breast-feeding."

  "Doesn't matter. You still might want to supplement."

  "Uh-huh."

  "Just a thought. Right, Sammy boy?"

  I stroke the outside of his foot.

  "You ticklish, Sam?" Sharon asks. "Is Uncle A.J. tickling you?"

  "Actually, I'm not tickling him. I'm testing his Babinski reflex." When you gently scratch the outside of an infant's foot, his big toe is supposed to go upward and his small toes are supposed to spread. I stroke the foot, and Sam's toes sort of spread, though the pinky toe seems to do most of the shifting. "See that? The Babinski reflex. Goes away after the fourth month. Looks like Sam's in good shape, so don't worry."

  If Julie and I can't have a child of our own, at least I can show our exasperatingly fertile friends that I know more about babies than they do.

  After lunch, we go to Peggy Guggenheim's museum. It's a lovely, clean, white modern art museum on the Grand Canal with a yard where Peggy buried her many beloved dogs. They have an elaborate grave for themselves, worthy of Ramses II.

  As we walk through the museum, Peter stands in front of the paintings with his hand on his chin for minutes at a time. He is appreciating the art. He is appreciating the bejesus out of this art.

  I am jealous. Thanks to the Britannica, I am pretty up on my art history, but I still don't have the patience to look at any of the pieces for more than a few seconds each. What is Peter seeing that is so fascinating? Does he know the paintings aren't going to move? They haven't moved in eighty years, and they aren't about to start now. But he sees something in there.

  The museum is located in Peggy's former home, and in her living room, there's a famous sculpture called Bird in Space by Constantin Brancusi. Created in the 1920s, this abstract work looks more like a very elegant copper carrot than a bird. I happen to know a good piece of trivia about Bird in Space, which I decide to share with the art-appreciating Peter.

  "You know, Brancusi got in trouble when he tried to bring this to the States. The U.S. government accused him of trying to secretly import an industrial part into the country."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah, almost got him arrested."

  "That's fascinating."

  Peter is genuinely intrigued, and seems happy that I taught him something. He is, clearly, far more evolved than me.

  number games

  It can be a desolate trek, this encyclopedia reading. Yes, I know: I signed up for it voluntarily, which makes it tough to elicit sympathy from friends and family. But it's still a lonely mission. I'm on the bed in the hotel, an hour after Julie has gone to sleep, reading in silence, no music, no TV, just the Britannica and me, as I wade through sentences such as this one: "During diagenesis, most of the magnesian calcites were transformed into stable assemblages of rather pure calcite, often along with scattered grains of dolomite." You still there? Good.

  I'm tempted to skip. And I have skipped a few times, but I always feel guilty enough to go back to give hoop skirts (or Herbert Hoover or whatever the victim was) a good skim. Or a decent skim. In any case, a man's got to find ways to keep himself amused. I've become a master of this. I've developed dozens of little games. Here are just three:

  1. The Count the Carpets Game. Every few pages, the Britannica features yet another in a dizzying array of carpet patterns. You've got your Bakhtiari, Balochi, Bergama, Bijar, Bokhara, and on and on. It feels like a very well organized Middle Eastern bazaar.

  2. The Spot the Celebrity Look-Alike Contest. Here's a fun visual game based on the little black-and-white pictures in the Britannica. Eighteenth-century French scholar Firmin Abauzit? He looks like Kevin Spacey! Karl Abel, a noted viola player of the 18th-century, is a dead ringer for Drew Carey.

  3. The Worst Ruler Competition. History is brimming with evil leaders you've never heard of. Early on, there was Jean-Bedel Bokassa, head of the Central African Republic, who, emulating his hero Napoleon, crowned himself emperor in a sumptuous $20 million ceremony that helped bankrupt his country. Though he did find enough money to also kill a hundred students. (On the other hand, he was acquitted of cannibalism charges.) Pretty bad. But then, in the Cs, Bokassa got some tough competition from Chou, king of China in the 12th century B.C. To please his concubine, Chou built a lake of wine and forced naked men and women to chase one another around it. Also, he strung the forest with human flesh. Chou really put some creativity into his evilness, but he's not unusual. Every letter has at least one truly dark-hearted cretin who somehow ascended to head of state.

  Once every few hundred pages, the Britannica will come to my rescue and surprise me with a game of its own. In the C section, you can find an actual unsolved New York Times crossword puzzle. Just take your pencil--or pen, if you're a real puzzler--and fill it in right there on the page.

  Under charades--which was originally the name for a type of riddle, not the pantomime game we know now--I got this brainteaser:

  "My first is a Tartar / My second a letter / My all is a country / No Christmas dish better."

  You get it? Turk-E. Turkey! That's the answer. Ha!

  And now, I've reached a thirteen-page section devoted exclusively to number games, like this curious pattern, which affords a "pleasant pastime":

  3 x 37 = 111

  6 x 37 = 222

  9 x 37 = 333

  And so on. Believe me, after reading about the Permo-Triassic rock strata of the Karoo system, this is fun stuff. Unfortunately, after number games, number theory is looming, which I don't expect to be quite the orgy of fun.

  numismatics

  Back when coins were made of metals like gold and silver, petty thieves would shave off the edges and melt down the valuable slivers. To stop this, mints began putting serrated edges on coins. So that's the real story behind
the cool ridges on quarters. Good to know that security measures can also be aesthetically pleasing.

  nursery rhyme

  My favorite Mother Goose fact thus far: "Jack and Jill" is actually an extended allegory about taxes. The jack and jill were two forms of measurement in early England. When Charles I scaled down the jack (originally two ounces) so as to collect higher sales tax, the jill, which was by definition twice the size of the jack, was automatically reduced, hence "came tumbling after." Kids love tax stories. I can't wait to hear the nursery rhyme about Bush's abolishment of the estate tax.

  Nyx

  She's the female personification of night. It's about 5 P.M., with Nyx approaching fast, and here I am in an unremarkable hotel room in Venice, perhaps the single most beautiful city in the world, full of gliding boats and striped-shirted men and quaintness around every corner. Instead of taking a predinner walk with Julie and Sharon and Peter to admire the surroundings, I've opted to stay and finish the Ns. Julie feared this when I started Operation Britannica, and she turns out to have a point: I've got a whole new and compelling reason to stay inside. I'm addicted to this thing. But like most addicts, I feel simultaneously drawn to it and repelled by it.

  O

  oath

  Our stay in Venice over, we say good-bye to Sharon and Peter and take a water taxi to the train station. It's a quick trip, five minutes tops, and it should cost the equivalent of $10.

  Instead, we get there, and the water taxi driver demands we pay him something approaching the gross national product of Bolivia ($8.2 billion). I shouldn't pay him, but we're late and he's a big Italian man. According to psychologist W. H. Sheldon's classification system, he is an endomorph (with a round head and bulky torso) and I am a wimpy ectomorph (narrow chest, high forehead, long arms). So I give him his ransom and Julie and I climb off.

  I wait till the taxi driver pulls away from the pier--until there's a safe patch of murky Venetian water between us--and then I shout at him: "Hey!" He looks up. If there's any time to be an ugly American, this is the time--when dealing with an ugly Italian man who just took most of your savings. It's time to insult him.

  Question is, after reading more than half the Britannica, are my insults of a higher quality? I've saved up a good one for just these situations. It's called the "bell, book, and candle," an oath formerly used by the early Roman Catholic church to excommunicate a Christian who had committed some unpardonable sin.

  It goes like this: "We declare him excommunicate and anathema; we judge him damned with the devil and his angels and all the reprobate to eternal fire until he shall recover himself from the toils of the devil and return to amendment and to penitence. So be it!"

  Now that's an insult.

  Unfortunately, in the heat of the moment, as I was being ripped off, I had a little trouble remembering the entire bell, book, and candle curse. I knew the word "reprobate" was in there, maybe the devil, but I couldn't summon the rest of it. And sadly, I couldn't even come up with the less elaborate backups: "You've got cryptorchidism!" (undescended testicles) or even "You've got dumdum fever."

  No, in the thick of battle, there's no time for elaborate insults. So I rely on a standby, and one that probably translates better across the language barrier. I give him the finger.

  obscenity

  Julie and I checked into the hotel today in Portofino, the site of Rick and Ilene's wedding. We spend the day hanging out by the pool eating our greasy Italian finger food. We're sharing an umbrella with another wedding guest, a blond-haired Minnesota native named Trent. He's a writer for Newsweek, and has just spent eight weeks embedded in Iraq.

  Trent has plenty of war stories. Like the danger of eating anything other than the food provided by the U.S. military. If you decide to be adventurous in the culinary department--say, by sampling a little local goat meat--you will pay for your bravery for days. That's not to mention another risk to journalists: writing anything that could be seen as anti-American. Trent wrote an article implying that his division was a tad trigger happy. For that, not only was he physically threatened, but he was subjected to a xeroxed anti-Trent newsletter created by the soldiers, a publication that included the witty word jumble "E-A-T S-H-T-I T-R-E-N-T." But the most surprising thing that Trent had to say involved the customs of the American soldiers. The troops, he said, can be a little crude.

  "Such as?"

  We didn't want to know, he says. We begged to differ. "Well, there's mushrooming."

  "Never heard of it."

  Mushrooming, explains Trent, occurs when one of our soldiers is asleep, and his buddy wants to wake him up in a creative way. The buddy unzips his pants, takes out his penis, dips it in ketchup, then thwacks the sleeping guy on the forehead, leaving a mushroom-shaped imprint. Hence mushrooming.

  Huh.

  Julie and I spend a few moments processing this bit of military reconnaissance.

  "Now that's something that you don't read in the encyclopedia," says Julie.

  "It'll probably be in the 2003 edition," I say.

  But it's true. Mushrooming is not in the Britannica. I'm jealous of Trent. Well, I'm not jealous of the fact that he ate goat meat or showered less often than I go to the opera. I'm jealous because he was out there in the sandy trenches getting firsthand knowledge. He wasn't reading it secondhand in a wussy book. And the knowledge he picked up was weird, crude, and to my still-adolescent mind, pretty fascinating.

  I can console myself, though. At least the Britannica does have plenty of its own weird and crude facts. I've learned almost every other bizarre thing men enjoy inflicting on their private parts. They've practiced ritualized bleeding to mimic menstruation. A shocking number have been castrated. An equally shocking number have been partially castrated--the 50 percent deal, officially called "monorchidism." They've inserted pebbles, stuck it with a pin, subincised it (cut the underside) and plain old circumcised it. They've splattered blood from their pierced penises and offered it to the gods. And the men of the Cobeua tribe of Brazil dance around with large artificial phalli, doing violent coitus motions accompanied by loud groans to spread fertility to every corner of the house, jumping among the women, who disperse shrieking and laughing as they knock phalli together.

  So at least I have a little sociological context for the practice of mushrooming. Now, instead of just snickering at mushrooming, I can ponder its place in other penis rituals the world over, then snicker at it.

  "Does General Tommy Franks mushroom?" I ask Trent.

  "I don't think so."

  occupational disease

  In the past, hatters often became ill because they used mercury salts to make felt out of rabbit fur. The mercury poisoning led to a mental deterioration known as erethism. Hence the phrase "mad as a hatter." Good to know. If I ever have kids, I'll make a little note in the margin of their Alice in Wonderland.

  olive oil

  The wedding itself was gorgeous. A nice traditional Jewish ceremony. Well, traditional except that it was held at a 12th-century Italian monastery. Since I'm pretty well versed in medieval Christianity these days, I can say with 90 percent certainty that monks did not wear yarmulkes, especially not monogrammed ones. But I'm guessing they did love a good hora. Who wouldn't?

  After the vows, I go on the receiving line to congratulate the happy couple. I shake Rick's hand, then give him a little marital advice I'd picked up from the encyclopedia: Attila the Hun died on his wedding night, perhaps from exhaustion. "So take it easy tonight," I say. "No need to prove anything your first night."

  "Great tip," he says. "Thanks."

  I tell Ilene that she looks radiant. Then add: "Just so you know, if you ever need an out, the easiest method of divorce comes from the Pueblo Indians. Just leave Rick's moccasins on the doorstep. Simple as that." Ilene says she'll keep that in mind.

  The food is delicious and deeply Italian--lots of pasta, lots of bread, lots of olive oil (which, by the way, the ancient Egyptians used as a lubricant for moving heavy building materi
als; so without olive oil, no pyramids). The only part of the wedding that is not a complete success--at least for me--is the after-dinner dancing. Julie is looking particularly elegant, with a wide-brimmed hat and black gloves.

  "Would you care for a dance, milady?" I ask.

  "Why, yes sir," she says.

  So far, so good. But when we get out on the dance floor, I decide to test out some new dance moves. I leap in the air wildly and move my limbs in a convulsive, jerky fashion.

  "What's going on here?" Julie demands.

  "Saint Vitus's dance!" I say. "Come on, join in!."

  I jump up and wave my arms frantically. Julie doesn't ask for an explanation, which is too bad, because I had one at the ready: Saint Vitus's dance was an ecstatic dance that spread throughout Europe in the middle ages. It was, says the Britannica, a kind of mass hysteria, affecting hundreds of people and becoming a public menace. Those afflicted would shout and foam at the mouth. I figured: when in a 12th-century monastery, do as 12th-century Christians would do.

  Julie turns her back to me and starts dancing with Rick's friend Ted, who apparently is not afflicted with a medieval seizure. My plan was to spread Saint Vitus's dance through the entire wedding party. Perhaps I should have gone with the tarantella, a medieval dance used to combat venomous spider bites by sweating the poison out.

  Olympus Mons

  I think I partially redeem myself when we get back to the hotel in Portofino. Our hotel is a fancy affair with a pool boy and wooden hangers--and really crappy air-conditioning. The thing wheezes like a bypass patient in recovery. The room is far too hot to sleep in. It's hot as Al-Aziziyah in Libya (136 degrees). Hot as the interior of Olympus Mons (the largest volcano in the solar system, located on Mars). If the room had any sweat bees--insects that are attracted to perspiration--they'd be all over us. I order up an oscillating fan. No help. I complain to the concierge, who sends up a bellboy to inspect the air conditioner. Oh, it's on, he assures us, and then leaves us.