The Know-It-All

by A. J. Jacobs

  Now in this glorious game of Boggle, depending on the number of letters in each of your words, you are rewarded 1, 1, 2, 3, or 5 points. Voilà! The Fibonacci series. Or at least the start of it.

  Somehow, knowing this makes me happy. I’m not sure why. I think it has to do with being able to see patterns in the world, knowing how an obscure math sequence relates to one of my favorite pastimes, unlocking a code, even if that code is about a silly Parker Brothers game.

  Thanks to the Britannica, I now know not only the name of the Boggle scoring system, but also how such a series was first proposed. Fibonacci gave it in the form of a riddle about randy rabbits. Namely: A certain man put a pair of rabbits in a place surrounded on all sides by a wall. How many pairs of rabbits can be produced from that pair in a year if it is supposed that every month each pair begets a new pair, which from the second month on becomes productive? Naturally, I’m jealous of these critters’ boundless fertility, not to mention disturbed by the amount of incest involved. But mostly I’m impressed by how this works—the more rabbit couples there are, the more pairs they produce, with the increases occurring at the good old Fibonacci intervals—1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc. The year-end total: 376.

  I now have an unexpected link between lascivious rabbits and Boggle. Even better, I know that Boggle connects in some cosmic way to pinecones and seashells, which also exhibit the Fibonacci sequence, according to the Britannica. It’s a nice little quartet: Boggle, rabbits, pinecones, and seashells. Or actually quintet, if you throw in The Da Vinci Code. (A friend tells me that the best seller also includes the Fibonacci sequence. She apparently reads for pleasure—wonder what that’s like.)

  liar paradox

  The ancient paradox goes like this: If the sentence “This sentence is not true” is true, then it is not true, and if it is not true, then it is true. I feel very lucky I am not stoned, because if I had read this after a bong hit, my head would explode.

  life span

  Tucked in among the other statistics—like the one about the yearlong life span of small rodents and pine trees that can last for forty-nine hundred years—comes a number that shocks me. It says the average human life span in the 1700s was thirty years. Thirty years! I’m thirty-five. I don’t need the algebra section to figure out that if I had been a cobbler back in the 18th century, I’d have spent the last five years relaxing in a coffin. Thirty years is nothing—crayfish can live thirty years. This is good information. Useful information. Optimism-inspiring information.

  lily

  Two errands today, two very different experiences. First, the florist. Julie’s taken to calling herself an “encyclopedia widow,” so I figure now might be a good time to remind her that I love her, and that I’m willing to spend $45 to back up that fact.

  I go to a shop in midtown, a couple of blocks from the office. The first thing I notice is that the florist has dreadlocks that reach down to his waist. I can’t imagine that’s a huge subset of the population: florists with dreadlocks. Sort of like insurance executives with mohawks.

  When I inform him that I want to order a bouquet, he asks me if I want the flowers in a vase. I reply that I do.

  “That’s called an arrangement, not a bouquet,” he says. His tone is surprisingly hostile, with a little boredom thrown in for good measure. I should walk out right now.

  I tell him I’d like a hyacinth. “You know, hyacinth,” I say. “Named for Apollo’s male lover, whom Apollo accidentally killed while teaching him to throw the discus.”

  The dreadlocked florist gives a half snort, half harrumph.

  “And I’d like some dogwood with that,” I say.

  “Dogwood doesn’t go with that,” he says.

  I tell him that I was just reading about dogwood, and how in Victorian flower language, a lady’s returning a dogwood was a sign of indifference. I just want to check if my wife still loves me.

  “Dogwood’s tall and hyacinth is short,” he says.

  I won’t describe the rest of the flower debacle—during which I bring up the Japanese flower arranging system, something called the Hogarth curve, and the Madonna lily, a symbol of virginity in the middle ages, all of which he seems disinclined to discuss. He asks me what I want to say in my card.

  “These flowers are bisexual, but I am straight, and I love you,” I say.

  He keeps his pen poised, but doesn’t start to write, instead glaring at me over his granny glasses. Yes, I’ve neglected to mention he was a dreadlocked florist with granny glasses.

  “Because most flowers are bisexual,” I say. “Angiosperms are bisexual.”

  He has already decided I am a moron. Now I am also a homophobe.

  Errand two is a stop at Supercuts for a haircut. My barber is named Steve, a man who has a serious collection of earrings on his ears, but neither dreadlocks nor granny glasses.

  I take my L volume out of my bag. As he snips, I read about lighthouses and lightning rods, my hair dropping into the crease between the pages. Steve wonders what I am doing. I tell him.

  “What a great idea!” he says. “We should all do that.”

  Encouraged, I inform him that Roman households often had a barber on staff. Like a butler. They offered haircuts to guests, like we offer them a glass of wine nowadays.

  “Wow,” he says. “I love that!”

  Maybe he is just being polite, but I think he is genuinely interested.

  I tell him that archaeologists have discovered a five-thousand-year-old frozen corpse that showed signs of the first haircut, then segued smoothly to Hollywood, pointing out that Greta Garbo’s first job was in a barbershop.

  “I knew Mariah Carey worked in a salon,” he says.

  Steve has been kind and receptive and supportive, and I want to hug him. I give him a $10 tip instead, which I think he much preferred.

  limerick

  Another reason to be happy—the following poem:

  A tutor who taught on the flute

  Tried to teach two tooters to toot.

  Said the two to the tutor,

  “Is it harder to toot,

  Or to tutor two tooters to toot?”

  That’s just good, clean, non-Nantucket-related fun.

  Lloyd Webber, Sir Andrew

  I didn’t need the Britannica to tell me about this man, the Ray Kroc of musical theater, the man behind such McMusicals as Jesus Christ Superstar and Phantom of the Opera. At Entertainment Weekly, I had to edit a faux-weepy homage to Cats when the producers announced that after 7,485 performances on Broadway, Rum Tum Tugger was going to that kitty-litter box in the sky. I think I probably used that phrase, come to think of it.

  But my most significant Andrew Lloyd Webber memory has to do with a play even campier than Cats: Starlight Express. For those who missed it, Starlight Express was the one about trains. The characters had names like Rusty and Dinah the Dining Car, and the actors played the trains by zipping across the stage on roller skates. As far as skate-based theater about modes of transportation goes, Starlight Express is among the top five.

  I saw Starlight Express when I was about fifteen years old. My mom and I had flown to London on a special mother-son bonding trip. After a busy day of examining torture instruments in the Tower of London and getting mocked for ordering ice in our drinks (the waiter brought us our ice cubes in a pail labeled “Yank Bucket”), we went to the theater. Starlight Express sounded like harmless fun.

  We watched Greaseball skate and sing about depots and the station, and then we clapped dutifully.

  “So what’d you think?” my mom asked, when we got outside.

  “Well, it was a little heavy-handed, I thought.”

  “How so?”

  And here I explained that, in my opinion, Starlight Express was actually an extended political allegory. The old steam train was meant to represent slavery. The diesel train was laissez-faire capitalism. And the evil electric train—the one with the lightning bolt on his costume—was fascism. I can’t remember the proof I had for
my thesis, but I remember being pretty convincing. At the end of my lecture, my mom nodded her head.

  “That’s interesting,” she said. “I never thought of it that way.”

  This was a huge moment in my life as a know-it-all. Now, it’s possible I might have overanalyzed Lloyd Webber, and there’s a chance that Mom was just being polite. But I don’t think so. I think my mother—a very smart woman with a master’s degree and a lifelong New Yorker subscription—was actually impressed with my analysis. And that felt great.

  That’s the feeling I want to get back. I want the world’s hidden meanings to leap out at me like a Chinese jumping mouse. I want to see the grand arcs and the big picture. I want to shock people with the incisiveness of my analysis. On the other hand, I don’t really want to see any more musicals about trains.

  Los Angeles

  The Britannica quotes the following joke: The suicide rate in Burbank is so low because living there makes suicide redundant. Well, it’s better than the Japanese gag about the monkeys and the moon.

  Louis XIV

  Louis XIV was not a particularly likable character. Here was a man with a Trump-sized ego who poured the nation’s riches into building a palace while French peasants ate clumps of dirt for dinner. But Louix XIV had one thing going for him: he tried to ban biological weapons.

  According to the Britannica, an Italian chemist came to Louis XIV with plans for the first bacteriological weapon. Louis XIV refused. He never developed the weapon, never used it against other European nations. But even more impressive, he paid the chemist an annual salary to keep the bioweapon a secret from the world.

  Good for you, Louis. Très bien. He was abiding by the Geneva Convention 250 years before it was created.

  It was a nice idea, but of course, no one—not even the divinely appointed Sun King—could keep bioweapons a secret forever. Information has a way of getting out. Which is good when it’s the perfect recipe for oatmeal raisin cookies, but bad when it involves death by chemical asphyxiation.

  And now, I live in a world where some horrible bioweapon may soon infect our subway system, and the Homeland Security Department warns us every couple of hours to duct-tape our nostrils. These thoughts about the inevitability of bioweapons depress me. The Louis XIV entry has set me off on a dark and disturbing train of thought. I’ve got to cut it off. I’ve got to suppress it just as Louis XIV suppressed primitive bioweapons. Julie’s right: embrace optimism. Remember, life expectancy was thirty years in the time of Louis XIV. So I’m lucky to be breathing at all.

  LSD

  Lysergic acid diethylamide is derived from the ergot fungus on grain, especially rye. It can be absorbed readily from any mucosal surface, even from the ear.

  This makes me nervous. I know it’s irrational—I don’t have a kid yet, I may never have a kid, but what if I do and he starts dropping LSD? What if he starts stuffing his ears with hallucinogens?

  The thing is, I now have regained a handle on some of those questions my kid may ask me. I know how hot the sun is (ten thousand degrees on the surface, 27 million at the core). I know how airplanes fly (Bernoulli’s theorem). I even know the answer to that old chestnut “Why is the sky blue?” (dust in the atmosphere scatters the smaller blue rays of the sun).

  But I realize that’s the easy stuff. What about sex and rye fungus and rock and roll? I used to laugh at the Tipper Gore types and their conniption fits about naughty lyrics or recreational drugs. Now I kind of see their point. What should my yet-to-be-conceived kid be allowed to watch? Are those threesomes on MTV’s Real World okay? And do I have to stop cursing around the house? And how can I stop him from taking ecstasy while visiting random colleges? I know how that ends up.

  A friend of mine recently told me that parents at bar mitzvahs nowadays are forced to hire extra security to keep an eye on the kids. The reason: oral sex. It’s so rampant that unless you watch these thirteen-year-olds closely, they’ll slip off to a corner and drop their pants. At the rate things are going, my kid will lose his virginity as soon as he stops breast-feeding.

  If Julie ever gets pregnant, I’m buying a leash for the kid and not removing it till he gets his master’s degree.

  Luciano, Lucky

  Even before reading the Britannica, I knew quite a bit about the history of the mafia. I knew, for instance, that Luca Brazi sleeps with the fishes and that Tony Soprano should have spent less time at the Bada Bing and more time working on his marriage.

  Okay, so I could use a little help.

  Happily, the Britannica is packed with colorfully evil real-life mobsters. Perhaps the best tale—worthy of Mario Puzo himself—is that of Lucky Luciano. A native of Sicily who moved to New York City as a kid in 1906, Lucky was a precocious little menace, already mugging and extorting at the impressive age of ten. In his teens and twenties, he broadened his skill set to include bootlegging, prostitution, narcotics—classic mafia stuff. He earned his nickname, Lucky, both for evading arrest and for winning at games of craps. Not to mention his luck at being one of the only mafiosi to live through one those notoriously unpleasant “one-way rides.” In October of 1929, Luciano was “abducted by four men in a car, beaten, stabbed repeatedly with an icepick, had his throat slit from ear to ear, and was left for dead on Staten Island.”

  After shaking that off, Luciano killed his boss Joe Masseria at a Coney Island restaurant, and by the early thirties, he had been promoted to capo di tutti capi. The fun ended in 1936. Luciano was busted for his brothel and call girl empire, and sentenced to prison for up to fifty years. Still, he continued to rule from his prison cell.

  So far, we’ve got a lively if slightly standard mobster yarn. But the next part is where things get interesting. In 1942, the luxury liner Normandie blew up in New York harbor as it was getting converted to military use for World War II. Sabotage was suspected. The Allies needed New York harbor to be safe, since key provisions were shipped through there. So navy intelligence made the trek to Luciano’s prison cell and asked his help. Luciano—who still controlled the waterfront and the longshoremen’s union—gave the orders. Sabotage on the docks ended. As a reward for his war efforts, Luciano’s sentence was commuted, and he was deported to Italy, where he kept himself busy with drug trafficking and smuggling aliens to America. He died of a heart attack in 1962.

  I love this tale—the heartwarming friendship between the navy and the mobster. I guess the moral is that sometimes, for the greater good, you have to suck it up, hold your nose, and ask for help from the dark side.

  lumbar puncture

  Lumbar puncture is the official name for a spinal tap. This is a good way to sound pretentious, especially if you’re referring to the beloved Rob Reiner mockumentary. I’ve collected many, many ways to sound pretentious—some of which have actually leaked into my everyday language. At work the other day, I made unironic use of the phrase “died without issue,” a phrase I’d never heard of six months ago (it means died without kids). In case you too want to sound pretentious, here are five strategies that could come in handy:

  1. If someone asks you the time, respond with this quote from Valéry: “Anyone can tell you what time it is. But who can tell you what is time?”

  2. Call cottage cheese by its alternate name, “Dutch cheese.”

  3. After a long flight, complain about “circadian rhythm stress” (what your hayseed friends call “jet lag”).

  4. Refer to the Vietnam War as the “Indochina Wars.”

  5. Do not use the word “bildungsroman” when talking about a coming-of-age novel. Yes, it’s pretentious. But it’s not really pretentious. Try these: Kunstlerroman, a novel that deals with the formative years of an artist. Erziehungsroman, a novel of upbringing. Entwicklungsroman, a novel of character development. “I think Harry Potter is a fabulous Kunstlerroman!”

  Lumière, Auguste and Louis

  Two French brothers who owned a camera factory. In 1895, they made a film called Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory—an aptly named documentar
y that shows workers shuffling out the door of the factory. It’s considered the very first motion picture. Which gives me Movie Idea Number Four: Do a remake of Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory with Hollywood’s A-list stars playing the workers. Tom Hanks, Russell Crowe, Tom Cruise all filing out a door, wearing black hats—box office gold!

  M

  Madonna

  THE BRITANNICA JUST added Madonna to the edition this year, and you could tell the editors wrote the entry while wearing one of those sterile full-body suits people use when containing an Ebola outbreak. It’s wedged in between write-ups for the first Madonna and British legal historian Thomas Madox, and contains sentences like this one: “Her success signaled a clear message of financial control to other women in the industry, but in terms of image she was a more ambivalent role model.” In Britannica-speak, that roughly translates to: “Madonna is a whore. A very dirty whore.”

  The entry did teach me some Madonna facts, including her middle name (Louise) and that she was a member of Patrick Hernandez’s disco revue in Paris. Not that I know what that is, but I’ll be sure to bring it up next time I see a Madonna video.

  Whenever that is. Reading about Madonna makes me miss pop culture. I’ll get back to you someday, pop culture. I promise. It’s just this Britannica is so damn long. Did they have to cover every single Nobel Prize winner and African canyon and South American capital? Couldn’t they have left out a few? Who would have noticed?

  Mahler, Gustav

  He had a mother fixation that manifested itself in a slight limp he unconsciously adopted in imitation of his mother’s lameness. The man most in need of therapy in the Britannica so far.

  majuscule

  Everyone keeps asking when I’m going on Jeopardy! And I have to say, I’m starting to feel pretty good about my chances. I’ve been watching my old pal Alex Trebek give the clues and I’ve made huge strides in my ability to shout out the proper questions before the contestants (especially if I use the pause button on my TiVo).