The Know-It-All

by A. J. Jacobs

  In fact, I may just be too smart for my own good. The other night, I watched Alex give the following $100 clue: “This is another term for uppercase characters, such as the ones that start a sentence.”

  I knew that. Easy. “Majuscule!” I shouted out, confidently. “What is majuscule!” “Majuscule” is the official name for uppercase letters and “minuscule” is the name for lowercase letters.

  One of the contestants twitched his thumb and rang in. “What is capital letters,” he said.

  “Correct,” said Alex.

  Oh, yes. That’s right. Capital letters. I should have known that. I was reminded of that woman at the Mensa convention who kept saying “interstices” when the word was “gap.” I felt like a tool. But also, quite superior.

  If I am eventually going to try out for Jeopardy! I figure it’d be good to get some advice from an expert. So I track down one of the all-time big money winners, a five-time champion named Dave Sampugnaro, who I found on the Internet (his e-mail handle is jeopardyboy). He agrees to meet me for coffee. Dave is a nice man with a goatee, wire rim glasses, and an abundance of nervous energy that, during our meeting, keeps his leg bouncing and his hands busily twisting a straw wrapper. “I haven’t read the entire encyclopedia,” he tells me when we sit down. “But when I was five I read the Information Please Almanac.”

  Nowadays, when Dave isn’t at his day job—he works at IBM—he spends his time collecting. He collects antique license plates, soft drink thermometers, presidential signatures—and most of all facts. The man is a fact machine. Our meeting is like a boxing match with factoids.

  Dave tells me that Ulysses S. Grant’s wife was cross-eyed and posed for paintings only at a concealing angle. I counter with my classic about René Descartes and his cross-eyed fetish. He responds with the nugget that James Buchanan was nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other, so he’d look at visitors with his head cocked to the side. I rally with a bit about a cousin of James Buchanan who invented a submarine that allowed him to walk on the bottom of the Mississippi River, where he found a fortune in lead and iron. After which he pounds me with the fact that Abe Lincoln was the only president to hold a patent—it’s for a device that lifts boats over levees.

  The conversation is fast and wide-ranging and slightly exhausting—but exhilarating. No eye rolling here. No awkward silences. Dave loves facts as much as, maybe more than, I do, and he’s just bursting to spout them and drink them in.

  Dave warns me that Jeopardy!’s not an easy experience. “I was so nervous in the greenroom, I was shaking. I tried to pick up a glass of water and I was spilling it everywhere.” And that’s if you get on. Dave tried out no less than seven times over eight years before getting the nod. Hopefuls have to take a ten-question test, then a harder, fifty-question test, then have an interview with the producers to see if they are camera-friendly—and even if they pass those they might not get called.

  There aren’t too many secrets to success, Dave says. Go with your first instinct when answering clues. And be passionate about knowledge—you should never think of studying as a chore. Facts are your friends.

  Speaking of facts, he’s got plenty more: “You know, at one time there was only one bathroom in the White House and the president had to wait his turn if someone was in there.”

  When I get back to my office, I start to think about Dave’s eight years of auditions. Jesus. I figure I better start now. So I call the Jeopardy! publicist to see when the next auditions might take place—and that’s when I get an unpleasant surprise. The publicist says that I’m no longer eligible, since I’ve met Alex Trebek. What? It’s not like Trebek and I play Yahtzee every Saturday afternoon. I doubt he’d recognize me in a lineup of other skinny white journalists. And I, for one, mistook him for a Mexican gardener. Doesn’t matter. Jeopardy! is The New York Times of game shows, and there can be no appearance of impropriety. As far as they’re concerned, my two-hour interview with Trebek put me in the inner circle next to his wife and mother and Merv Griffin. Answer: This is hugely frustrating. Question: What are the overly strict Jeopardy! rules?

  Maybe I should look into Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I can win more money and no one will see how bad my handwriting is.

  mammals

  Elephant copulation lasts twenty seconds. That should make a lot of men feel better.

  Mann, Horace

  In his final speech, the educational reformer told students: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” Good wisdom. Great wisdom even. I have to remember that.

  manure

  The Britannica isn’t a Farrelly brothers movie, but it does have more than its fair share of scatology. And thank God for that, because I desperately needed to expand my knowledge of waste products.

  You see, when I married Julie, I became uncle to her brothers’ kids—four adorable, squeaky-voiced children under ten. Not having much experience with the Nickelodeon crowd, I initially had some trouble connecting with them. But then I hit upon a secret. Two words, to be exact. My entire relationship with my nieces and nephew was forged with the phrase “monkey poop.” For five years, I have worked this phrase into every conversation I have with them.

  “What would you like for your birthday?” I’ll ask Andrea, age seven.

  “Gameboy pinball!” she says.

  “Well, I was thinking of getting you fifty-seven pounds of monkey poop. Would that be okay?”

  “Nooo!!!” she’ll scream, running away. “No monkey poop!”

  My monkey poop joke has been my biggest hit, my equivalent of Bill Cosby’s dentist routine. I think my nieces and nephew were just happy to have found an adult who is less mature than they are. And yet, after five years, even something so brilliant as monkey poop began losing its freshness. I needed some new material. The encyclopedia was there to help.

  One Sunday, all the kids and their parents made one of their day trips to the city, and used our apartment as headquarters.

  “What’s for lunch?” I ask Natalia, age nine.

  “I dunno,” she says.

  “You think Aunt Julie will be serving whale poop?”

  “Whale poop?” she asks.

  “Yeah, whale poop is delicious.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Seriously, a lot of people do eat whale poop.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You don’t believe me?” I take out volume A, and turn to ambergris. I show Natalia the definition: a foul-smelling substance found in the intestines of whales that, when dry, takes on a sweet aroma, and is used in spices and perfumes. She is duly impressed. She runs into the kitchen.

  “I’d like some whale poop, please! On French bread!”

  Who said the Britannica doesn’t have practical knowledge? This is killer material. Next, I impress my nieces and nephew with stories about fossilized dinosaur poop (it’s called coprolite). I segue into the best method for storing manure (stack it, so that it doesn’t leach nitrogen), which wasn’t quite as big a hit. But I redeem myself with the casebearing beetle. When it’s threatened, it pulls its legs inward and disguises itself as caterpillar droppings.

  “Everybody, pretend to be caterpillar poop!” I shout.

  We all drop to the floor and pull in our arms and legs.

  “Hey, are you by any chance caterpillar poop?” I ask Natalia.

  “No, it’s me! Natalia! Fooled you.”

  Julie’s sister-in-law Lisa walks into the room to see the five of us on the floor in little balls.

  “What’s going on here?” she asks.

  “Shhh,” says her daughter, Allison, age five. “We’re pretending to be caterpillar poop.”

  Lisa looks at me. She is not amused.

  “I thought we discussed this. We would not be making monkey poop jokes anymore.”

  “But this is caterpillar poop,” I say. “Totally different.”

  masochism

  The term “masochism”was derived from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Aust
rian novelist who wrote extensively about how he enjoyed being beaten and subjugated. Poor Masoch. He’s no Sade. Everyone still talks about the Marquis de Sade—his works are read, movies are made about him, biographies glorify his memory. But Masoch gets nothing, except the sullying of his family name. On the other hand, if anyone likes being ignored, it’s probably Masoch. Pay no attention to me! Yes, ignore my writings! Just tarnish my name!

  If the Britannica has taught me anything, it’s to be more careful. I don’t want to turn into an unseemly noun or verb or adjective someday. I don’t want to be like Charles Boycott, the landlord in Ireland who refused to lower rents during a famine, leading to the original boycott. I don’t want to be like Charles Lynch, who headed an irregular court that hung loyalists during the Revolutionary War. I can’t have “Jacobs” be a verb that means staying home all the time or washing your hands too frequently.

  mechanics

  Two days ago, as I was tapping a golf ball around the Esquire art director’s office floor, I wondered to myself: Why do golf balls have all these dimples? And here’s the answer: the dimples create turbulence around the ball, which reduces the drag as it flies through the air. (Some scientists also think that bathing suits with rough surfaces help make swimmers go faster, but this is still controversial.) Sometimes the Britannica has exquisite timing.

  mechanics, fluid

  An insight! A potentially life-altering insight. Gasoline should be purchased on very cold days. The colder the gas, the lower the volume, the less expensive the gas itself. So go to Exxon when you’re wearing your fleece and gloves; or if that’s not possible, at least go in the morning, when it’s cooler.

  Does everyone know this?

  I had my epiphany while looking at all the equations and diagrams for fluids and their expansion. I knew gases expanded, but had forgotten fluids did as well. I thought of the various fluids in my life—orange juice, water, gasoline—and then I made that nimble mental leap. I took my science and applied it hard.

  I wonder how many other hints and secrets and insights are lurking in the encyclopedia, waiting for me to unlock them. It makes me nervous that I haven’t been thinking enough.

  memory

  In a Sherlock Holmes story I read a long time ago, Watson is shocked to discover that his detective friend doesn’t know the planets of the solar system—or even that the earth orbits around the sun. Holmes could distinguish 140 types of tobacco by their ashes, but he doesn’t know the planets. Holmes explains to the baffled Watson that his mind is like an attic. There’s room for only so much lumber up there. So he stores the lumber that he’ll find useful in the catching of thieves—information about the coloration of different tobacco types, for instance. Planets are of no use to him. In fact, he’s annoyed at Watson for telling him about the planets, and he promises to do his best to forget them.

  I’ve remembered this story for years. Naturally, I forget the name of the story—but the anecdote has stayed with me.

  I’ve thought about Sherlock a lot recently, since I’m trying to cram a lot of lumber into my own mental attic. What’s the capacity of memory? Is it really an attic? Or can it stretch indefinitely like a nice pair of sweatpants? And perhaps more important, how can I make sure whatever I stuff in there stays in there.

  Hoping for help, I read what the Britannica says about memory, and though I do learn that the opposite of déjà vu is called jamais vu (a false unfamiliarity with a situation, as when you walk into your apartment and feel like you’ve never been there before), I still feel I could use more instruction in memory techniques. But where? As you may recall, my first brush with adult education was not a pleasant one. It was the speed-reading seminar from Hel (a Norse version of hell where it is eternally cold, a temperature that seems more hellish to me). So I’m not eager to jump back in. That said, I did pick up a Learning Annex catalogue that advertised a course called “Gain a Photographic Memory in 1 Night,” from world-renowned expert Dave Farrow. Farrow’s write-up says that he’s in the Guinness Book of World Records for memorizing the order of fifty-two decks of cards shuffled together randomly. Fifty-two decks. Not fifty-two cards. That’s 2,704 cards. It can’t be argued; that is an astounding feat. I need to meet this man, so I give adult education another chance.

  When I arrive at the community college cafeteria a couple of weeks later, Dave is decked out in his blue suit and blue tie, pacing at the front of the class and nodding his head at students as they trickle in.

  A bearded man cracks the door open. He’s wearing a red beret and plaid pants. “Is this the memory class?” he asks.

  “You remembered!” says Dave jovially.

  “Huh,” says the man. “You looked better in the catalogue picture.”

  I feel bad for Dave. Having a stranger insult your personal appearance is a hard thing to forget, even for nonexperts like me. I want to tell Dave that he looks just fine—he kind of resembles TV’s James Van Der Beek—and besides, he shouldn’t take criticism on his physical appearance from a guy in a red beret and plaid pants.

  Maybe because I sympathize with Dave, I decide I like him from the start. He’s Canadian, for one thing. Canadians are hard to hate (though there was talk of annexing their country after the Civil War). Dave ends most of his sentences in exclamation points and he reminds us repeatedly that we’re going to have a lot of fun. To inspire us, he tells us his hard-luck tale of battling three learning disabilities (ADD, dyslexia, and another I’d never heard of). And now look at him!

  “If you know how to use your gray matter, you can remember phone books of information!” His techniques will give us memory power we never dreamed about! We can do it! Amen!

  Oh, and by the way, we really should buy the home study course, which he happens to have on sale right here for $129. Yes, adult education strikes again—another infomercial disguised as a class. The home study course pops up every couple of minutes, sort of like a salesman’s version of Tourette’s. He could be talking about anything—food, books, Ireland—and all of a sudden, there it is, the home study course, back to say hi. I made a game of counting its recurrences.

  The other game—and I wasn’t alone in this one—is busting the man who memorized 2,704 cards for every tiny memory lapse. It’s a petty thing to do, and a nice Canadian like Dave shouldn’t be subjected to such small-minded nitpicking, but it sure feels good. At one point, Dave mentions how he was talking to one of the students on the way up in the elevator, and—

  “Stairs!” shouts a man from the back.

  Dave stops. “Excuse me?” The guy is leaning back in his chair, his hands locked behind his head.

  “Stairs,” he says.

  “Oh yes, that’s right, we took the stairs. The elevator’s broken.” The class snickers.

  Dave’s class actually covers some of the same territory as the god awful speed reading class. But since I like Dave better, I pay attention when he sings the praises of visualization. To remember a fact, he says, you create a little picture in your head. For instance, to remember my name—A.J.—the class comes up with Ajax, and visualizes me washing with Ajax soap. It was vaguely disconcerting having the whole class imagine me doing the dishes or washing my tub. I hope they imagined me with my pants on.

  Regardless, Dave’s system seems to work. We memorize the class names, a string of random words, and the properties of various types of glue, giving ourselves a hand after every victory.

  At the break, I tell Dave about my project. “I’m reading the encyclopedia from A to Z and trying to learn everything in the world. You think I can remember everything?”

  “Absolutely. With the techniques in the home study course, you can definitely do it!”

  “But the encyclopedia’s 65,000 entries—”

  “You can do it! I memorized 2,700 playing cards in two days. In fact, after you do it, you can give me a testimonial!”

  On the one hand, I’m heartened. But on the other hand—a much bigger hand—I’m a little annoyed. I wanted Dave
to say, “Wow, not even I—world-renowned memory expert—could attempt such a feat. You are the king! There’s just not enough room in my attic!” But the home study course it is. I give Dave my credit card, which kind of makes me nervous, seeing as he can probably memorize the digits without effort.

  Back in my living room, I listen to CD number two of Dave’s Memory Wiz system, the one where he explains how to memorize definitions. “Let’s have fun with this,” he says. The fun definition we are going to memorize involves the properties of the anti-neutrino particle. The anti-neutrino sounds sort of like “ant” and “newt”, so Dave urges us to visualize an ant carrying a newt on its back. Okay. Now we learn the anti-neutrino is defined as a subatomic particle (now picture the ant and newt driving an atomic submarine). It also has no mass (visualize a priest on the submarine waving his arms to indicate that there will be no communion today) and is emitted during beta decay (the priest also happens to be holding a Betamax that is in desperate need of repair). Voilà! Simple as that.

  It’s a fun little picture. And it makes me want to take a nap. This memorizing thing is going to be harder than I thought. Still, I figure I should give it a whirl, and not just because I paid $129 for the home study course. I flip back a couple of pages. Here’s a good one to try: melee. Melee was the precursor to soccer and was played with inflated bladders or, by the British, with the head of an enemy Dane; by the 11th century, many melees were played on Shrove Tuesday.

  Okay. Here goes: “melee” sounds sort of like “melon.” I’m picturing a melon in the shape of a soccer ball, and this melon really has to go to the bathroom (that’s the bladder). And now it’s stuffing a raspberry Danish into its head (Dane’s head). Now it’s carrying a shovel with two dates (Shrove Tuesday).

  Dave’s system is no doubt a good one. But the thought of creating fun little pictures for each of the 65,000 entries makes my head feel like it’s been kicked by an 11th-century Englishman. I’ll probably return to my current system—which consists of squinting my eyes and looking really hard at the page and hoping a bunch of facts stick to my cerebral cortex.