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

In preparation for our meeting, I presented my argument to my parents. You know, just to see if they had any little suggestions. "And therefore," I read to them off my yellow legal pad, doing my best to speak from the diaphragm, "the Dalton School has no philosophical grounds on which it can punish me. You must let me go."

I looked up. My dad's face was very stern. Even my mom--who almost always supported me, who loved to boast about my brilliance, who knew I was special ever since I mastered that Tonka dump truck before any of my classmates--even Mom seemed unhappy with me. Her face was scrunched up, as if she'd just wandered into a big patch of arales (a flowering plant that emits a fetid odor that attracts flies).

"I think that's a very bad idea," said my dad. "Just go in there and say you're sorry."

"No, I'm saying this. It'll work. Trust me."

I brought the notes for my speech to the meeting with the administrator. But as I studied his unsmiling face and listened to his lecture on the honor code, I began to suspect my parents were right. It would take more than a well-organized five-minute speech on ethical paradigms to radically alter his moral philosophy. And if I decided to try, I might well find myself applying for educational opportunities at high schools not featured in Woody Allen movies. So instead, the administrator got to hear how sorry I was that I let Nick cheat off my paper. Truly, awfully sorry. "It was wrong letting Nick cheat off my paper," I said, shaking my head in disbelief at the blackness of my soul. "I'll never do it again."

Whenever I think of this story, I'm always amazed at my initial level of delusion. Nowadays, I know that beautifully crafted philosophical arguments will not get you out of trouble at work, get you a raise, or land you a table at Nobu. And if I were that bearded administrator today, it sure wouldn't work on me. Ethical relativism--even if I still clung to it intellectually in the years that followed--has little impact on my postschool life.

Reading the Britannica, though, had an odd effect on me: it actually made me much less of an ethical relativist. I had a vague idea from high school and college that I shouldn't be judging other cultures, especially preliterate ones. They have their own customs, and who are we to critique them with our biased Western eyes? A few thousand pages of the Britannica will cure you of any fuzzy idealization of preliterate societies. I've read about culture after culture with traditions that strike me as wrong--evil, even.

Just try to refrain from judgment when you read about, say, the customs of the Native American Kutchin people. When a Kutchin girl had her first menstruation, she was sent to live for a year in a special shelter away from the tribe, wore a pointed hood that forced her to look down at the ground, had a rattle that prevented her from hearing anything, carried a special stick if she wanted to scratch her head, and had a special cup that could not touch her lips. No doubt in my mind. That's not only crazy, it's just wrong.

I've even come to a conclusion that would get me blackballed from ever setting foot in liberal education circles again. That is this: colonialism wasn't 100 percent evil. More like 96 percent evil. Sometimes the colonizing culture actually made moral improvements in the native culture. I came to this conclusion while reading about the abolition of the Indian custom of widow burning. In pre-British India, a man's widow was burned alongside his corpse. The British colonialists put a stop to that. So yes, they criminally oppressed an entire people. But like a robber who fills up the ice trays while he steals the TV, they did a smidgeon of good.

Etruscan alphabet

Etruscans sometimes wrote boustrophedon style, in which the direction of writing alternates with each line--right-to-left, then left-to-right. Brilliant! The eye doesn't waste time trekking back to the left side of the page after every line. If the Britannica were written boustrophedon style, I'd be in the Fs by now.

eunuchs

Julie's not pleased with the Britannica. She had a few minutes to spare and decided to see what it had to say about her favorite movie star, Tom Cruise. She slid out the C volume and found the answer: nothing.

"What kind of business is this?" she says, pointing to a page with illustrator George Cruikshank and a cruise missile. "No Tom Cruise? He's had a huge impact on our culture. Huge."

"They're a little light on the pop culture," I say.

"Weird," she says.

What about one of her favorite musicians, George Harrison? She got out the Hs, to discover that the Beatle didn't rate his own entry either--though there was a nice write-up of George Harrison, noted church organ designer from the 19th century. He's a musician too, in his own way.

"That's a weird book you got there," she says.

The Britannica may seem a little peculiar in its choices at times. But the good news is, once you've read several thousands of its pages, you get a sense of what it takes to get behind these velvet ropes. I'm proud to say I've cracked the code. And as a service to you, the reader, here are the ten best ways to get your own entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

1. Get beheaded. This is perhaps the surest path to getting written up. The Britannica loves nothing more than a person--preferably a noble one--who has had his or her neck chopped in two. One of my favorite games involves reading a biographical squib that begins with the words "French revolutionary" and then guessing how many years it takes before he finds himself under the guillotine.

2. Explore the Arctic. It helps if you can go on an ill-fated expedition, but pretty much any Arctic adventuring will do. If you travel anywhere north of Banff, you'll get a careful look from the Britannica editorial committee.

3. Write some poems. Surrealist and Russian formalist poets are especially welcome, but almost anyone who has ever written a quatrain or rhymed more than a dozen words seems to get into the club. At times, it gets almost as absurd as an early Paul Bowles poem. A two-page spread in the early Bs that is only slightly atypical features no less than three of 'em: Carl Bellman, Andres Bello, and Hilaire Belloc--a Swedish poet, a Chilean poet, and a good old English poet.

4. Become a botanist. Scandinavian ones seem particularly popular. Also, the study of mosses and peat deposits shouldn't be underestimated.

5. Get yourself involved in commedia dell'arte. The Britannica's obsession with the Italian 18th-century comedies borders on the unhealthy. The EB has great enthusiasm for comedia dell'arte actors, whether they happened to play the pretentious but cowardly soldier Capitano, the saucy maid Columbine, or the madcap acrobat Zanni.

6. Win the Nobel Prize. Economics, physics, peace--the category's not important, as long as you've got the medal.

7. Get castrated (men only). If you're really committed, the word "eunuch" is a good thing to have on your resume. And don't despair, just because you have lost a pretty important source of testosterone, it doesn't mean you'll be powerless. On the contrary. Maybe it's a compensation thing, but many of these eunuchs over the years have had impressive clout. Like Bagoas, a Persian minister in the 4th century B.C., who led an army in conquering Egypt, looted the temples, made a fortune, killed the king, killed the king's sons, then tried to poison the new ruler he appointed, only to be forced to drink the poison himself. A good run while it lasted.

8. Design a font. Apparently, coming up with a new typeface is a more impressive feat than I had previously thought. The Britannica especially likes controversial typefaces that are initially dismissed haughtily, only to be revived later and recognized as brilliant, like Baskerville, designed by font hero John Baskerville.

9. Become a mistress to a monarch (ladies only). This seems a pleasant and painless way to get in. If I were a woman, I'd start working on that as soon as possible, since there are fewer and fewer monarchs every day.

10. Become a liturgical vestment. I know this is easier said than done, but since every garment ever worn by a religious figure gets a nice picture, I thought I'd throw it in, just in case.

Ezekiel

The biblical prophet Ezekiel ate a scroll to symbolize his appropriation of its message. Now, that's a committed reader. Maybe I should eat the entire encyclopedia to symbolize my appropriation of its message, but I don't think my stomach would react well to the leatherette covers.

I like this image of Ezekiel and the scroll as snack. It's the literal version of the metaphor linking eating and reading--he's a voracious reader, he devours books, he's hungry for knowledge, et cetera. It rings true to me. After my four-hour reading stints each morning, I feel like I've stuffed my mind full of very rich food, like a Thanksgiving dinner for my head every day. I wish that I could unbutton the pants around my brain and let out my cerebral cortex a little.

I'm wondering if--to continue Ezekiel's metaphor--I bit off more than I can chew when I announced this Britannica project to the world. Because I have to tell you, I'm not sure I can go on. I'm not sure I can hear another one of those tissue-thin pages crinkle while turning. Or see another black-and-white picture of an old man with elaborate facial hair. Or learn about the average cubic meters of water discharged by another African river. Or crack open another volume with a spine emblazoned with the Scottish thistle--a plant with sharp thorns that serves as Britannica's weird-looking and aggressive logo. Why exactly did I think this was a good idea again?

F

fable

Julie and I spend the afternoon at my mom and dad's apartment. They're throwing a brunch for their friends, and we've been invited to have some smoked turkey and try to make a good impression. I sit on the couch next to their friend, a lawyer named Bob. When he learns about my project, he tells me an encyclopedia-themed fable. I haven't heard too many of those, so I'll repeat it here.

"Did you hear about the Middle Eastern potentate?" he asked me. "This potentate called a meeting of the wise men in his kingdom, and he said, 'I want you to gather all the world's knowledge together in one place so that my sons can read it and learn.' The wise men went off, and after a year, they came back with twenty-five volumes of knowledge. The potentate looked at it and he said, 'No. It's too long. Make it shorter.' So the wise men went off for another year and they came back with one single volume. The potentate looked at it and said, 'No. Still too long.' So the wise men went off for another year. When they came back, they gave the potentate a piece of paper with one sentence on it. A single sentence. You know what the sentence was?"

Bob looked at me. I shook my head.

"The sentence was: 'This too shall pass.' "

Bob paused, let it sink in. "I heard that when I was very young and it has always stuck with me."

It's a good story. And it's some good wisdom, too: "This too shall pass." So far, the Britannica has backed that sentiment up. The Black Plague passed, the Hundred Years War passed, the vogue for codpieces passed. Maybe Bob's sentence is, in fact, the secret of life. I wonder if I'll be able to come up with anything better by the end of my journey. What will be my mind-blowing one-sentence distillation of all knowledge? Rene Descartes had a fetish for women with crossed eyes? The French had not only canned laughter, but canned weeping? Needs some work.

Fahrenheit, Daniel

My anger toward 18th-century German physicist Daniel Fahrenheit is all out of proportion. I went into the living room just now and starting ranting to Julie about this brainless jackass Fahrenheit. She tilted her head, concerned. "Is there maybe something else going on here?" She's right. Our babyless marriage continues to darken my mood--and Herr Fahrenheit is taking the brunt of it. Still, he genuinely pisses me off.

Born in 1686, he spent most of his life in the Netherlands, where he invented the mercury thermometer in 1714, which is fine. I don't begrudge him that. I do, however, find his temperature scale completely absurd. For zero on his scale, Fahrenheit chose the temperature of an equal ice-salt mixture. For 30, he chose the freezing point of water, and 90 was supposed to be the human's normal body temperature.

There's so much wrong with that, I'm not sure where to start. First of all, Fahrenheit bungled the measurements. As I've been forced to remember all my life, freezing point of water is actually 32 degrees and body temperature is 98.6. So he's an inaccurate moron. Second of all, why choose 30 for the freezing point of water in the first place? What's wrong with starting it at zero? Oh, that's right. He's reserved zero for the temperature of an equal mixture of ice and salt. Huh? Where'd he come up with that one? How about an equal mixture of ice and tomato juice? Or how about one-third ice and two-thirds baking soda, with a dash of paprika?

I'm astounded by the inertia of bad ideas. Once they take hold, it's a bitch to root them out. Now, three hundred years later, we're stuck with Fahrenheit's ill-thought-out, badly executed system. It makes my blood boil, which happens at about 100.1 degrees Celsius.

Family, The

A hippy Christian cult in the sixties whose female members were instructed to engage in a practice called "flirty fishing." In other words, they spread the gospel by having sex with men. Unfortunately, while spreading the gospel they also spread herpes, and flirty fishing was discontinued.

Farinelli

Remember what I was saying about eunuchs? Here's another one. Born Carlo Broschi, Farinelli was the most famous castrato opera singer of the 18th-century. In 1737 he went to Spain, where his singing alleviated the melancholia of Philip V. Every night for ten years he sang the same four songs to the king. I hope he at least shuffled the order.

Farnsworth, Philo

The Utah engineer who helped develop television. In 1927, after many years of research, Farnsworth successfully broadcast the first image in the history of the American TV: the dollar sign. He couldn't have come up with a more appropriate image for his invention. Somehow, deep down, Philo knew that Lisa Kudrow would earn $1 million per episode for singing songs about her smelly cat.

Fellini, Federico

The movie 81/2 got its name from the number of films Fellini had directed at up till that time: seven features plus three shorts. That answers a question that I had never, ever wondered about.

Fertility and infertility

According to the Britannica, Julie and I are officially experiencing infertility. "Infertility is defined as the failure to conceive after one year of regular intercourse without contraception." We're up to fifteen months now.

The Britannica says that one in every eight couples is infertile. That's a pretty high percentage, and it would make me feel better if the anecdotal evidence in my life provided any support. Instead, our friends just keep pumping young 'uns out.

As for medical advice on beating infertility, the Britannica hasn't provided much I haven't gotten from our ever-growing stack of how-to-get-pregnant books. But that's not to say we aren't enlisting the Britannica's aid--by which I mean Julie and I have become experts in ancient fertility rites. Every time I read about a preliterate society's rituals, I tell Julie, who makes a note of them. We know it's highly unlikely any of these will have any effect, but what's the harm in trying? Nothing else seems to be working.

So we have adopted a Fertility God of the Week. First came Anahiti, Iranian goddess of fertility and agriculture. Then it was Baal, the god of fertility worshipped by Canaanites. After that, Dumuzi, the Sumerian goddess of fertility and marshes. We don't actually worship these gods, and we have yet to sacrifice any small mammals to them, or even offer up our ficus tree. But we do like memorizing their names. It gives us something to do.

"Who is it this week?" Julie will ask.

"This week we've got good old Earth Mother."

"Oh, yes. Earth Mother."

"And unlike other female fertility goddesses, she doesn't undergo periodic sexual intercourse with a male god."

I also bought Julie a stuffed rabbit, because in the section on Easter, I learned that rabbits are a symbol of fertility. The Easter bunny was imported from pagan rituals, and did not actually have much interaction with Jesus.

"You know, some cultures believe that flagellation promotes fertility," I say, as we read in bed one night.

"I'm gonna have to pass on that one."

"Just one whip?" I say.

"No thanks."

I lightly whip her with the comforter, just for luck.

Fillmore, Millard

The thirteenth president was born in a log cabin. Why doesn't poor Millard ever get press for this? Lincoln hogs all the log cabin spotlight.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott

In 1920, after marrying Zelda and publishing This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald wrote: "Riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky, I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again."

Jesus. That one stops me. What a sad quote. I find it particularly haunting because I've had that same feeling. During those few times in my life when I've been exceedingly happy, I've only gotten stressed out because I figured that my happiness would be fleeting. Fitzgerald's life didn't end so well--a spiral of drunkenness and commercially unsuccessful novels and a heart attack at forty-four. Not a good role model.

Fleming, Ian

He not only wrote the Bond books, but also the flying-car novel Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. And it's there you can find the line that summarizes Fleming's philosophy of life: "Never say 'no' to adventures. Always say 'yes' otherwise you'll lead a very dull life." Huh. That's actually moderately profound. It's not quite Ecclesiastes, but it's pretty good advice. A much better way of thinking than Fitzgerald's, anyway.

fondue

Legend has it that this dish originated during a Swiss truce in the 16th century, when the Protestants brought the bread and Catholics brought the cheese. Or the other way around--no one's sure. It's a nice story. Sort of Reese's Peanut butter cups, but with more war and religion.

fowl

Technically, the term "duck" should be used only for a female. The proper term for a male duck is "drake." So Daffy Duck's true daffiness: gender identity disorder.

French literature

I e-mail my favorite high school teacher to tell him about Operation Britannica. I figure I've done him proud. He agrees to meet me for lunch.

My butt has barely touched my chair at the Chat 'n' Chew diner when he starts in on me. "You know, this is a ridiculous project. A complete waste of your time." Oh boy. He's got the same tone as when he handed me back my paper comparing James Joyce to prop comedian Howie Man-dell. I've just gotten a D minus, but this time it's my life.

Mr. Bender was my English teacher in sophomore and junior years. Now, fifteen years later, I call him Steve, even though every time I say it, I feel like I'm playacting as an adult. Steve--a large, bearded man who looks a bit like Abe Lincoln without the sunken cheeks or stovepipe hat--was the cool, funny English teacher. He told us stories of his former life as a stand-up comedian alongside Eddie Murphy. He could play a mean ukulele. And he introduced us to surreal filmmaker Luis Bunuel, which was like catnip to our fuzzy rebellious high school brains. Since I graduated, Steve had gotten into Buddhism, which at this very moment he is using to attack my endeavor.

"From the Buddhist position, you're actually dumber," Steve says. "You're taking an original, pure mind, which is a crystal reflection of the soul, and you're making it dirty and crusty, so you won't be able to see anything. You're cluttering your mind."

"I disagree," I say, as I desperately try to flag down a waitress. Any distraction--a list of daily specials, perhaps--would help my cause. But the waitresses are as hard to find as Indonesia's glory-of-the-sea cone shell (fewer than a hundred known to exist).

"Being a Buddhist, my relationship to knowledge has changed. It's more about genuine inquiry than about the accumulation of facts."

"Why can't I have both?" I ask. "Like, did you know that Daniel Defoe went bankrupt thirteen times? That's a good one for your English class, huh?"

Steve shakes his head. "You're probably retaining a huge amount of superficial knowledge, and since we live in a superficial culture, you will impress people with your facts. But what about wisdom?"

"I'm not up to the Ws yet," I say. It's my cheap, fallback answer, and Steve is disappointed. I seem to have disturbed his Buddhist calm. In an effort to deflect any more attacks, I get Steve talking about Buddhism. He tells me how much he loves meditating. He says he's attracted to Buddhism because it's peaceful--Buddhists don't kill people.

"Actually, they do!"

This is an exciting moment. I get to correct my former teacher. I tell Steve that the prime minister of Ceylon was shot by a disgruntled Buddhist monk. And that's just one example. Steve nods. He knows all about that, and isn't impressed. I am failing to see the big Buddhist picture.

"Do me a favor and read Bouvard and Pecuchet by Flaubert. I think you'll find it very relevant."

When your high school English teacher gives you an assignment, it's best to follow it, even if you've already got a 33,000-page book weighing down your nightstand. So I picked myself up a Penguin Classics edition and dipped into this almost-forgotten novel.

Steve was right. This was relevant. Way too relevant. I was dismayed to learn that Gustave Flaubert had stolen my life a full 150 years before I was born, and was taking great delight in mocking it, the absinthe-drinking schmuck! In Bouvard and Pecuchet, Flaubert tells the tale of two 19th-century Frenchmen--bumbling, sexually inept, and dumb as hunks of Camembert--who decide they want to learn everything. They begin to read obsessively. They are enamored of chemistry, so they set up an experiment--which ends up blowing up their house. They read up on medicine, only to become quack doctors who almost kill their patients. Same story with politics, religion, philosophy, and on and on. These two would make a nice buddy comedy starring Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler. Just as disturbing, Flaubert ridicules some of the very same insights I've had. Remember Absalom? I noted to myself that he should have gotten a crew cut so he wouldn't get his hair stuck in the tree. Flaubert says he should have put on a wig. I console myself that my crew cut observation is much more clever.

I know what Flaubert's saying. He's saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. He's saying that you can't learn the secrets to life from reading textbooks. And I know that he and Mr. Bender have a point. At face value, my quest teeters on the absurd. Still, it is a quest--and that in itself is has some merit. I've never embarked on a quest. Who knows where it might lead, what I might discover?

In fact, I like to think of Bouvard and Pecuchet as heroic. At least they're trying to do something instead of sitting around eating pastries, ignoring basic hygiene, and persecuting Jews, which is what your average 19th-century Frenchman did. And some of Bouvard and Pecuchet's so-called comical ideas--that women should be emancipated, that light indoors will one day be stored--turned out to be not so comical after all. Nice going, hommes.

I hate Flaubert, that superior bastard. Why should the pursuit of knowledge be the monopoly of so-called experts? Hooray for dilettantes. And anyway, earlier in the F section I learned that Flaubert was in love with a woman but didn't tell her about it till thirty-five years later. Which leads me to the conclusion: what the fuck does he know?

Freud, Sigmund

I've never been a big fan of Freud's. I think I know why--if I may indulge in a little self-analysis. When I first read Freud's theories, I was a freshman in high school, and I wasn't having an awful lot of sex. By which I mean no sex at all. So the idea that sex was the driving force in human behavior just increased my already dangerous level of frustration. It was like a color-blind person reading that the meaning of life lay in the joys of multihued flowers. No, I preferred Marx. Not that I'd had much experience with factories or proletarians or chains, but at least I could use Marx to take a self-righteous stance against my parents, those oppressive, bourgeois tools. As for Freud, I took great joy in repeating a quote I read somewhere: "Psychoanalysis is the disease for which it purports to be the cure." That was nice. A dismissal of an entire system of thought with a single witticism. Brilliant!

Those early prejudices die hard, so I'm still not much of a Freudian. But if I had to choose one doctrine of Herr Doctor's to embrace, I'd have to go with the Oedipal complex. That just might have some validity. In fact, now seems as good a time as any to lie back on my couch, rest my head against the analyst's napkin, and dissect my lifelong competition with my dad.

It began early. Every night when I was a kid, we played the same game: a modified version of handball that involved my wall, my cantaloupe-sized green Nerf ball, and my bed (the obstacle that made the game interesting). We called it, imaginatively enough, Wall Ball.

The game took on enormous importance to me. I would practice with my Nerf ball--whose name, by the way, was Seymour--for hours after school. My dedication would have impressed Bjorn Borg. It was monotonous work. Thump, thump, thumping that ball against the wall, trying to land it in the hard-to-reach corner by the radiator. The only enjoyable break in my regimen came when the ball semiaccidentally rolled into my sister's room across the hall, eliciting a glass-shattering shriek. With good reason, actually. I had developed the habit of drooling on the Nerf ball for good luck (don't ask). So Beryl would be doing her Spanish homework and all of a sudden this spongy green moist thing would roll up against her ankle--well, it couldn't have been very pleasant.

When bedtime rolled around, Dad would come to my room and we'd play two or three games. To me, it mattered. I threw tantrums to rival John McEnroe, if not Caravaggio. I would shout and scream and use whatever bad words I thought I could get away with--"retarded" being a particular favorite. If there was a Wall Ball referee, I would have kicked him in the shins.

Thanks to my rigorous practice schedule, I'd occasionally win a game. My dad would congratulate me, seeming genuinely happy for me. And I'd take the opportunity to do something mature, like pump my fist and shout, "I am the Wall Ball king!"

If we weren't feeling athletic, my dad and I had another option for competition--a board game version of hockey. I liked this game a lot, mostly because I had invented it. And since I was the inventor, I was also the expert on the rules. Interestingly, the rules turned out to be remarkably flexible. Especially when my father was winning.

"When the puck bounces off two walls at a forty-five-degree angle, you actually have to roll a nine or it's automatically my turn," I'd say.

"Is that so?" my father would say. He never argued. He just went along with it, happy to be interacting with me.

As I've gotten older, my dad and I have continued to play games, though we've moved on to those invented by other people: croquet, Boggle, Scrabble. I've become a slightly better sport. I no longer throw things, and I've phased out "retarded" in favor of more mature words, like "dammit."

I think I now know why I've had this thirst to beat my father. It's not--sorry, Dr. Freud--fear of castration or desire to have sex with my mother. And it's not that my dad is particularly competitive with me. You won't find him bouncing a basketball off my forehead as Robert Duvall did to his son in The Great Santini. No, it probably stems from cognitive dissonance that started in my childhood. Namely, this dilemma: on the one hand, I believed quite firmly that I was the smartest boy in the world, but on the other, here was a person in the same apartment who was clearly far smarter than me. Here was a man who knew all the answers. Who knew why the fridge was cold and what made the Lexington Avenue subways run and how far dirt went down. Here was a man who made the smartest boy look dumb. This caused plenty of confusion and frustration in my prepubescent mind--which still lingers today. I needed some area where I could clearly reign supreme; I hoped Wall Ball was it. And if not, then maybe hockey or croquet or encyclopedia reading.

frigate birds

I find out my fellow Esquire editor Andy is looking for a writer to interview Alex Trebek, host of Jeopardy! I plead with him for the assignment. How could I not? I mean, Jeopardy!--the pot of gold at the end of my project. And Alex Trebek! The world's most famous know-it-all.

"I'm a big Trebek fan," I tell Andy. "Huge Trebek fan." Andy--who eventually relents--is no moron. He knows I'm reading the encyclopedia and have an ulterior motive: me versus Trebek. A knowledge showdown.

Truth is, I have conflicted feelings about Trebek. On the one hand, I love Jeopardy! and respect the way he runs the show with stern colonel-like authority--not a moment wasted on buffoonery. On the other hand, I want to pop Trebek in his smug Canadian mouth. I mean, this is the man who pretends to know every potent potable and every presidential pet, who oozes faux sympathy for mistaken contestants with his famously condescending "sorry," who pronounces "burrito" as if he went to kindergarten with Fidel Castro and "Volkswagen" as if he grew up on the banks of the Rhine. Plus, my friend who writes about TV says that in real life Trebek is kind of rude. All the better. This will be my chance to expose him for what he is: some guy with a ridiculous mustache who reads the answers off the cards. That's right, folks: he has the answers already!

That was the plan, anyway. But if I was hoping to impress Trebek with my superior intelligence, things didn't get off to the best start. The day after I flew to Los Angeles, I drove my rented compact to Trebek's Beverly Hills mansion and rang the bell.

Trebek's son answers, and tells me his dad is out back, waving vaguely in the direction of the yard. The yard in question is an elaborate landscape, with lots of trees and walls and bushes and paths, and after a brief walk, I run into a Mexican gardener. "I'm looking for Alex Trebek," I say. He waves me back. I pass another Mexican gardener, who waves me even farther back. I get to a third Mexican gardener. He is on his knees, a look of intense concentration on his face as he digs a hole. By this time, I'm getting a little frustrated. "I'm looking for Alex Trebek," I say, a bit too sharply. I am about to clarify with a "Donde esta Senor Trebek?" but I don't have a chance.

"You found him," says the gardener. He stands up, takes off his thick soiled glove, and comes to shake my hand.

This is not good. As an experienced journalist, I probably should have been able to pick out Alex Trebek inside the perimeter of Alex Trebek's own property. But in my defense, Trebek is wearing a baseball cap, his hair is grayer than I thought--and where the hell is his mustache? Turns out he shaved it off a few years ago. Okay, a little more research might have been advisable. It's about five seconds into my alleged know-it-all showdown, and I'm feeling about as clever as, say, Jennifer Love Hewitt on Celebrity Jeopardy.

I'm not sure what Trebek thinks of my lack of reporting skills, but he's cordial enough not to dwell on my them. "Let's go to my office," he says. We enter the house, which has a blue-and-yellow Jeopardy! rug the size of a large surfboard in the entry hallway. His office walls, as you might imagine, are lined with books--Russian textbooks, Civil War tomes, the illustrious Encyclopaedia Britannica itself. As you also might imagine, the books are well organized into thematically linked sections. This is a man who, according to press reports, puts his dress shirts on light-colored hangers and his sport shirts on dark-colored ones.

I ease into the interview with some small talk--gardening, rental cars, that sort of thing. And when he's feeling comfortable, I hit him with my real question: if he's so damn smart, how would he do as a contestant on Jeopardy!

Well, Alex says, he'd do okay among senior citizens, but against someone my age, he'd get his butt whipped. Just doesn't have the recall anymore. "I flew from New York to Los Angeles recently," Trebek says, "and I entertained my first serious thoughts about coming down with Alzheimer's. They brought out the food and I said, 'Oh, this is my favorite vegetable.' And I looked at it, and I looked at it, and I looked at it, and I could not come up with 'broccoli'. And that's when you realize that, hey, you're starting to lose it. But so what? It's not important. Knowing everything is not the most important thing."

Alex Trebek showing signs of early senility? And he doesn't even care? What kind of know-it-all nemesis is this?

As we talk, I'm confronted by a Trebek I never expected. No prissy milquetoast, he goes out of his way to swear like Uncle Junior on The Sopranos ("bullshit" and "asshole" are two favorites). No cold-blooded Spock, he tells me he's an impulsive romantic--he left military college after four days to chase a girl.

I won't say that Trebek is entirely without pretension. Occasionally the pompous side of him peeks through--he tells me that he speaks English, French, some Spanish, and that he can "fool around in other languages," which strikes me as very annoying for some reason. He also uses the word "escarpment" in casual conversation. And he relates to me an elaborate pun he once made on the names of Edith Cavell and Enos Ca-bell, a moderately well-known British nurse and first baseman, respectively. But overall, he's a decent guy.

About halfway into our interview, Trebek tells me the following story.

"I was at a college tournament in Ohio recently, and I was telling the audience about my trip to Africa, and I got teary-eyed. I started to cry. This is kinda dumb. I'm in front of three thousand people and I'm getting weepy talking about Africa."

Alex Trebek crying? That is a hard image to conjure up. That's like Henry Kissinger giggling or Vladimir Putin yodeling. Makes no sense.

"And what the hell's Africa to me?" Trebek continues, asking the very question I was wondering. "Well, I go to Africa--to Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania--and I stand there and I am overwhelmed by the thought that this is where I'm from. I came from here. And I feel comfortable."

Huh. I'm not sure how to respond to this. Is Alex Trebek black? He sure doesn't look black. He looks pretty white to me. He looks like the quintessence, the very incarnation, of whiteness.

"You mean...because it's the cradle of civilization?" I ask, taking a shot.

"Yeah. It's like, hey, I'm home."

It's a strange story, and I'm not certain why he'd share it with a journalist, but it has an odd effect on me: it makes me like him more. That clinches it. Trebek isn't a mustache-twirling villain, especially since he doesn't have a mustache. He's a guy who's not afraid to look vulnerable, even a little ditzy. My plan for a showdown is in full meltdown.

If I'm not going to try to humiliate him, maybe I can bond a little. Here we are, two men who spend their days swimming in facts. I tell him that I'm reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He seems mildly impressed, if not blown away. He tells me that as soon as Jeopardy! goes off the air, he's going to retire and try to read every book in his house, "even the ones I've read before, because I can't remember them."

I ask him, of the quarter million clues over the last thirteen years, what's the favorite fact that he's learned?

"Oh God," he says. After a struggle, he comes up with one: You know how in nautical law, a country has jurisdiction over the first three miles from its coast? (Actually I don't, but I'm not up the N's.) Well, that came about because a cannon's range was three nautical miles. "That's fascinating," I say, though it probably wouldn't be my first pick.

My favorite line in our two hours together comes when I ask him for his philosophy of knowledge. Trebek thinks for a moment, then responds: "I'm curious about everything--even things that don't interest me." I love that sentiment. It's totally contradictory, but I know what he means. And so, at the end of our talk, I climb in my rented compact and drive back to the hotel to read about friendly societies (the 17th-century forerunners of insurance) and frigate birds (they've got eight-foot wingspans and often catch fish in the air dropped by other panic-stricken birds) and other things that don't interest me. At the very least, they could come in handy if I decide to return to L.A. in a suit and tie and become a beloved five-time champion of Alex Trebek's quiz show.

Fux, Johann

I'm proud of myself. When I saw the name Johann Fux--an 18th-century Austrian composer--I didn't giggle. Sure, there was a faint smile, but I'm getting better, I tell you. I didn't ask myself whether Johann Fux on the first date or whether Johann Fux while wearing proper protection. I didn't secretly think that "Fux You" would make a cool T-shirt.

The more I progress in the alphabet, the more successful I am at stifling that eleven-year-old boy inside of me, the one that still thinks a good Beavis-and-Butt-

head-style scatological pun is cause for great joy.

It's not easy. Just the number of asses alone will tempt even the most evolved mind. I've learned about The Golden Ass (a book by a Platonic philosopher) and the Wild Ass' Skin (a novel by Balzac). I've read about the half ass (a type of mule in Asia) and Buridan's ass (an animal in a philosophical parable). But it goes way beyond asses. Asses are just the start. You can also take a trip to the river Suck (in Ireland), where you could fish for crappies (a freshwater bass) while you drink some Brest milk (the town in Belarus is known for its dairies). If you're bored, you can have a stroke-off (while playing bandy, a version of ice hockey) and fondle a bushtit (a small bird). If you're feeling smart, you might want to argue the impact of Isaac Butt (an Irish leader), or debate the merits of the Four Wangs (Chinese landscape painters), who might have been collected by the Fuggers (an art-loving family). Or else, just take a flying Fokker (a German airplane).

I know this is wrong. This isn't why I'm reading the Britannica. I'm reading it to get smarter, better, more enlightened, not to make dirty puns. Maybe it's because I've read so many of them, or maybe it's because the Britannica is actually making me more enlightened, but I've cut way down on these Beavis moments. The Four Wangs, though--that is kind of funny.

G

gagaku

At long last, the wait is over. If you recall, the word "a-ak," the very first word of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, had no definition, only the recommendation that the reader "see gagaku." I showed remarkable willpower and decided not to flip ahead, but to continue reading the As, figuring I'd get to "gagaku" in good time. Well, three months later, I am here. I have arrived.

That's got to count for something. That is, without a doubt, an accomplishment. The mystery is about to be solved! Unfortunately, the actual definition of "gagaku" does not provide quite the huge payoff I was hoping for. Not exactly a shocking twist you might find in an O. Henry story or an M. Night Shamalan movie. "Gagaku" is the Japanese term for a type of East Asian music that rose to prominence during the 5th to 8th centuries ("a-ak" is its name in Korean). Gagaku involves flute, drum, and strings, and sometimes accompanying dances. The notations remain obscure, but some form of gagaku can still be heard in Japan. And that's about it.

Huh. Well, there's always "zywiec" to look forward to.

gal

It's Valentine's Day. We don't make a big deal about this holiday in the Schoenberg-Jacobs household. We were both single for so many years that we have residual resentment from all of the date-free Valentine's Days we suffered through. It's a cruel concept, Valentine's Day. It's as if they had a holiday to celebrate rich people or attractive people. Miserable and alone? Sorry, this isn't your day. So in mini protest, Julie and I spend the night at home. We order in Thai and watch some romantic TV--the scene of the coroner on CSI removing a pancreas was particularly enchanting.

Cards, however, are allowed. Julie gives me a lovely one about how these last five years with me have been the best in her life. In response, I give her my card, which I'd typed that day at work, hovering over the printer as the paper came out. Don't want this one leaking out.

Julie reads it aloud.

"You make me suffer tachycardia," she reads. She cocks her head.

"It's when someone has an irregularly fast heartbeat," I say. "I'm just saying you make my heart beat faster. Keep going."

"I'm glad we practiced assortative mating together," she says. She looks at me again.

"It's when you pick a mate who's similar to you. Like fat people mate with fat people. I'm saying we're similar."

Julie looks back at the printout.

"You are worth much more than twenty spears," she says.

"That's the traditional bride price among Africa's Azande tribe."

She finishes up: "You are my gal--and I don't mean the unit of measurement."

"Yeah, a gal is a change of rate in motion of one inch per second per second. Or one centimeter. That's right, one centimeter. Anyway, you really are my gal. So what do you think?"

"A little show-offy," she says, "but the sentiments are nice."

I'm relieved. It could have backfired, but she seems to have enjoyed it. Which emboldens me to tell her that, though the encyclopedia is taking a bunch of my time and putting a little strain on our marriage, it's made me realize how lucky I am. There just aren't many happy marriages in the encyclopedia. Marriages in history are loveless obligations, something to suffer through in between affairs. The French, of course, raised out-of-wedlock sex to perfection, even creating an official position for mistress to the king. I knew kings had mistresses, but I didn't know that they practically had business cards and an office.

A surprising number of marriages are unconsummated, and an even greater number end in bloodshed. Once in a while, maybe every couple of hundred pages, I read about a happy marriage. But even these are often tainted with oddness--as in the unlikely union of brilliant poet William Blake and an illiterate peasant woman. I hope they had amazing sex, because I can't imagine the conversations were too lively. I tell Julie the Blake story, adding that I'm glad she's not illiterate, which she takes in stride.

gall

Julie's brothers are in town, their families in tow, and they've all congregated at our apartment in preparation for a visit to the Museum of Natural History. Doug has taken out the A volume, and is flipping through it. Doug is smart--he owns a software company, for one thing--but he's not the information freak that Eric is, and he only mocks me half the time.

"You remember anything from the As?" he asks.

"Pretty much everything."

He flips to a random page. "Ankh," says Doug.

"Egyptian symbol of life," I say. I didn't mention that I actually knew that before reading the EB.

He flips some more. "How many Aleutian Islands are there?"

"Four hundred and twenty-three," I say.

"No, fourteen large islands, fifty-five smaller ones," he says.

I try to deflect with a lame joke about how I was counting in the Mayan base-twenty system.

"What is Archimedes' screw?"

This I knew! It's a circular pipe in the shape of a helix, a piece of equipment used to lift water up in ancient times.

Doug seemed moderately impressed.

"And why did they want to lift up water?" he asks.

A low blow. I already got the definition--why is he pressing me for more details? I admitted I didn't know.

"They used it to lift water out of the holds of ships," Doug says.

"Let me see that," says Eric. He grabs the volume from his brother and reads it quickly. "This is wrong. The Archimedes' screw was first used for irrigation."

I couldn't believe it. First, Eric concluded that the Britannica omits key information (see Burke and Hare). Now, he says it's just plain wrong. How am I supposed to deal with this blasphemy? He's questioning the authority of the mighty Encyclopaedia Britannica. Like he's an expert on the early uses of Archimedes' screw? The unmitigated gall ("gall" is also the word for a plant swelling, by the way). I tell Eric to take it up with the editors.

I need a break, so I go into the office, where my nieces and nephew are playing a game of Sorry. Doug's kids are adorable, no surprise there, and so are Eric's--Gap-ad cute and sweet as butterscotch (named for scorched butter). Eric may treat me like roadkill, yet I have to admit, much as it pains me, that he's a good, caring father and has done a remarkable job raising his kids.

"Who's up for Simon Says?" I ask.

They seem up for it, and since I have seniority, I appoint myself Simon.

"Simon says, raise your right hand," I say. We all raise our right hands.

"Simon says, touch your toes." We all touch our toes.

"Simon says, turn around and around and around."

My nieces and nephew and I start twirling. This wasn't a spontaneous twirling, mind you. I had been planning this twirling for quite some time. I had plotted this twirling ever since I had read about the secret Blasis technique, invented by ballet teacher Carlo Blasis, in which a dancer prevents dizziness by snapping the head around more quickly than the body so as to maintain focus on one spot.

I knew this was potentially extremely useful information. But how? Since we rarely put on employee shows of Swan Lake, I seldom find an excuse to twirl at work. And I don't run into many dervishes on the Upper West Side. The only thing I could come up with was Simon Says.

So there I was, spinning around and around, snapping my head, keeping my focus on Julie's painting of Ray Charles. And it worked in a sense. I kept myself from getting overly dizzy, even as my nieces and nephew tumbled to the ground.

I didn't feel nauseated, but afterward, I sure felt like a bully and a jackass. I was so desperate to put my knowledge to some sort of use, I forced it into a semicruel game of Simon Says. This wasn't organic. This wasn't like when I saved Anna from eating cilantro. What was I thinking?

I confessed my sin to Julie that night. She wasn't even impressed. She said anyone who had taken a modern dance class knew about the head-snapping technique.

gamete

Another one of Julie's friends just got pregnant. Her gamete (sex cell) is now a diploid zygote. These friends of hers are frighteningly fertile. We're in bad moods. I spend the day with my lips frozen in a fake smile, trying some facial feedback. It fails to comfort me.

Gandhi

I don't have teenage kids, as is abundantly clear. But someday, God willing, when I do, I'm going to do my best to remember the postpubes-cent Gandhi. When my kids go out and chop down a telephone pole or put a stink bomb in their friend's locker, I'm going to recall this paragraph: "[Gandhi] went through a phase of adolescent rebellion, marked by secret atheism, petty thefts, furtive smoking and--most shocking of all for a boy born in a Vaishnava family--meat eating."

Gandhi--that little thug! I wonder if other parents in Porbandar told their kids, "For the last time, I don't want you hanging around that bad seed Mohandas!" This gives me Movie Idea Number Three: Young Gandhi, with Frankie Muniz as the cigarette-sucking, burger-eating pick-pocket who eventually accepts his fate as the most saintly man alive.

Not to make too much of one paragraph, but it does give me a little more hope about human nature. As I've gotten older, I've gotten crankier, and have started to think that personality traits don't change through a person's life. Once a bully, always a bully. But now I'm confronted with Gandhi. You can't get a much bigger transformation than that, unless, unbeknownst to me, Mother Teresa went through a phase as a loan shark.

Garibaldi, Giuseppe

I knew Garibaldi had something to do with uniting Italy. I could probably have come up with the fact that he led an army of Red Shirts. (Incidentally, someone needs to write a history of the world according to colored clothing. In addition to Italy's Red Shirts, I've read about the Yellow Hat Order in Tibet; the Black and Tan police force used against the Irish; the feared Seneca leader Red Jacket; those fascist scum the Brown Shirts; the Great Yellow Turban rebellion in China; and, for a little variety, the Shirtless Ones, who supported Argentina's Juan Peron. I think it would make a great doctoral thesis, or at least a lovely spread in Harper's Bazaar.)

Back to Garibaldi. I'm ashamed I was so ignorant of this man, because he led an inspiring life, one that intersected in a surprising and--to me, at least--profound way with the life of Abraham Lincoln.

The sixty-second Garibaldi:

Born on the fourth of July, Garibaldi first got into trouble as a sailor in the Piedmont navy. After taking part in a socialist-inspired mutiny, he fled to South America to avoid a death sentence. There, among other things, he eloped with a married Brazilian woman and led a group of Italian soldiers in Uruguay's revolution against Argentina. These were the first Red Shirts. In other fashion news, Garibaldi adopted the gaucho costume he'd wear for the rest of his life.

Garibaldi returned to Italy in 1848 to help in its fight for independence from Austria. He scored some astounding underdog victories before being exiled again, landing in, among other places, Staten Island. But Garibaldi was a tenacious man. He returned to Italy and in 1860, he fought his most famous battle: he conquered Sicily and Naples with his tiny band of a thousand Red Shirts and the support of the local peasants, who, taken by his charm, saw him as a god who would deliver them from feudalism. By 1862, he had effectively united the country.

Garibaldi's love life wasn't so successful. In 1860, says the Britannica, he married a woman named Giuseppina, but abandoned her, within hours of the marriage, when he discovered she was almost certainly five months pregnant by one of his own officers. A shorter marriage than most of Shannen Doherty's.

By the end of his life, Garibaldi had become a pacifist, a champion of women's rights, racial equality, and religious freethinking. Not bad. The most likable revolutionary I've encountered so far.

But I haven't even brought up my favorite fact about Garibaldi, which is this: in July of 1861, an embattled Abraham Lincoln offered to make Garibaldi a Union general in the American Civil War. Garibaldi turned Lincoln down, partly because Lincoln wasn't ready to abolish slavery yet, and partly because Garibaldi wanted supreme command of the federal troops.

This is an appealing tidbit. Not just because it raises the question, what if an Italian had led the Union troops to victory? Would the South hold a grudge against his country? Would there be no pizza parlors in Alabama? It also appeals to me because I would never have guessed Honest Abe was going to make a surprise cameo in the life of Garibaldi. I love when this happens. It's always exciting, like when there's a special guest star on a sitcom. The Britannica is packed with weird ways that great lives intersect. I love reading how Arthur Conan Doyle had a venomous feud with Harry Houdini (the occult-hating Houdini thought Conan Doyle's seances were a sham.) Or that Winston Churchill wrote the obituary for Ian Fleming's father. Or that Bach and Handel were both treated by the same quack doctor. I like the more random connections as well, like the one between Esso and Erte and Eminem (all have names derived from the pronunciation of letters). The Britannica reminds me of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, but for all of life. In the words of Donne, John (1572-1631), no man is an island. I find it comforting to know that I'm not alone, that I'm part of the big fabric, and that it's a lovely fabric, like the intricate carpets that Abbas commissioned in Persia.

Garrick, David

Famed 18th-century Shakespearean actor who also managed the Drury Lane Theatre. He fought to "reform" the audience, discontinuing the practice of reduced entry fees for those who left early. I don't like this guy. His reform is terrible. We need to go back to the old system: You stay an hour at a movie, you pay half price. You stay a half an hour, quarter price. Leave after ten minutes, the theater has to pay you for your trouble.

gazpacho

I'm feeling overwhelmed by the reading. I'm spending way too much time on it. The font is too small, the pages are too big, the words too polysyllabic. It's the literary equivalent of trying to hike in the dense underbrush of a jungle (though not the Amazon rain forest, which has a curiously sparse ground level; the canopy doesn't let light get through). In any case, it's excruciatingly slow going. I need a machete to chop my way through.

So I do something drastic: I enroll in a speed reading course from the Learning Annex, New York's adult education outlet. The $44 class promises to make me a literary speed demon, to double my intake. It's held on a Tuesday night in a nondescript classroom with an instructor named Les. Les is one of the founders of the Evelyn Wood speed-reading courses, which, he boasts, have trained more than 2 million people, among them Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter. "Carter got the Nobel Prize," he says. "We're not going to take credit for that."

The class chuckles dutifully. There are about twenty of us. We've been told to bring our books with us, so there's an odd assortment of reading material scattered around. One woman has brought Earth in the Balance by Al Gore, someone else has The Prince by Machiavelli, and one guy has brought his copy of Maxim magazine, presumably because he wants to learn to masturbate faster (it turns out Maxim is just for the midclass break; he also has a novel that features fewer models in nurse outfits). I pull the Britannica out of my bag and drop it on the desk with a manly thud. Sadly, no one seems to notice.

Les looks to me like a turtle. A large turtle. I feel sorry for the buttons on his striped shirt, which seem to be under a tremendous amount of pressure from his stomach. They seem like they could pop any moment and shoot into the unsuspecting eye of a would-be speed reader. I'm glad I have my glasses on.

The first thing I learn is that Les can talk. He talks about a one-eyed executive he once taught. He talks about a housewife who sold the paperback rights to her book for $3 million. And, yes, he talks about the topic at hand. "The slower you read, the more you're going to remember, right?" he asks in his thick New York accent. "Uh-uh...the slower you read, the worse your comprehension." Les looks around to see if there are any Skeptical Sams. No one takes the bait. "Your brain is so powerful, it's like driving a brand-new Ferrari at thirty miles per hour. Or the way my daughter drives--one foot on the brake and one foot on the accelerator. We're going back and forth, back and forth, and she can't figure out why until I tell her. The faster you read, the greater your comprehension...If you read slow, your brain gets bored. You daydream about going to Bloomingdale's or to a party."

I nod, hoping he'll see. Got it. My Ferrari-like mind has comprehended. Ready to move on. But Les lingers on this theme for what seems like a very long time, making me wish I was at a department store or a party or anywhere else. Les may be a fast reader, but he sure is not a fast teacher.

Finally, Les tells us to pick up the gadget he handed out to all of us at the beginning of class--a silver cigar-shaped laser pointer. "This is a revolutionary thing," announces Les grandly. "We call it the Raster Master. I'd like you all to introduce yourself. Say, 'Hello, Raster Master.' "

The class actually says, "Hello, Raster Master." We all start clicking the button and shining the red dots around the classroom. Les explains that the Raster Master's name is derived from the Latin word for rake, adding that it's "a technical term."

"It didn't fall out of the sky," he continues. "We did research for ten years." The secret, he explains, is that "the eyes follow a moving object. Why? Because our ancestors in the savannah in Africa who just fell out of the trees didn't want to get killed." They had enemies--lions and tigers and other cavemen (though not dinosaurs, he points out, since they had gone extinct)--and needed to spot the dangers. "Whoever made us--God, evolution, take your pick--gave us peripheral vision to survive." He's worried he's lost the class. "Too much? Too complicated?"

No, we think we've got it. "I teach fourth-graders. I tell them, do not put the Raster Master up your nose. So they put it in their ears." I smile and nod. I will not put the Raster Master in any orifice whatsoever. The Raster Master, Les tells us, widens the peripheral vision and lets us read more than one word at a time. He tells us this a lot.

We finally get to test out the famed Raster Master. I open to the G section and read with the rest of the class for sixty seconds. I move that red dot across the lines. I try to read clumps of words, not single words. I read about "gazebo" (a joke word that combines "gaze" with the Latin suffix ebo, meaning "I shall") and "gazpacho" (Arabic for soaked bread). I'm about to dive into Gbarnga (a Liberian city) when he tells us to stop. Honestly, I can't tell whether I read faster with the help of the Raster Master, but I don't want to get in trouble, so I say that I did.

Les pleads with us to be careful with the Raster Masters. They're not ours to keep, but they are available on his Web site for about $20. He continues telling the class about peripheral vision and the Raster Master until finally, after what seems like an eon or two, a Russian woman in purple pants raises her hand. "You're repeating this over and over. You're not telling us anything new."

Yes! Someone's said what I was too timid to say. She has challenged the mighty Les. Hallelujah!

But Les shoots right back. "Most people can't handle more than one strategy at one time," he says. His tone is sharp. "You can leave if you want. But you're not ready for a second strategy. It'll overwhelm you."

She says nothing. I scan the class for some outrage among my fellow students, praying the Russian woman was the Trotsky in a revolution that would sweep the classroom. But no luck. The others are looking at her as if she's some sort of nogoodnik troublemaker. I just don't get it. People are way too accepting of authority, even if that authority is some blowhard with a Latin-named gadget.

After a short break, Les does get around to teaching us new strategies. Unfortunately, none of them have to do with speed reading. One is a learning method that involves tracing an outline of your hand on paper the way that kindergarteners draw Thanksgiving turkeys. Another is a meditation technique using the mantra "Men Hay Sheen," a sound he likens to the name of West Wing actor Martin Sheen. "The Hindus have been doing this for twenty-five hundred years, and look how smart they are." Les pauses. "Well, I don't know if they are or not. But they're skinny. You ever notice how skinny Hindus are?"

We nod. Yes, we've noticed. Hindus are skinny.

Oh, and we learn one other lesson, the most important lesson of all: if you really want to learn how to read fast, you can enroll in Les's weekend course, where many other secrets will be revealed. That one's only $395.

When I hear that, the clouds part. All becomes clear. Tonight's seminar is just a teasing infomercial for the real--aka expensive--course. Dammit! I toss my G volume manfully into my bag, shaking my head.

As I walk out, I can't resist getting in one sharp dig at Les. I inform him that the first sentence of his xeroxed handout contains a typo. The handout warns that if you read while on automatic pilot, it "wrecks havoc."

"It should be 'wreaks havoc,' " I tell him.

"You think so?"

"I know so."

"No, you're right. W-r-e-e-k?"

"No, w-r-e-a-k."

"You're right. I'll tell my secretary."

I thought that would feel good--showing up Les. But it didn't. It just felt cheap and dirty. I took the number 9 train home annoyed, playing with my Raster Blaster on the subway posters. (Yeah, I'm a sucker; I bought one of the damn things.) For the next few days, I tried to read my Gs using the red dot method. But it felt so dorky and unnatural and awkward, I gave up. I figured that even if I sped up my reading a bit, the total saved time would never equal the three hours I wasted in that class.

General Grant National Memorial

I am desperate for someone to ask me the dusty classic "Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?" Because now I can say, "Ulysses S. is buried in Grant's Tomb, but so is his wife, Julia Dent Grant. Also, it cost a remarkable $600,000 for 1897, and reaches a height of a hundred and fifty feet."

Genghis Khan

I pay special attention to this one, seeing as my father is obsessed with Genghis Khan. His bookshelf has an all-Genghis-all-the-time section that stretches at least a yard, maybe more. I'm sure he knows all the Britannica's facts on Genghis. I'm sure he knows that Genghis was born clutching a clot of blood, which was taken as a sign of good luck. I'm sure he knows that when Genghis conquered the Tartars, he had all Tartars over the height of a cart axle put to death, which reminds me of some horrible, bloody twist on a Disneyland ride. You must be this tall to live.

The Genghis fixation is an odd one, since my dad is the least warrior-like man I know. The most violent I've ever seen him is when he staples a big wad of papers. If my dad were somehow transported back to Genghis Khan's army, he'd no doubt get in trouble for failure to meet his decapitation quota. In all my years, I've never seen him ride a horse, much less hurl a plague-infested body over an enemy wall.

The Britannica's write-up of Genghis doesn't help much in illuminating my father's obsession. To me, the man seems like just another run-of-the-mill pillaging tyrant, if a very successful one. So the question remains: why Genghis? Since my quest is ostensibly to learn everything, I suppose I should try to solve the Genghis mystery as well. Maybe I can--in this year of knowledge gathering--also figure out my dad. So I do something I rarely do: I call my dad and ask him a serious question point-blank.

"I like the way he dresses."

No, really.

"Um, he's a very good dancer. You should see his fox-trot."

I'm not letting my dad off the hook. No, really. I want to know. This is a highly unusual demand in our father-son relationship, and he probably hates it. But after my pleading, my dad does think about it a bit. And finally comes up with two reasons. First, not too many people know about Genghis, so that's appealing to him. And second, despite the tyrant's ruthless and murderous ways, he did help spread civilization--his Pax Mongolia opened trade from East to West.

Now I understand. And the reasons are, in fact, illuminating. My own interests are--not so coincidentally--fueled by similar motives. Just like my dad, I like carving out a quirky, little-explored territory of knowledge. And just like my dad, I'm drawn to counterintuitive information. I feel I have made some progress. I thank my dad, and tell him that I'm not plotting to kill him, the way Genghis's son Jochi did.

George III

The British king ended his sentences "rhetorically and fussily with the repeated words 'what, what, what?' " I considered trying the "what, what, what?" thing out on Julie, especially after we had a fight over where exactly the paper towels should go in the pantry closet, but even I realized it was way too annoying.

gerbil

Some say that the African variety of gerbils carry the bubonic plague. The gerbil--of all rodents--does not need more negative publicity. There's enough antigerbil Hollywood gossip out there.

Gettysburg Address

Like everyone with an IQ over two score and three, I knew the phrase "four score and seven years ago." But I hadn't read the rest of Lincoln's speech since high school. The Britannica printed it in full, and for that I am grateful. It's a beautiful speech, worthy of its reputation. Maybe it's even too good. Lincoln says, "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here." Whereas, in truth, the world did note and did long remember what Lincoln said, perhaps even more clearly than the details of the battle itself. Did I recognize that little irony in high school? I must have, but I had no recollection of it.

Still, that wasn't the most surprising thing I learned (or relearned) about the Gettysburg Address. I learned that despite being president of the United States, Lincoln wasn't the main speaker that day. The big attraction was a two-hour speech by Edward Everett, a former Massachusetts congressman and president of Harvard, who was considered the greatest orator of his day.

Poor Everett. He probably spent weeks working on his speech, tweaking it, trying it out on his wife. On the big day, he went up to the podium, gesticulated and orated and exhorted for two straight hours, mopping his brow, maybe pausing to take some sips of water, finishing with a big rhetorical flourish. He probably thought he blew everyone away. Then Lincoln goes up to the podium. Two minutes later, Lincoln steps down and Everett is a historical footnote, some guy who gassed on before the Gettysburg Address.

Two hours versus two minutes. This is fantastic. Now I've got the perfect historical anecdote to back up my oft-mocked contention that shorter is better. Even 140 years ago, before attention spans shrunk to the size of the pygmy shrew (the smallest mammal, weighing less than a dime)--even 140 years ago, people liked the quick take. I've been on board this bus for years. I can't sit still when a movie drags past ninety minutes. By the time the entrees are served, I'm ready for the check. I have such trouble watching even a half-hour sitcom, I've figured out a secret, which I share with you now: if you put on the closed captioning and press fast forward on the VCR or TiVo, you can still read all the dialogue. I read sitcoms in eight minutes flat. So now, when my colleagues at Esquire make fun of me for preferring the bite-sized item to the four-thousand-word magnum opus, I've got poor old Edward Everett in my quiver. But I've droned on about this topic enough. So let's move on.

giraffe

"The voice has so rarely been heard, that the animal is supposed to be voiceless; but it is capable of low call notes and moans." Good to know next time I'm playing with kids: "A cow says moo, a cat says meow, the giraffe says [imitate nonsexual low moan here]."

glottal stop

In phonetics, this is a momentary stoppage of the airstream, caused by closing the glottis. When those with Brooklyn and Cockney accents pronounce "bottle" as bah-ul, they are using the glottal stop. There's a cruel little irony here--those who use the glottal stop can't even pronounce it correctly. They say "glah-ul stop." I wonder if the people who named the glottal stop did this on purpose, the scamps.

Glyndwr

A district in Wales. Please buy a vowel.

Goethe

Once in a blue moon (a blue moon, by the way, is caused by the dust in the air following a forest fire), I'll read a section or two from the Britannica CD-ROM. Such was the case with the Goethe entry. I was at the office, I had my laptop, I had some rare free time at lunch--the temptation was just too great. I always feel a little cheap afterwards, as if I've had an affair with a younger, flashier woman. I feel like apologizing to my good old crinkly-paper-and-ink volumes when I get home, maybe bring them some flowers.

But anyway, Goethe. Before the Britannica I knew, at least, the semi-proper pronunciation of his name. For a couple weeks in high school, I thought there were two people--a German writer named Gerta that Mr. Bender kept talking about, and some guy named Goethe (Go-eetha) I was reading about in my textbook. I figured out they were the same person when it turned out they both wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther. That was a tip-off even for me.

What I didn't know was Goethe's curriculum vitae. When Goethe wasn't busy explaining to people how to pronounce his name, he found time to be a critic, journalist, lawyer, painter, theater manager, statesman, educationalist, alchemist, soldier, astrologer, novelist, songwriter, philosopher, botanist, biologist, color theorist, mine inspector, and issuer of military uniforms.

Well, at least he didn't supervise irrigation schemes, that slacker. Oh wait. My mistake. He was also a supervisor of irrigation schemes.

I was familiar with the phrase "Renaissance Man," but Goethe is like a Renaissance Man with access to amphetamines. I can't figure out how he fit all these jobs into a single life, much less the one-page single-spaced resume that employers generally request. He makes Leonardo da Vinci look like a lazy bum.

And he makes me extremely jealous. I've always wanted to be a generalist, to snack off the pupu platter of life without committing to any particular entree. In college, I specialized in introductory courses--intro to sociology, anthropology, math, whatever. By senior year, when my friends had all progressed to taking seminars like "The Semiotics of Ornithology in Cervantes's Oeuvre," I was sitting with a bunch of freshmen in "Psychology for Those Who Can Barely Speak English." After college, I became a journalist partly because I could remain something of a generalist. That, and I had no other job offers. But even journalism is a long way from the life of a Renaissance Man. In my ten years in the business, I have yet to do any deep thinking on color theory and I rarely get asked to supervise an irrigation system.

My dad wanted to be a Renaissance Man too, as evidenced by his overabundance of diplomas--diplomas he'd still be getting if my mom hadn't put her foot down and made him get a job.

My dad and I live in the wrong era, apparently. Everyone before the 20th century held at least one second job that had absolutely nothing to do with the first. Witness these actual job combinations I've read about thus far:

poet/meteorologistlawyer/astronomershipowner/sociologistlyricist/mollusk scientisttypographer/puppeteerbuccaneer/scientist

Nowadays, not only do you have to specialize, but you have to specialize within your specialty. There probably aren't any general mollusk scientists anymore. You have to be a Northeastern digger clam reproductive scientist. I suppose my encyclopedia adventure is an attempt to fight the forces of specialization, to reclaim the title of Renaissance Man. But I read about Goethe, and I realize I'd be lucky to have 4 percent of his range, which is sad.

Did I mention that Goethe's writings on science alone fill fourteen volumes? And that he also found time to write fifteen hundred passionate letters to Charlotte von Stein, the wife of a court official whom he had a crush on? I did know enough about Goethe from high school to remember that his Faust was all about the dangers of the quest for knowledge. But judging from his life, he had an insatiable thirst for knowledge and did just fine.

gospel

Sometimes my day job can be exhilarating. I'm thinking, for instance, of when vineyards send me free bottles of wine hoping for coverage in the monthly wine column. That's always interesting. (By the way--in case any vineyard owners are reading this--Esquire's address: 1790 Broadway, 13th floor, New York, NY 10019. I'm partial to sauvignon blanc.) But a lot of times, my workday can be boring. Dull as watching the grass grow, even grass with cool names like creeping bent grass or turkey beard.

This is one of those times. As an editor, I have to read each of the articles in my section about forty-three times, until the sentences are sucked of all meaning and become weird little black marks on the page. Today's article--a man's guide to shining shoes, military style--has long ago passed into the nonsensical state. "Whorl"? That's a strange word, I think to myself. Whore-l. Wore-ell. Wooorl.

But at least the Britannica reading has given me some new perspective on my job. It's given me awareness of the power of editing. I'm thinking, for instance, of the Ems telegram in 1870. Prussian chancellor Otto van Bismarck edited the report of a diplomatic meeting to purposely offend the French and start the Franco-Prussian War. I'm not saying that as an editor, I want to start a war, but it's nice to know I could.

Or better yet, there's the Wicked Bible, which I learned about back in the Bs. This was an infamous edition of the Bible from 1631. The problem? It omitted the word "not" in Exodus 20:14, resulting in the commandment "Thou shalt commit adultery." See that? One small editing error and you get a whole country fornicating with their neighbors' wives.

The average British peasant no doubt read the Wicked Bible and thought to himself: Okay, I'm not going to kill anyone. Won't worship a false idol. I'll make sure to have sexual congress with a married woman. Adultery. Now that's a commandment I can get behind. I wonder if God would rather I beget with Farmer John's wife or Parson Jebediah's wife.

I'm curious whether the editors of the Wicked Bible--who, incidentally, were fined three hundred pounds for their error--made an honest mistake, or if they were playing an immature little practical joke with God's words. Maybe they thought of changing "Thou shalt not kill" to "Thou shalt not spill"--which would have caused a lot of very carefully poured glasses of tea and a few hundred more homicides--but settled on the adultery commandment instead.

I ponder all this as I read Esquire's own shoe-related commandment: use "small circles that tighten the whorl." What if I changed "small" to "large" circles? I'd be sending hundreds of Esquire-reading men into their offices with improperly polished shoes. The power! I cross out the word "small" in the sentence, then stet it, newly aware of my responsibility.

graham crackers

Another in the thousands of forgotten controversies: Sylvester Graham, inventor of the graham cracker, was an eccentric health guru of his day who preached the virtues of hard mattresses, cold showers, and homemade bread. That last one got him attacked by a mob of outraged bakers.

Grateful Dead

I'm no Deadhead--I attended one Dead show, which I found about as interesting as the diagram in the fungi article charting the life cycle of bread mold. Still, I know enough about the classic stoner band to hold my own. I know about Jerry Garcia, LSD-laced punches, Terrapin Station, etc. And I certainly know more than my mom, who called me the day Garcia died to ask me if I knew who "Jerry" was. She came home to a barely coherent ten-minute message on her answering machine from a Deadhead at a gas station. He had just heard the news about Jerry and was apparently too bummed out to dial the phone correctly. In any case, I probably already know everything the Britannica has to say about the Grateful Dead.

I start to read: "In folktales of many cultures, the spirit of the deceased person..." Well, I'm not even through the first sentence and I feel like quite the moron. I had always figured Jerry and Co. had come up with the name the Grateful Dead out of their acid-addled heads. But no, it's a sly allusion. Just so you know, the grateful dead folktale goes like this: A traveler finds a corpse of a man who was denied a burial because he had too many unpaid debts. The nice traveler pays for a burial, and goes on his way. Sometime later, the spirit of the corpse appears to the traveler in the form of an animal and saves him from some danger. Finally, the animal reveals himself to be the grateful spirit of the dead man and offers the traveler two free tickets to Red Rock and some really awesome hash brownies. Well, I embellished there at the end. But you get the idea.

The Grateful Dead bait and switch is not unusual. I have a similar forehead-slapping revelation every few pages, and they always make me feel dumb as a box of extrusive igneous rocks. It's making me paranoid. I'm realizing there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of allusions I'm missing every day. They're hiding everywhere--in my medicine cabinet, on my bookshelf, on my TV screen--just waiting to make me look stupid. I'm not talking about Finnegan's Wake. I wouldn't feel too bad about missing a couple of Joycean allusions to druidic runes. I'm talking about everyday things like Lorna Doone, which I thought was a Nabisco cookie, but turns out to be a famous swashbuckling novel by Scottish novelist Richard Blackmore. Or corvette, which isn't just a car but a small naval vessel.

Sadly, the Grateful Dead isn't even the first band name I learned about in the Britannica. I got the same feeling when I read about Eurythmics--which isn't just Annie Lennox's eighties band, but was originally an early 20th-century method of teaching music involving the tapping of feet and clapping of hands. Or about Supertramp, which came from the title of a William Davies book called The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp.

I'm not up to N yet, but I figure 'N Sync is a revolutionary faction in the Ottoman Empire or something.

grease

Have I gotten across the mind-blowing diversity of everything? Whatever the topic--bottles, lakes, rodents--the Britannica seems to have hundreds and hundreds of varieties you never knew about. It's like discovering for the first time that there's a world beyond chocolate and vanilla, like walking into a Ben & Jerry's-type ice cream boutique to gaze upon its buckets of mango-loganberry sorbets, rutabaga fudge, and so on.

Consider grease. I figured, as I venture most of my friends and family do, that grease is grease. But no, there's a whole marvelous, disgusting world of grease, with endless flavors to choose from. There's white grease, made from inedible hog fat; yellow grease, made from darker parts of the hog; brown grease, containing beef and mutton fats; fleshing grease, from the fatty material on pelts. And don't forget bone grease and garbage grease! And that's just your fat-based greases. You've also got your mineral greases, which consist of a liquid lubricant such as petroleum mixed with soap or inorganic gels. Delicious.

There's always more diversity than you think. Even if you figure you've got a good grasp of a topic, the Britannica still manages to surprise you. Back in high school, I memorized the various ways of classifying organisms: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species--a list I still remember thanks to the mnemonic "King Philip came over from Germany Saturday." So I was feeling pretty good until I got to the Macropaedia entry on biological sciences, where I was disturbed to find out that I knew exactly squat about taxonomy. In addition to my precious phylum and friends, there's also brigade, cohort, section, and tribe. There are also subphyla and superclasses and suborders. You get the idea. There's a lot of freaking diversity.

Since I'm on the topic of taxonomy, let me talk about that for a second. Because here's something I've realized: the Britannica is doing for my mind what Julie has done for the rest of my life. By which I mean organizing it.

As I've mentioned, Julie is the single most organized person in America. She lives in a world of four-color notebooks, Post-it notes, Magic Markers, hanging files, and three-hole punchers. She keeps an Excel spreadsheet charting every movie we've seen, and whether we saw it on DVD, tape, or in the theater. She has, in the past, kept lists of every outfit she's worn and every celebrity she's spotted (Monty Hall in a Tel Aviv hotel!). She still remembers our entire wedding list. One night a few months ago she spent twenty minutes breaking down the guests by first name: five Davids, three Michaels, et cetera. Our kitchen is a thing of beauty. On our counter, there's a three-ring notebook containing the menus of every restaurant that will deliver to our house, organized with color tabs listing the various cuisines. I once pointed out to her that the cuisines were not properly alphabetized; the Italian menus came before the Indian menus. She told me that she had organized it geographically, with the westernmost countries first, and then working east.

At first, I laughed at Julie's organizing fetish. But slowly, over the last couple of years, without even trying, she's converted me. I now put things in folders and make endless lists. At work, I have a four-color notebook of my own, though I hide it whenever my boss comes by my office, since I feel it's embarrassingly unmanly, akin to the practice of putting smiley faces over i's. But it makes me feel better. Everything in its proper place. Life may be chaotic, and the second law of thermodynamics (discovered by Rudolf Clausius) will win out in the end, but we can fight it while we're here.

But back to the Britannica. Thanks to my reading, I feel like my brain is becoming beautifully organized, filled with little hanging folders inside my skull. The Britannica has helped me organize the world into rational categories. It excels at taxonomy. Consider card games. There must be hundreds of them, but the Britannica points out that they all fall into one of two categories: those based on rank (such as bridge) and those based on combinations (such as poker). Maybe this is obvious, and maybe I'm a mouth-breathing moron, but I'd never thought of it. The world of card games suddenly seems more manageable--just two neat categories. Same has happened with cereals (which come in just four varieties: flaked, puffed, shredded, and granular), cakes, fires, types of abbreviation--all sorts of things. Even the subject of taxonomy itself has its own taxonomy, but don't get me started.

Greek system

I shelved my G volume long enough to join Julie at the movies. We chose Old School, a comedy about a bunch of thirty-something guys who start their own fraternity. (By the way, the first true frat was Kappa Alpha, begun at Union College in 1825.) I figured it was a good choice: it had the word "school" in the title, so it sort of related to my quest for intelligence.

We get there half an hour early, as we always do. Usually, this is a smart idea--we avoid getting stuck in the front row and staring at the actors' manhole-sized nostrils for two hours--but in this case, it backfires in a spectacular fashion. As soon as we take our seats, a couple sits down behind us. I take an immediate dislike to the male half of the couple. He is young and cocky and loud as an emu in heat (they have a specially constructed trachea for noisy vocalizations).

He feels it necessary to make a business call on his cell--he works for a record label, I surmise--during which he makes it clear that everyone in his office but him is a complete dimwit who couldn't operate a spoon. He hangs up, and whines to his girlfriend for making him come to this movie, which he knows is going to be stupid. He segues into a complaint about the Grammy Awards, which he has been pressed into attending, the poor man, and which he knows will be chock-full of morons and jackasses (well, maybe he is right about that one). He makes another cell phone call, during which he abuses another colleague. At which point his girlfriend makes--in my mind--the heroic suggestion that he stop treating everyone like peons.

"You don't even know what 'peon' means," says the guy.

"It's a servant or lowly person," says his girlfriend.

Good for her, I think to myself. He thinks differently.

"No, that's wrong," he says. "It has nothing to do with social position."

"What is it then?"

"It means a small person. Small in stature. Like a midget." He has a fine mixture of condescension, confidence, and ennui going.

"Really?" says his girlfriend. "I could swear it's a servant."

"Nope. The actual definition is 'small in stature.' People misuse it all the time."

He is not joking.

A peon is a midget? Is this true? I'm not up to the Ps, so I haven't yet read about peons and yet I am 96 percent sure that he is wrong. I am almost positive that the only thing small in stature is his cerebral cortex. But that 4 percent of uncertainty keeps me from turning around and telling him to please use his cell phone as a suppository device. Well, that and a lifelong aversion to confrontation. I flash to that scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen pulls Marshall MacLuhan out from behind a display and gets him to personally dress down the offending gasbag. I don't need Marshall MacLuhan. All I need is a dictionary.

When Julie and I get home from Old School--which turned out to be entertaining, though a little light on academic rigor--I look up "peon" in my dictionary. No mention of midgets, dwarves, hobbits, or Dustin Hoffman. "Peon" means farm laborer, servant, or poor person. The etymology is from Spanish peon, or peasant, which in turn is from the Latin word for a man who goes on foot.

Another reminder that many of your everyday know-it-alls are complete and total imbeciles. I vow that when I become smart again, I will use my knowledge for good, not for evil--for enlightenment, not for condescension.

Green, Hetty

The Witch of Wall Street they called her. Not a beloved woman. Hetty lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and through clever, and sometimes vulturelike, investments, she became the richest woman of her day. Also the cheapest. She wore shabby clothes, lived in a small apartment in Hoboken, and allegedly refused to hire a doctor to treat her son's hurt leg, a decision that eventually led to its amputation. Which she probably liked, since that meant fewer socks to buy.

Personally, I've never been a cheapskate. I'm not a free spender, mind you, but I do buy decent clothes from midlevel chains like Banana Republic, would probably pay a doctor to save my son's limbs if the kid asked nicely, and unless the waiter spills cappuccino on my lap or tells me I look like Lyle Lovett, have always given a respectable, 15 percent tip.

I'd say I'm right in the middle on the stinginess scale. Or I was. The Britannica has nudged me to be ever so slightly less cheap. For the last few weeks, I've started tipping more, in the range of 20 to 25 percent. That's one clear-cut--if very small--way the Britannica has changed me, probably for the better. I noticed the change after reading about marginal utility theory in the economics section. I probably learned all about marginal utility theory in college, but it didn't sink in, just as most things in college didn't sink in, unless they involved new and more efficient ways to get hammered.

For those foggy on their microeconomics: marginal utility theory says that consumers differ in the amount of satisfaction they derive from each unit of a commodity. When a man with only seven slices of bread gets offered another slice, that one extra slice gives him a lot of happiness. But if a man has a couple of hundred slices of bread--enough bread to keep him waist deep in sandwiches for months--another slice of bread won't send his spirits soaring.

In short, money means more to those who don't have it. I know this verges on common sense. But there's something about seeing it in the Britannica, expressed as a rock-hard economic law, that makes it more powerful to me. So, for instance, today, when I took a cab home in the snow, even though the driver tested my nerves by spending the entire time telling me about his favorite Dunkin' Donuts flavors (he's partial to crullers), I gave him $6 instead of the usual $5. I probably have more money than he does in my bank account, so the dollar will provide him greater happiness than it would me. A simple, logical conclusion. I know it smacks of noblesse oblige, of extreme condescension. But I don't care--it makes me feel better. Of course, the real right thing to do would be to give away 90 percent of my bank account, but what can I do? I like my Banana Republic khakis and my cappuccinos.

Greenland

A mystery solved. I've always wondered why Greenland--which is basically a massive sheet of white ice--is called Greenland. Turns out the country's name was coined by an Erik the Red, who had been banished from Iceland in 982 A.D. for manslaughter. He called his new home Greenland in order to entice more people to join him there. In other words, it was all a shady PR ploy by a felon. Shady, but smart. No doubt he got more takers than if he'd gone with something more accurate, like Bleakland or Depressingland or Youllstarveland.

gymnasium

The literal Greek translation is "school for naked exercise." Which made toweling off the stationary bike even more important.

H

haboob

The haboob is a hot wind in the Sahara Desert that stirs up huge quantities of sand. The sand forms a dense wall that can reach a height of three thousand feet. Jesus. It kind of reminds me of my life. It's my own damn fault, but I've found myself in an information haboob. A dense wall I can't see out of. I'm not even a third of the way to those glorious Zs, and my life consists of work and reading, reading and work, with a little sleep and a bowl of Life cereal in between.

I found a couple of minutes to call my parents for a brief catch-up. My mother spent most of the time telling me about her new crusade against multitasking. She hates when people check their e-mails while talking on the phone. It means they're not listening. "Uh-huh," I told her, "that's interesting," as I opened another of my AOL e-mails.

Hanson, John

He's sometimes referred to as the first president of the United States, thanks to his role as president of the Continental Congress in 1781. The first president wasn't George Washington--that's a good fact to mention at the bar, assuming you want to get kicked in the groin and have your glasses broken.

Harrison, William Henry

The ninth president--or the tenth if you count John Hanson--campaigned by passing out free hard cider to voters. The man basically bought his way into the presidency with booze. It backfired on him, though; he died a month into office.

Harvard

As if I needed reminding that everyone who is important in world history went to Harvard. My alma mater, Brown, isn't a bad school, but when it comes to famous attendees, I can only think of S. J. Perelman, a couple of Kennedys, and, uh, let's see, Kara Dukakis, the daughter of former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, who lived in my dorm and whose roommate had very loud sex in the dorm shower. But Harvard, my God. Presidents aplenty, countless members of Congress, and pretty much every great American writer. The Britannica lists just some of the graduates who went on to literary fame: Henry James, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, John Dos Passos...

Whoa, nelly! Wait just an Ivy League second. Robert Frost as a graduate of Harvard? I flip back to the Fs, because I distinctly remember that--yes, it's true, right there next to his picture--Robert Frost dropped out of Harvard. Attendee, yes. But graduate? I think not, you nutty gold-embossed volume.

This is a very exciting moment for me. In fact, it's embarrassing how exciting this is for me. I find mistakes rarely--maybe once every four hundred pages--but when I do, I feel like an astronomer spotting a comet (perhaps even the Tago-Sato-Kosaka comet, which, by the way, passes by earth only once every 420,000 years). I feel like the middling student with a C average who has somehow busted the smartest kid in the class as he was writing an equation on the blackboard. I still remember fondly when I discovered that the entry on Dvur Kralove, a Czech city, had a backward quotation mark.

And this find is disputable, but I throw it out anyway because it made me proud: The Britannica was discussing grammar, and mentioned something called an "infix," which is a cousin of the suffix and the prefix, except that it occurs inside a word. The Britannica stated that the infix occurs in Greek and Tagalog, but not in English. I somehow summoned up from my college linguistics course the fact that there is, actually, one infix in the English language: "fucking." As in "in-fucking-credible," or "un-fucking-believable," or "Bri-fucking-tannica." It may not be polite English, but it still counts, at least according to my liberal college professor.

Since it's the work of humans--even if they are high-IQ humans--the Britannica has a long history of mistakes. I came across a 1999 Wall Street Journal article by Michael J. McCarthy that gives an entertaining peek at the foibles of fact checking such an immense product. The first edition was particularly riddled with misinformation and half-truths, such as this entry on California: "California is a large country of the West Indies. It is uncertain whether it be a peninsula or an island." Ha! Even your average movie star knows this is absurd, at least after you explain to him the definition of a peninsula.

The EB has since fixed California but other errors have popped up, as readers have been delighted to point out. Apparently, there's a whole group of people--and by people I mean losers--who also comb the Britannica looking for mistakes. The Journal article reports that, for years, the Britannica bought into the widely held myth that the emperor Caligula appointed his horse to the Roman Senate. After researching classical sources at the suggestion of a reader, the Britannica nixed the reference. Caligula's steed never held government office, though he did have an ivory manger and a marble stall, which isn't too bad. Another victim of close inspection: the story of Martin Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to the church door. Turns out he just passed the pages around. The Britannica also caused a hubbub in Scotland recently when its CD-ROM mistakenly reported that the country had no parliament. A British newspaper headlined its article about the gaffe "Encyclopedia Twit-annica." Tough stuff. Of course, not all complaints have merit. One misguided reader wrote the editors an outraged, obscenity-packed missive claiming the Ostrogoths--an obscure medieval ethnic group--did not assimilate, as the Britannica claimed. Perhaps he believed he was an Ostrogoth-American.

To be fair, the Britannica is admirably anal in its attempts at accuracy. The fact-checking department got a photocopy of Houdini's birth certificate to prove he was born in Budapest, not Wisconsin, as he had claimed. And in 1986, they barely avoided a massive factual meltdown. That was the year a disgruntled laid-off editor tampered with the database, inserting a reference to his boss as Rambo and replacing all references to Jesus with Allah--a real howler. When the Britannica threatened legal action, the editor fessed up to all his unauthorized tweaking.

Still, for all their thoroughness, bloopers slip through. And thank God. It's good to know that even the brainiest among us, even the weightiest institutions, make mistakes. Just to be sure on the Robert Frost situation, I run him through Nexis. He did drop out--but later got an honorary degree. Huh. I decide that still does not make him a graduate. Though I could be mistaken.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

I may have known quite a bit about Hawthorne at one point in high school. As an adult, I know only the very basics: (1) He wrote The Scarlet Letter. (2) That letter was A. (3) The book had a sad ending. (And I only remember that last one thanks to Demi Moore. When she turned the book into a movie and slapped a happy ending on it, she justified it by saying, "Not many people have read the book." Which, in my case, was sadly true.)

Turns out that Hawthorne had an unhappy life, even for a 19th-century writer. His dad, a ship captain, died at sea when Hawthorne was four. Hawthorne was weighed down with guilt because one of his forefathers was a judge at the Salem witch trials. He had a complicated friendship with Herman Melville that ended badly--Melville thought Hawthorne was too distant, so Melville wrote a poem satirizing him. Hawthorne was bitter about being fired from his job at the customhouse. And toward the end of his life, "he took to writing the figure '64' compulsively on scraps of paper."

I reread that sentence several times. That's what it says, right there in the encyclopedia--Hawthorne compulsively wrote the number 64 on scraps of paper. There's no explanation, no mention of why he wrote 64 instead of, say, 65 or, even crazier, 63. I'm thinking some ambitious grad student needs to explore this topic and write a thesis called "The Scarlet Number: Hawthorne and the Eschatological Implications of the Repeating 64."

In the meantime, this strange fact stays with me. Maybe it's because I've got plenty of my own compulsions. I don't have any special affinity for the number 64, but I do like to swallow in pairs of two. If I take a bite of a peach, for instance, I make sure to gulp half the pulp in one swallow, but save half of it for a second swallow. Or there's my radio ritual. When I turn off the radio, the last word I hear has to be a noun. No verbs, no prepositions, no adjectives--I need a noun, preferably a good, solid noun, something you can hold in your hands. So I'll stand over my shower radio, dripping, pushing the power button on and off and on and off till I catch Nina Totenberg saying something like "bottle" or "car." Only then can I get out of the shower and get dressed.

I'd prefer to kick these tics altogether, but since that's not going to happen without some time-consuming therapy, I'm delighted to learn about other people's compulsions. So reading the encyclopedia is good for me. It's packed with personality quirks, and we're not just talking the compulsions of John Q. Obsessive. We're talking about the compulsions of the most brilliant men and women in history.

head flattening

This is just what it sounds like: the ritual deformation of the human skull, as formerly practiced by some Pacific Northwest Indians. The desired flat-head effect is achieved by fastening the infant's skull to the cradle board. Some Indians from the Southeast practiced another method: placing a bag of sand against the infant's forehead.

I actually remember head flattening from back in the Bs. It made a cameo in the article on body modifications and mutilations, which, if I may reminisce a bit, was one of the weirdest entries in the Britannica. The variety of ways that humans have found to distort their bodies is truly remarkable. It makes your jaw drop, assuming the jaw hasn't been deformed by some ritual.

Over the centuries, cultures have put bands on various parts of the skull to squeeze it into an hourglass shape. Humans gone to town on their own teeth, chipping them, putting pegs in them, blackening them, carving relief designs into them. The Mayan Indians considered crossed eyes beautiful, and induced the condition by hanging an object between the baby's eyes.

The tongue has seen some rough times, getting slashed (some Australian tribes) and having a cord of thorns pulled through it (the Aztecs). Labia have been elongated. Necks have been stretched like a mound of pasta dough (the Padaung woman wear a fifteen-inch brass neck ring that pulls four vertebrae into the neck).

The breasts have been compressed (in 17th-century Spain), distended (in Paraguay)--and systematically enlarged by the tribe members of the modern United States.

That was a jolt. I was reading along, thinking to myself how mystifying these primitive cultures are with their need to squeeze and pull the human body into contorted shapes. And then, bam--a sentence about gel implants and boob jobs. We're not so different. We're just another of the world's cultures with our own weird fetish--one that happens to involve boobs the size a female blue whale (the largest recorded animal, weighing in at two hundred tons, with a heart of fifteen hundred pounds).

Heisman, John

The man who gave his name to the Heisman trophy was a famed football coach for Georgia Tech. During the off season, however, Heisman supported himself as a Shakespearean actor, a job that inspired him to use Elizabethan polysyllabic language in his coaching (for example, he called the football a "prolate spheroid"). Why aren't there any Shakespearean football coaches nowadays? Now all we get is Bill "the Tuna" Parcells and his love of Henrik Ibsen. Okay, we don't even have that because I made that up. My point is, John Heisman is proof--just in case you needed it--of how far we've slid into dumbness.

heroin

Heroin was first developed by the Bayer company. That'll whisk your headache away faster than a couple of dozen aspirin. Take two syringefuls and call me in the morning. Or late afternoon.

hip-hop

"Influential early deejays include DJ Kool Herc, Grand Wizard Theodore and Grandmaster Flash." I've heard of Grandmaster Flash, but Kool Herc? Grand Wizard Theodore? Holy shit--I don't recognize either. Let me tell you: it's a sad, sad day when the Encyclopaedia Britannica is hipper than you. I'm annoyed I've never heard of those guys. Back in high school, I was actually an early fan of rap music, thanks to the influence of my friend Eric, who called himself M. C. Milano. (Get it? White on the outside, black on the inside.) But obviously, we weren't listening to the authentic stuff, because we missed Kool Herc and Grand Wizard Theodore.

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 methamphetamines. 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, 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 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.

"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.

industrial engineering

Big news. The Britannica has inspired me to change the way I load the dishwasher. The revolution began with a passage on mass production, where I learned the most important thing is to carefully divide the operation into specialized tasks. Namely, "simple, highly repetitive motion patterns and minimal handling or positioning of the workpiece. This permits the development of human motion patterns that are easily learned and rapidly performed with a minimum of unnecessary motion or mental readjustment."

I realized--when I was in the kitchen later that day--that I was doing some serious unnecessary motion and mental readjustment while cleaning up after dinner. I used to scrape a dish, rinse it, put it in the dishwasher, scrape another dish, rinse it, put it in the dishwasher, and so on. Crazy, I know. No specialization, no division, pure chaos.

Now, I've become a beautifully efficient poet of motion. Now, I scrape all the dishes using the same precise swipe of the fork. Only then do I rinse the stack. And after that, I load them all with an economy of motion.

I love it. I am trying to live up to the example of those early 20th-century efficiency experts like Frank Gilbreth, who descended on factories with stopwatches and clipboards. (By the way, Gilbreth had twelve kids, and was the inspiration for the book Cheaper by the Dozen.)

I'm telling you, my new system is faster. I may be wasting a year of my life reading the encyclopedia, but at least I'm shaving time off my daily tasks. Over a lifetime, this method may well save a full two to three minutes.

inherited traits

I've been reading a lot of intriguing theories about heredity recently. The ancients believed in something called "maternal impressions"--that the baby's personality is affected by experiences the woman undergoes while pregnant (this is why Eskimo mothers eat ducks' wings while carrying; they hope to make their babies good paddlers). Aristotle endorsed the theory of telegony, which says that an infant's inborn traits come not only from his biological father, but also from other males who mated with the mother in the distant past. My mom once dated the great-grandson of William Howard Taft, so if I become enormously fat and start supporting higher tariffs, we'll know whom to blame.

But today, I got a close-up lesson in heredity. It happened over lunch with my dad. Since my dad and I both work in midtown, we occasionally meet at a deli for sandwiches.

As soon as we're seated, I start in on him. "Let me see if I've learned enough legal stuff in the encyclopedia to help you with one of your cases."

Dad looks very uncomfortable.

"Just tell me one of your cases and I'll see if I can solve it," I say.

"How about the case of the disappearing waiter. That's a good one to solve."

I could have pushed him but I sensed this one was better left alone. There is that attorney-client privilege thing.

"What about nonlegal questions?" I ask him. "You have any of those?"

"How about 'What are you ordering?' "

"No, like factual questions."

Dad thinks about it for a few seconds, and comes up with one: "-What's the most southern state?"

I pause. Is this a trick question? "Hawaii."

"Yes. Most northern?"

"Alaska."

"Right. Most western."

I try to picture the map of the United States. It's either Alaska or Hawaii.

"Alaska is the most western."

"Good. Most eastern?"

"Maine."

"Nope. The most eastern state is Alaska."

What? That's crazy talk. I give him a disbelieving scowl.

"A couple of the Aleutian Islands cross the 180th meridian. So it's officially the most eastern state."

Huh. I hate to admit it, but that is pretty good.

"Did you get that from the A section back when you read the Britannica?"

"I'm not sure where I picked that up," says my dad.

I'd never pressed him about his recollections of reading the 1974 Britannica. I know he says he didn't remember much, and the Alaska section may not have stuck with him, but there must be something he retained, right?

"I remember most of the words started with A or B," he says.

"Come on, really."

"Not much. A little here and there."

Shit. That doesn't bode well.

"I actually remember more from the World Book set I had when I was a kid," my dad says. "I remember doing a big report on Australia. I really got into Australia, became obsessed with it. I wanted your grandfather to move the family to Australia, and he had to sit me down and explain that he was a lawyer in New York."

This gives me a jolt. Back when I was a kid, I became obsessed with the very same island continent. I used to spend hours tracing maps of Australia with the manic single-mindedness of Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters.

"I loved Australia as a kid too."

"Yes, I remember," says Dad.

I'm not sure how I feel about this information. Could there possibly be a gene that specifies adoration of particular geographical locations? Or did my dad somehow subtly influence me to choose Australia as my beloved continent? Either way, it's left me frazzled. Along with being the smartest boy in the world, I also fancied myself completely unique. I wanted to be totally different from other humans, perhaps spontaneously generated like the primordial giant of Norse mythology formed from drops of water. Which is partly why I chose Australia--I was the only boy in my class who knew his didgeridoo from his dingo. And now, here's more evidence that I'm not different at all. I am practically a replica.

intelligentsia

I've got big weekend plans. After nearly a month of waiting, I will be attending the semiannual Greater New York Mensa Club Regional Gathering in Staten Island.

I invited Julie, since spouses are welcome, but she had a previous engagement involving sitting on the couch and reading magazines. So stag it is. This will be my first Mensa convention, and I'm a bit nervous. Will they be impressed with my knowledge? Will they sense that I weaseled my way in on my measly SATs? Will they spend the whole time talking about bioethics? Will Geena Davis be there?

I did attend one other Mensa event a couple of weeks back--the Fun Friday Dinner at a Chinese restaurant downtown--but it wasn't quite as fun as advertised. I ended up sitting in the corner and had trouble wedging myself into a conversation. The only highlight was watching one Mensan carefully arrange ice around the exterior of his bowl of won ton soup.

"Can I ask what you are doing?" I said.

"It's to cool the soup without having to water it down," he said.

"Oh," I said.

"At home, I use plastic ice balls."

"Why don't you bring the ice balls here to the restaurant?" I said.

"And where would I store them at work all day?"

He was startlingly unimpressed with my intellect. He studied me, no doubt wondering when Mensa began accepting people who spent their childhood eating lead paint. But I had to give it to him: the ice trick was pretty smart.

The convention--officially called "A New York State of Mind"--will be much better, providing me with lots more quality Mensa time. I get up early Saturday morning to try to catch the Staten Island ferry, but end up waiting in the pigeon-filled terminal for two hours. I'm not even leaving New York City, and the trip will take me at least three hours. This puts me in a dark mood. I've already skipped Friday night's activities and don't want to miss more. Who the hell has a convention in Staten Island? I think. That's not very smart. I chuckle to myself at my wit.

I get to Staten Island Hotel just in time for the Mensa pizza luncheon. It's in the Harbor Room, a space with low ceilings, an alarmingly patterned rug, and at this moment, about forty geniuses consuming pepperoni and Almaden wine. No Geena Davis in sight.

I sit down at a round table. My fellow luncheoners are busy rehashing last night's comedy show, which apparently didn't go so smoothly.

"What happened?" I ask.

"It was a disaster," says a woman wearing a denim jacket and very large glasses. "There were hecklers."

"Mensan hecklers?" I ask.

"Yes," she admitted. "Drunken Mensans. They were not acting in a Mensan way."

"What'd they say?"

"They told the female comedienne that she had a nice ass. Instead of saying, 'Nice act,' they said, 'Nice ass.' "

"Oh," I say. I'm annoyed that I have missed crass drunken Mensans. I would have liked to see that.

"It just wasn't very wise," says my friend with the denim jacket and the glass lenses that could fill a submarine porthole. "It ruined the night. It was a nice evening till then."

This wasn't the only controversy of the Mensa convention. I learned that one genius had brought two huge Bernese mountain dogs and one of them had taken a huge Bernese mountain dump outside of the game room, which the owner allegedly had neglected to clean up. So Mensans can be as immature and irresponsible as those with just average IQs. I take a bite of pizza and mull the implications of this.

I notice my lunch mate's convention badge has a circular yellow sticker on it.

"What's the yellow circle for?" I ask her.

"A green circle means, 'Yes, I want a hug.' A yellow circle means, 'As'me before hugging.' "

I look around the room. Everyone's badge but mine has the color-coded circles, which makes me feel a bit left out. I notice one man has a badge with no less than three green circles, which I assume means he wants a hug really fucking badly. He wants a hug like a crack addict wants a fix.

"You don't like hugs?" I ask my friend.

"I'm too small," she says. "I could get crushed. There are just too many fat Mensans."

Well, I didn't want to mention it, but yes. It's true. This group may have big brains, but a shocking number of them also have enormous asses. For every IQ point, they're packing at least two, two and a half pounds. And while we're on the subject, it's worth noting that obesity isn't the only physical problem here. Remember Rene Descartes's fetish? Let's just say he'd be having a ball at the Mensa convention.

After a few more slices of pizza and a couple of plastic glasses of Almaden, I've made several other observations.

1. Mensans love puns. I heard about how the eating of frogs' legs makes the frogs hopping mad. A person who is interested in architecture has an edifice complex. When I met one Mensan who worked in a photo shop, he told me, "It gives me a very negative outlook on life."

"I shudder to think," I responded, which simultaneously earned his respect and made me hate myself a lot.

2. A Mensa convention is not the best place to network for a new job. Not counting the photo shop pun lover, an unusual number of the conventioneers seem to be without steady income. When asked their line of work, many responded in such vague phrases as "I work on projects" or "I do a little of this, a little of that." Eventually I learned that asking, "What do you do for a living" is bad Mensa etiquette, the equivalent of asking the average person, "How often do you masturbate?"

3. Mensans love grand theories. One fiftyish woman explained to me her Bonsai Tree Theory of Human Nature. "Plato has his cave. I have my bonsai tree." I can't repeat her theory here since I have no idea what she was talking about, but it's apparently the equivalent of Einstein's E = mc² for human behavior.

I decide to continue my own study of human behavior in the Mensan game room, which is down the hall in something called the Verrazano Room. Here I find an impressive stack of games: Scrabble, Boggle, Taboo. You name it, they got it. I watch a game where a gray-haired man is trying to get his teammates to guess a word.

"It's a space between two things," he says.

"Interstitial!" shouts a woman.

"No," he says. "A space between two things."

"Interstices!" she tries again. "Interstitial! Interstices!"

"No!" he says.

Time's up. The word was "gap." This makes me happy for some reason. This woman is throwing out four-syllable Latinate words, and the answer is the beautifully simple "gap." Some people, I conclude, try way too hard to be smart.

In another corner of the game room, two Mensans have taken a break from gaming to engage in what seems to be a fierce conversation. I drift over to eavesdrop. Now, I'm not out to reinforce stereotypes here, so I wish I could report that the argument was about post-Clintonian foreign policy or the relative merits of Mozart and Tchaikovsky. But the actual topic of their debate was Star Trek: The Next Generation. Specifically, Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

MENSAN ONE: I just don't understand why Picard is bald.MENSAN TWO: What's the problem?MENSAN ONE: Because wouldn't they have a cure for baldness by the twenty-second century?MENSAN TWO: Yes, they would.MENSAN ONE: So why is he bald?MENSAN TWO: Because it's a personal style choice. He chooses to be bald.MENSAN ONE: I still think it's strange.

Since I'm not a Trekkie, and no one's inviting me to join their game, I wander back to the Harbor Room to see if I can score another pizza slice. I sit down at a table with two men, both of whom have unorthodox hair. The topic, I'm happy to hear, isn't Star Trek. It's calculators.

They compare notes on what words you can spell if you punch in the right numbers and turn the calculators upside down--"Shell Oil", "hello", "hell", et cetera--before one of them takes it to the next level.

"You know what I like to do?" says the guy with the mini pompadour. "I like to get a calculator and ask for the square root of negative one and see what the calculator does."

"What happens?" asks the other guy, who has a beard that is creeping north of the cheekbones and heading for his forehead.

"Depends on the calculator. If it's a good one--over twenty dollars--it'll say it's an error. If it's under twenty dollars, it has a nervous breakdown."

The bearded guy is impressed. That's good calculator information. For the next twenty minutes, I sit quietly as the conversation turns to 20th-century physics. They talk confidently about quanta, wavicles, Max Planck, superstrings, alternate universes, quarks, the double slit experiment. I want to jump in--I know enough physics from my Britannica to keep up--but they never glance my way. I feel locked out.

A brunette woman sits down next to me. Fresh meat. She has just come from the game room.

"Ah, the Verrazano Room," I say. "Giovanni Verrazano."

"Yup," she says.

"You know, he discovered the Hudson River before Henry Hudson."

"No, I didn't."

"On top of that, Henry Hudson was a real bastard. He was so stingy, he took back a gift from a crew member, which led to an uprising. His crew mutinied him. Sent him off to die in a rowboat. So in my opinion, it should be called the Verrazano River, not the Hudson River."

"I hadn't heard that before," says my table mate.

Ha! I look over at the two calculator jocks, hoping they're hearing my knowledge. No acknowledgment. They're still nattering on about Neils Bohr. As for the woman, she's looking around for escape routes. I have succeeded in boring a Mensan.

Lucky for her, someone's just announced that the trivia contest will be starting momentarily in Parlor 902. I'm there. Here, a perfect chance to show off my Britannica-earned knowledge.

Parlor 902 is chock-full of Mensans sprawled on the couch, sitting on the floor, and passing around pencils and paper. "Does everyone have a pencil?" asks the emcee. He looks like he could be an up-and-coming orthodontist in Great Neck--but because job questions are taboo, I'll never know. "Everyone have a pencil?"

Everyone does have a pencil. And so we begin. I'll say this for the Mensan quiz: it's damn hard. A sample question: "Whose last words were 'The world has lost a great artist'?" (Nero, I would learn later.) Another: "What is the meaning of the mnemonic 'Oh be a fine girl kiss me right now sweety'?" (The spectral class of stars.) I would be freaking out about my lack of intelligence if the rest of the geniuses weren't complaining so loudly. "Who the hell wrote these questions!" demanded a woman in the corner who looked to be about the size of a spectral star class K.

If not for the Britannica, I would have gotten maybe one question out of seventeen. But thanks to my diligent reading, I scored a respectable 4.5 out of seventeen, which I hoped might just be enough to give me the victory (the half point came from knowing that Ben Franklin endorsed the turkey as the national bird, though not knowing it was because he considered the eagle "cowardly").

One of my proudest quiz moments was knowing the origin of the phrase "dog days of summer." (It derives from the ancient belief that the Dog Star, Sirius, gives off the heat of a second sun, so when it's rising it causes the weather to be particularly hot.) But I also knew the punishment inflicted on Abelard: castration.

"I don't even know who Abelard was," says the emcee, as he reads the answer. The crowd murmurs and shakes their heads.

"He was an 11th-century Christian theologian," I say. This should have been my big moment--giving a history lesson to a bunch of Mensans who know less than me. But for some reason--acoustics, my tendency to mumble, a combination--no one seemed to hear me.

I say it again. "He was an 11th-century Christian theologian!" Again, nothing.

The emcee is already on to the next question: "The original definition of pedagogue is--"

"HE'S AN 11TH-CENTURY CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIAN!" Not only is my timing off, but the Mensans can sense the anger and bitterness in my voice. They are frightened. The emcee pauses and makes a mental note to put me on the handle-with-care list, right next to the guy who didn't clean up the crap of his Bernese mountain dog. Then he continued.

In the end, I lose to a guy who scored seven. He is a cocky dweeb with a haircut in the shape of a wedge and the posture of a proboscis monkey. He doesn't even acknowledge my respectable 4.5.

Soon after, I find myself on the Staten Island ferry, returning to my life on Manhattan with non-Mensans. I am in a sour mood, and not just because I've lost the genius trivia contest. After a day of intensive Mensa, I feel annoyed at the club for being so elitist and self-congratulatory--and angry at myself for so desperately wanting to be a part of it. That feeling, in turn, is tempered by pity, seeing that many of these people are even more socially maladjusted than I am, and definitely more in need of career counseling. That is then colored by bitterness, since they'd probably pity me if they knew that I sneaked in on my SAT scores.

The convention, I decide, brought out an unattractive side of me. I'm thinking in particular of my final few minutes, when a fellow Mensan and I were approached by a guy from New Hampshire who happened to be staying at the hotel and who had a question for us.

"You guys with that Mesna?" he asked.

"Yes, Mensa," said my fellow genius.

"Okay, I have a serious question for you: what is the fancy name for an outhouse?"

"Water closet?" I offered up.

"No, it wasn't that. It begins with P. I heard an interview with this archaeologist on the radio. He digs up old outhouses, and they used this word."

"Privy," my fellow genius said.

"Yes! That's it!" said the New Hampshire man.

"That's why they call it the privy council in governments," the genius said, following the Mensa bylaw that all conversations must include a pun.

The New Hampshire man was satisfied and wandered off, at which point my fellow Mensan and I laughed and shook our superior heads. Oh, the regular people. Aren't they silly with their lack of synonyms for plumbing? Yes, maybe. But at least they don't need stickers to decide whether or not to hug.

intercourse

Julie and I, in our quest to get pregnant, are having an awful lot of sex. The rumor is that sex is supposed to be fun, but we've long since passed that phase. We have purposeful sex. For us, sex is about as entertaining as taking the crosstown bus--it's merely a vehicle to take us where we want to go. This doesn't seem fair. Why can't there be a more even distribution of sex throughout a man's life? Why couldn't I have had some of this sex when I really needed it, like during some dry stretches as a single man in my twenties? Instead, it's all clumped up in my mid-thirties, like a steep bell curve, proving too much of a good thing is exhausting. At times, I wish Julie were like a queen bee, which has sex only once in her life, but stores the sperm in a pouch for use throughout the next five years.

Tonight, though, I'm going to put some spice back into our sex life. Julie is in bed already, reading her novel. At about ten-thirty, I lay down my Britannica and come into the bedroom. I stand at the foot of the bed and start stomping my feet--left, right, left, right--then pointing my head at the ceiling. Julie looks up from her book.

"What's going on here?"

"Are you getting turned on?" I ask.

"Oh, I'm hot."

I stomp my left, then right, foot again. "It's the mating dance of the blue-footed booby. It's called sky pointing. I thought you'd like it."

"Yes, it's extremely arousing."

"Perhaps you'd prefer a visible dung heap, as left by rabbits to indicate they're ready to mate?"

"Uh, how about you just come here and get me pregnant."

"Fair enough."

I climb into bed and we get down to business. Julie stops kissing me for a second, pulling her head back.

"Are you thinking about the Britannica?" she asks.

"No," I say. Which is a lie. Because I am thinking about it. I can't help it. Even in this, the least cerebral of pursuits--not counting the Jim Belushi show--I'm mulling over my new knowledge. I'm thinking about how damselflies mate in the air and amphibians have sperm packets and female button quails sleep around. I'm thinking about how engaged couples in Scotland were allowed in the same bed--but were sewn up in separate sleeping bags (the practice is called bundling). I'm thinking how male and female bony fish have sex organs oriented either to the right or left and that only opposite-oriented individuals can mate and that it'd be really sad if a male bony fish with a left-oriented penis fell in love with a female bony fish with a left-oriented vagina.

Julie returns to kissing me. She knows I'm lying, but she's come to accept it.

Iraq

It's clearer and clearer that we're going to war with Iraq. I half expect our TV Guide to give a time and day so we can program our TiVo to record it.

I'm extraordinarily stressed out about it. It's going to be ugly. I said over drinks with my colleagues the other night that I fear this war will open a Pandora's box of terrorism. (Though I wanted to say Pandora's jar; that's what the EB calls it, a jar, not a box, but I thought they'd look at me funny, so I stuck with box.)

I spend my little free time worrying and clicking on Yahoo! to check the terror alert level, and figuring out ways to avoid taking the subway.

Julie tells me to stop wasting my time. The worrying doesn't help anyone. She tells me I could either sign up for the marines or else join one of those protests where they throw Dumpsters through McDonald's windows. Then at least I'd be doing something. But fretting about terrorism doesn't help anybody. She's right, and I know it, but still I can't stop. I'm addicted to worry.

I was hoping the EB would help me come up with a clear solution for the Iraq crisis--or at the least clarify my opinion about the war. But that's just not happening. I read the twenty-five-page Macropaedia article about Iraq just now. I know a lot about those 167,975 square miles in the eastern Arab world--at least until the Ebbinghaus curve kicks in. I know it was called Mesopotamia until the 7th century. I know that aside from oil, date palms are its major export. That Baghdad has red double-decker buses, a holdover from the British occupation. I know there was a fertilizer shortage until 2000. That there's a big monument to Ali Baba's housekeeper in Baghdad. I know the Tigris and Euphrates formed one of the early cradles of civilization--which, I figure, might make for some nice closure; the world started there and might end there. And I have some historical perspective on the war: I know that this land has been sacked just about every other year for the last eight hundred years. Oh, it's Tuesday, time for another upheaval in Iraq. I know, most pertinently, about the Christian-Islamic feud that stretches back before the Crusades.

But how should we deal with Saddam? That I don't know. Frankly, I'm not sure what I was expecting. Was I expecting the Britannica to finish the Iraq entry by saying, "Plus, the United States should not go to war with Iraq because it would be a disaster"? Or, "In conclusion, nuke 'em"? Still, I'm disappointed. I suppose it goes back to something I was reading about in the ethics entry. There is a gap between "is" and "ought." The facts are on one side of the canyon. And there, on the other side, across the river, are your ethical options. No logical syllogism can bridge the two.

The only thing I can say for sure is this: we should all go back to the type of warfare practiced by many Native Americans--counting coup. Back then, warfare was sort of an elaborate game of tag. The touching of one's enemy was considered the greatest coup. Not scalping, not murder, but touching them. That I'd like to see. General Tommy Franks going into Baghdad, poking Saddam in the ribs, then running away laughing victoriously.

irony

The French horn is from Germany. The Great Dane has no relation to Denmark. Cold-blooded animals often have warmer blood than warm-blooded animals. Softwood is often harder than hardwood. Catgut is made from sheepgut. Caesar was not born by cesarean section. A cold is not caused by the cold (Ben Franklin pointed this out). Death Valley is teeming with life (more than two hundred types of birds, several types of fish, and so on). Heinz has several hundred varieties, not its advertised fifty-seven. Starfish are not fish. The electric eel is not an eel. The anomalous Zeeman effect in atomic physics is more common than the regular old Zeeman effect.

These are all things I've been keeping in my little "Ironic Facts" file on my computer. Irony is named for "the Greek comic character Eiron, a clever underdog, who by his wit repeatedly triumphs over the boastful character of Alazon." But the stuff above is a different kind of irony. These ironies are a function of our ridiculously imprecise language. I feel we need someone to come in and clean it all up, a Rudy Giuliani of English who would crack down on all lazy, loitering, leftover-from-other-eras words. But that'll never happen. As I learned in Fahrenheit, the inertia of bad ideas is a powerful force.

J

Jackson, Reggie

Reginald Martinez Jackson of Wyncote, Pennsylvania. My hero. Back when I was a Yankees-obsessed prepubescent, I loved my Reggie Jackson. I had my Reggie posters, knew my Reggie stats, ate my Reggie candy bars, even though they tasted like fourth-rate Snickers and looked like a clump of guano from the Peruvian cormorant (an effective fertilizer).

I'm glad to see the Britannica has written him up, since my other favorite Yankee--Bucky Dent--didn't rate a mention. It's a joy to read about Reggie in these illustrious, oversized pages and how he played for Arizona State, joined the A's, excelled as a base runner, and in the momentous year of 1977, signed a five-year contract with the New York Yankees and smacked a record three home runs in a World Series game.

I remember that World Series game. I was there. This is the only piece of history in the encyclopedia that I actually got to witness live and in person. I wasn't at the Battle of Waterloo. I missed the Crusades. But I did see Reggie Jackson play that epic sixth game of the 1977 World Series at Yankee Stadium. Well, almost.

Here's what happened. When I was nine, Dad somehow scored tickets to the big game. My parents were no sports fans, but they wanted to give me an all-American childhood, so once in a while they'd suck it up and take me to the stadium. So there I was, with my mitt on my left hand, my Yankees yearbook on my lap, gloriously giddy.

My hero, Reggie, steps up to the plate in the fourth inning, and bam, hits a home run. Sails it over the right field wall. Awesome. The very next inning, crack! Another home run. Unbelievable. I'm in heaven. Two home runs! And then--Dad decided it was time to leave and beat the traffic. We wouldn't want to be jammed into a subway with all the other people, right?

"But Dad, what if Reggie hits another home run?"

"Oh, he won't," Dad assured me, as he tugged me out of the packed stands.

We were on the subway platform when we heard it--a stadium-shaking roar from the crowd. A roar like I'd never heard before. Reggie had hit his third home run. History had been made. People would be talking about that homer forever. And I would not be speaking to Dad for several days. Though we did have the subway all to ourselves, which was nice.

My attendance at two-thirds of this historical event is in one sense disappointing--like leaving Iwo Jima right before the flag was planted. But it also makes makes me think that I had an impact, ever so slight, on the Britannica. If I hadn't been cheering so dutifully in the stands, Reggie might not have hit those two home runs. The third I can't take credit for, as we know.

Incidentally, the Reggie era was about the last time I really had a handle on sports. I think I know less about current professional athletics than any fully functioning man in the United States, including your average Amish dairy farmer (who, by the way, runs a very high risk of inheriting knock-knees, also known as dysplasia).

I'm not 100 percent certain why I lost interest in sports back when I was fourteen. I don't think the World Series incident had much to do with it. My theory is this: I began to recognize the vast gap between my enthusiasm for sports and my ability to play them. So I stopped paying attention.

After twenty-one years, it's gotten embarrassing. I go to meetings at Esquire, and they'll talk about the weekend's games, and I have to avoid all eye contact in hopes I won't get called on. I'll be studying a particularly interesting floor tile, and my friend Andy, who knows that my sports awareness ended in 1982, will say, "Hey, A.J., did you see Graig Nettles hit a double this weekend?" And then everyone will crack up. I feel as emasculated as a crab after an encounter with a barnacle (barnacles consume crab testes).

As any high school football coach will tell you, the best defense is a good offense. So that's what I've started to do. I can't compete with other men on this year's stats or trades. I don't even know the names of the more obscure expansion teams (the Guam Jaguars? the Lynxes? the Cheetahs?). But thanks to the Britannica, I can thrash my fellow men in the history of sports. When the topic of sports comes up, I just make some noises about how athletics today are such a dirty business, just an extended Gatorade commercial. I much prefer sports from times gone by.

If it's baseball: The very first games had a second catcher behind the regular catcher, whose job it was to field foul balls. Also, before the New York Yankees, there were my favorites, the New York Highlanders and the New York Mutuals.

If it's football, I say: The 1905 college season was so violent, no fewer than eighteen players died from injuries on the field. Teddy Roosevelt called a presidential commission to investigate. From that came the legalization of the forward pass.

If the topic is tennis: Long before the Williams sisters, the Doherty brothers dominated the sport. They ruled from 1897 to 1906--and one brother lost only two matches in four years.

The reaction varies from mild interest to perplexity. But that's better than ridicule. If it were baseball, I'd call it an infield single as opposed to a strikeout.

Jacobs

I'm no more narcissistic than most Americans. Well, maybe a little more narcissistic. I get an embarrassing amount of pleasure from entering my own name into Google and seeing what turns up. So here we have six pages of Jacobses, which promise to be excellent reading for me. They start with the father of all of us Jacobses--Jacob of Bible fame. I had forgotten that he was so duplicitous (he stole his brother Esau's birthright by impersonating Esau to his blind father), which taints my name for me just a bit. But I forge on.

There was urbanologist Jane Jacobs and folklore scholar Joseph Jacobs. But even more impressive, there were no less than three Jacob movements: the Jacobins (French revolutionary extremists), the Jacobites (supporters of the exiled King James II) and the Jacobean Age (referring to art produced during the reign of King James I). I was happy to learn that Shakespeare, in his later tragedies, is considered a Jacobean playwright, which somehow, in my mind, makes Shakespeare and me related. Two Jacobean writers, me and the Bard.

In my defense, I'm not interested only in those who share the name Jacobs. I keep track of other name coincidences, as well. In the fishing entry, I learned about a Kalamazoo man who, in 1896, invented a revolutionary type of fishing reel. His name was...William Shakespeare. Yes, just like the Jacobean playwright. This man's parents must have had quite the sense of humor. They must have thought: "What name can we choose for our son that will ensure that he will (a) be mocked until long after puberty, and (b) always have a nice sense of failure about him, because he'll never be able to live up to the other guy?" Well, they dost hit the mother lode!

There's more. Kathy Bates was an Oscar-winning actress who hammered James Caan's ankles, but she also, apparently, wrote the text to "America the Beautiful." And the National Enquirer? No need to be ashamed to read it anymore. Back in the 1800s before the Civil War, there was another National Enquirer--a famous abolitionist newspaper that had very few articles about Jennifer Lopez's love life. So you could always say you got confused, that you thought you were buying an antislavery publication at the checkout line.

I'm not sure why I'm fascinated by these name coincidences. I don't think they reveal anything excessively profound--except maybe that names are imprecise and repetitive and arbitrary. But whatever the reason, it's another interest that I inherited from my father.

A few years ago, I was working with a friend named Albert Kim at Entertainment Weekly. My father was working at his law firm with an associate named...Albert Kim. So my father arranged a lunch between the two Albert Kims and the two Arnold Jacobses. In theory, it seemed like a good idea. We got to the restaurant, and the two Albert Kims greeted each other and we all had a nice laugh. And then they asked each other their respective middle names. And then...it became quite clear they had pretty much nothing else in common besides their first and last names. And we hadn't even ordered the entrees. It didn't become an annual event.

James, Jesse

The greatest robber of the Wild West died in 1882. He was shot in the back by a gang member while he was at home "adjusting a picture." That doesn't seem right. Being shot in the back is bad enough, but while adjusting a picture? A notorious bandit shouldn't end his life engaging in interior design. Well, at least he wasn't crocheting throw pillows.

Jefferson, Thomas

More confusion. With Jefferson, I'm seeing the flipside of the Attila the Hun effect. Just as Attila had his good side, even the most amazing, accomplished, original, justice-loving men have their dark side. I knew about Jefferson's hypocrisy on slaves, which is evil enough to fill a couple of lifetimes. But it also says here that Jefferson paid newspaper reporters to libel his nemesis John Adams. That I didn't know about. What a horrible fact. Do people have to be sleazy to succeed? I hope not, but if even Jefferson does, it makes me wonder.

In other news, Thomas Jefferson had very clean feet. Every morning, he rose at dawn and washed them in cold water.

joke

It's April Fool's Day today. The timing of April Fool's Day, by the way, seems related to the vernal equinox, when nature "fools" mankind with sudden changes in the weather. The victim of the practical joke is called a fish in France and a cuckoo in Scotland.

At work, people aren't quite as interested in these facts as they are in the question of who left plastic dog poop on all the editors' chairs.

Jonson, Ben

I knew a lot of things could save your life--a helmet, a good lawyer, cholesterol medication--but this one was new to me: the ability to read Latin. If you know your E Pluribus from your Unum you'll live a lot longer. At least if you're an accused criminal in 16th-century England, as was Ben Jonson.

I remembered Jonson vaguely--he was the second most successful Elizabethan playwright after Shakespeare, the Pepsi to the Bard's Coke. What I didn't know was that he was a rascal--an angry, stubborn man with a homicidal temper. In 1598, the same year he had his first big hit play--Every Man His Humour--Jonson killed a fellow actor in a duel.

The strange part, though, is how he escaped capital punishment. The accused playwright invoked a legal loophole called "benefit of clergy." The concept of benefit of clergy started in 12th-century England when the church convinced the king to offer immunity to priests and other ecclesiastical officials. By the 16th century, however, the definition of "clergy" had stretched to include anyone who could read the Fifty-first Psalm in Latin.

On the one hand, this is a crazy law--elitist, unjust, arbitrary. On the other hand, it's kind of nice that reading and scholarship were once so highly valued that they had the very tangible benefit of stopping a hatchet from removing your head from your shoulders. It's beautifully clear-cut: You read Latin, you live. You don't read Latin, you'll soon be experiencing a nice case of rigor mortis (though you won't know the definition of rigor mortis, you illiterate jackass).

juggling

You should know that juggling has gone through historical stages. Nowadays, your top jugglers tend to stick to three or four balls, but do their juggling from unusual and surprising places--on horseback, or on a unicycle, for example. This as opposed to 19th-century juggling, when ball quantity was king. The more the better. Back in the 1800s, Enrico Rastelli made a name for himself by juggling with ten balls, which the Britannica calls "an almost miraculous accomplishment."

I admire Enrico. He's my kind of man, and ten-ball juggling, that's my kind of accomplishment. Enrico's a welcome break from the usual Britannica fare. I get dejected reading page after page of men who created vaccines or opened trade routes. I know I'll never do anything like that. I just don't have it in me. But I can see myself doing something along the lines of Enrico. A lesser accomplishment, one that doesn't save lives or change the world, but nonetheless makes people marvel and say, "Now that is impressive." Or else, "Jesus, what a massive waste of time."

There are a handful of these types sprinkled throughout the encyclopedia. Like Peter Bales, a 16th-century Brit who was famous for his microscopic writing, and produced a Bible the size of a walnut. Or Blondin, a tightrope walker in the 1800s, who tiptoed across Niagara Falls, stopping in the middle to make and eat an omelet. Admittedly, that's not my thing, especially if the omelet wasn't egg white. But still, I love Blondin's passion and commitment.

And now, for the first time in my life, I'm feeling the same passion and commitment. I've got my own quest, one that causes a handful to marvel, and far more to ask me, "What the fuck?" I know my accomplishment of reading the Britannica won't get me into the Britannica itself. But it's a start. And maybe next time I can conquer something even more impressive, like reading the walnut-sized version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

jujube

Julie's throwing an Oscar party. Not just a haphazard, casual Oscar party. This is serious Oscar party. This is the most well-organized Oscar party on the Upper West Side. Movie posters suddenly appear on the walls. Fake Oscar statuettes frame the television. There are prizes, pools, Oscar trivia. The tables fill up with Junior Mints, Twizzlers, popcorn, Jujubes (the name Jujube, I learn, comes from a plum-sized Chinese fruit. The etymology of candy--another gap in my education I didn't even know I had).

If you attend Julie's Oscar party, you should come prepared. All the twenty guests are encouraged to wear costumes that represent a movie that was released that year. Julie has selected a red devil outfit and an accompanying pitchfork; she's Far from Heaven. My costume is a little less elaborate. I've got on jeans and a T-shirt and plan to sit silently in the corner. I'm The Quiet American.

An hour before the guests arrive, Julie flips on all three of the TVs. She likes to have each of our TVs going just in case anyone happens to be walking through another room. She doesn't want them to miss a single self-congratulatory moment. It gave me a little thought.

"We should do a past posting scam," I say, as I arrange the Twizzlers in a bowl.

"What?"

"Past posting--it's a scam I read about in the con game section. I'll watch the Oscars on the office TV, and you and the guests can watch on TiVo in the living room. But the trick is, you delay the broadcast a few minutes on TiVo. So I'll know who won before you do. And I'll saunter in and bet on the categories and we'll win hundreds of dollars. You know, like in The Sting."

"Is that what they did in The Sting? I saw it when I was young and never understood it."

"Yeah, well sort of. But they faked the whole thing. But that's the idea."

"And they didn't have TiVo."

"Right, no TiVo in The Sting."

"Past posting--that's interesting."

Ha! She liked that one. Nothing better than that. I love having her on my side. Maybe I should confine my facts to ones that help illuminate the plots of old movies.

The party went off splendidly, though Julie did put the kibosh on my scam because she didn't want me ruining the surprise for her. A reasonable if costly decision.

Julie

Sandwiched between Julich (a duchy of the Holy Roman Empire) and Julijske Alpe (the Alps that run near Slovenia), there's a little note in blue ballpoint pen. It reads: "Where's Julie?"

I laugh out loud when I read this. Julie has snuck into my J volume and done some defacing. I go into the living room and tell her that she's probably under her maiden name, Schoenberg, and they just haven't had time to update it.

jump rope

It's about midnight, and Julie's asleep. I'm in the extra bedroom, getting my daily dose of knowledge, my butt planted on the white couch, my feet kicked up on the coffee table, reading about jump rope's most popular chants (as in "Apples, peaches, pears and plums / Tell me when your birthday comes").

I look up for a second, and I see it silently cruising across the light blue rug. A cockroach. A German cockroach, to be precise, sometimes erroneously called a water bug. It's one of the most primitive living winged insects, basically unchanged for 320 million years.

And it's about to die.

I take my J volume--I should have grabbed volume 16 of the Macropaedia, the one that says Chicago-Death on its spine; that would have been more appropriate, but I didn't have time to be witty. I hold my Britannica at shoulder height and drop it, like the payload from a B-17 bomber (a plane so big it was called the Flying Fortress). It lands with a satisfying thud.

I pick up the book, and am annoyed to see the determined little vermin has survived the assault. It just keeps cruising along like a tiny tank, heading toward the safety of the radiator.

This time I slam the Britannica down and mash it into the floor with my foot. Victory! I must say, the Britannica's leatherette covers are very easy to wipe down. No bug juice stains at all. So at the very least, even if the whole knowledge thing is a bust, the encyclopedia has come in handy as pest control.

I get a lot of that--people telling me the different uses for their encyclopedias. My cousin hurt his wrist while playing squash, and his doctor prescribed physical therapy with the encyclopedia. Another friend said that when he was young, he drove his parents crazy by using a volume of the Britannica as a drum in a makeshift percussion set.

I recently read an article that said that explorer Ernest Shackleton lugged the entire eleventh edition with him on his expedition to Antarctica. (So I can never whine when I lug one onto the downtown number 9 subway). In any case, Shackleton, while stranded over a freezing winter, ended up using the Britannica's pages for kindling.

Which makes me realize there's something great about the physicality of the Britannica. It's not disembodied information, not a bunch of encoded 1s and 0s on a microchip the size of an Indian mung bean. It's a big old-timey book, a massive object that can squash bugs and light fires and make thuds. I know I sound like a crotchety old grandfather on the porch reminiscing about the good old days of rumble seats, but I believe in pages you can actually turn.

K

Kafka

There are few things more annoying than a busybody friend, the kind who thinks he knows what's best for you and ignores your wishes.

Like Albert. Several years ago, when we were both working at Entertainment Weekly, I confided to him that I had a crush on an ad sales girl named Julie Schoenberg. But, I said, that is strictly confidential; you cannot tell a single person, especially Julie. Which he interpreted to mean: "Please, feel free to tell anyone at all, especially Julie."

Within two hours of my confession, Julie and Albert were behind closed doors, dissecting my crush and laughing.

The only thing more annoying: when your friend turns out to be right. If Albert had honored my wishes for secrecy, I probably would never have acted on my crush. I'd still be single, lonely, and have no idea what a sconce is, much less have several in my home.

All this was on my mind as I was reading about Kafka, who had the biggest busybody friend in Western history.

First, some relevant background on Kafka. As I figured from what little I knew, Kafka had some self-esteem issues, most of which came from having a tyrant of a father. So Kafka, unable to commit himself fully to literature, got his doctorate in law and found a day job at an insurance company. While at law school, Kafka met a minor novelist named Max Brod. The two became lifelong friends.

While he was alive, Kafka halfheartedly agreed to have some of his strange stories--including Metamorphosis--published by avant-garde literary publications. But on his death from tuberculosis at the age of forty-one, full of misgivings about his work, Kafka left Brod a very clear note: Destroy all unpublished manuscripts. Which Brod interpreted to mean, "Publish all unpublished manuscripts." He even somehow interpreted it to mean "Become Kafka's posthumous publicist, biographer, interpreter, and archivist." If not for Brod, we would never have known The Trial, The Castle, or Amerika, to name a few.

After reading about Kafka, I decide I'm going to call my friend Albert and tell him to burn my unfinished manuscripts when I die. He'll know what to do.

Kama

An Indian angel who shoots love-producing flower arrows. His bow is of sugarcane, his bowstring a row of bees. I have to say, Kama with his fancy bow and arrow makes our Cupid look kind of second-rate in comparison. Cupid just flies around in a diaper shooting regular old love arrows. It is odd, though, that two cultures have these love archers. Does this say something profound about the human mind? Maybe about violence and love? The damn Britannica raises these questions in my mind but doesn't answer them.

kappa

The strangest type of supernatural being I've encountered so far: a "vampirelike lecherous creature" from Japan that's obsessed with cucumbers, resembles a green monkey with fish scales, and refuses to lower its head for fear of spilling the magic water it keeps in the holes on top of its skull. I don't know who came up with this, but I can almost guarantee those weren't shiitake mushrooms he was eating.

katydid

This member of the grasshopper family is named for its unique mating call, which sounds like a psychotic witness: "Katy did, Katy didn't, Katy did, Katy didn't."

Kennedy, Edward M.

If Reggie Jackson's home run spree was the only piece of history I witnessed, here we have the only person in the Encyclopaedia Britannica whom I've actually met. I never had the pleasure of chatting up Aristotle or Balzac, but Ted Kennedy and I have shared a firm handshake and some good times. Or a firm handshake, anyway.

I met him at my friend Douglas Kennedy's bachelor party. Douglas is one of the many children of the late Robert Kennedy, and he was my roommate at college. Douglas had his bachelor party a few years ago at a steak house in Boston. I flew up from New York, and arrived at the restaurant an hour and a half early. When I walked inside, I found that only one other guest was there ahead of time: Senator Kennedy. Ninety minutes with Ted Kennedy. Alone.

Some might see this as a wonderful opportunity to talk to a living legend, to probe his mind about politics and history, triumph and tragedy. I saw this as a wonderful opportunity to mumble, laugh nervously, and toss out a half dozen baffling non sequiturs. I'm not very good with powerful people. If I had known he was going to be there, I'd probably have loitered at the airport T.G.I. Friday's for ninety minutes. But there I was with Doug's uncle, the host of the party, drinking vodka tonics.

He asked me what I did for a living. I told him I worked at Entertainment Weekly magazine. I could see from the quizzical look on his face that he wasn't a longtime subscriber. In fact, he wasn't a huge fan of pop culture at all. Didn't spend a lot of time in Dawson's Creek chat rooms. But he tried. He brought up Seagram's Universal and how they were doing post-merger.

As for me, on the other hand, I knew about Dawson and his love triangle. But I knew squat about which conglomerate was having balance sheet woes. Dead end.

He brought up yachting. Another topic where I didn't know my yardarm from my winch. So that sputtered out after about three minutes. I'm honestly not sure how I got through the next eighty-two minutes. I know we spent a good amount of time enjoying the sounds of the restaurant's air conditioner and clinking silverware. But the rest is hazy. When Douglas finally walked in, I experienced something similar to what I imagine Jessica Lynch felt when those marines burst into the hospital.

The senator--who, as it turned out, was a friendly, big-hearted fellow when around those with social skills--never caught my name, but I did score a couple of points for being punctual. In fact, that became my identity: Punctual Guy. The rest of the weekend, whenever the senator saw me, he shouted, "It's the Punctual Guy!" At the photo shoot, he suggested to the Punctual Guy that he stand over here. At the rehearsal dinner, he gave a hearty hello to the Punctual Guy.

If I met the senator now, I think I'd fare a lot better. I now know a bit about health care reform and fair housing. Though I might not bring up how the Britannica says his "somewhat raffish personal life" dimmed his presidential prospects.

Kentucky

Julie's family's visiting again--they love to visit, these people--and her nephew Adam will be staying the night. I've been assigned to inflate the air mattress for him. It's not an easy assignment.

I've spent a good fifteen minutes pushing and pulling the little bicycle pump that attaches to the mattress, but I've made disturbingly little progress; the mattress still looks as wrinkly as a large raisin or a senator from one of the Carolinas. The problem seems to be that the air hose doesn't properly fit over the mattress's hole, and so the air keeps hissing out. My father-in-law, Larry, is watching the proceedings from a comfortable chair. He decides to chime in, telling me: "You got book-learning, but you got no street smarts, boy!" (He's from the Bronx, but for some reason likes to affect an Alabama twang.)

I thank him for his insight, then go back to my pumping. My forehead is damp, I think I've lost a couple pounds so far, and the air keeps wheezing out of the mattress. "You should spend more time reading the instruction manual and less time on the encyclopedia, boy!"

This is not an unusual comment. Over the past couple of weeks, I've begun to sense the monumental amount of crap that I'm going to receive for the rest of my life (an amount somewhere between John Adams's famous mound of manure and the debris that Hercules had to clean at the stables of King Augeas). Anytime I have a bit of trouble in the mechanical department--working a microwave, opening a lock, downloading a file at work--someone will say, "What's the matter? That not in your fancy encyclopedia?" Anytime I don't know the directions to Yonkers or whether there's a gas station nearby or when the next bus leaves, someone will say, "Guess you don't know everything after all, huh, Cliff Clavin?" Anytime I don't know the secretary of state under Eisenhower or the capital of Kentucky, someone will say "Hey, I thought you knew everything!" (That'd be John Foster Dulles and Frankfort, by the way.)

And yes, I did finally inflate the mattress. Well, halfway, anyway. But I tell Adam that it's more comfortable that way, and he believes me.

Khnum

Still trying to get pregnant. The fertility god of the week is Khnum, the Egyptian diety with a human body and a ram's head. Julie and I gave a little nod to him last night before dinner, though we don't know how to pronounce his name. (The Britannica, sadly, doesn't have phonetic guides.) Meanwhile, our non-Egyptian helper--Julie's ob-gyn--has recommended I get my sperm tested. Which is why I'm at a reproductive clinic studiously avoiding eye contact with the other people--mostly women--in the waiting room.

I check in with the receptionist.

"Yes, you're here for a collection," she says chirpily.

I like that euphemism--a collection. So that's what I spent so much time doing as a high schooler: collecting. I was much more dedicated to this type of collection than to my coin collection and the drink stirrer collection combined.

The nurse leads me into a room specially suited to collecting and hands me a small plastic specimen cup.

"If you need any help, feel free," she says. She points out a basket of pornos--not Playboy or Penthouse, but the really skanky variety, the kind with sweaty men and women engaging in what the Britannica might classify as coition, really nasty types of.

Speaking of the encyclopedia, I'm relatively confident that I am the only man to ever bring a Britannica volume into this room. It's in my computer bag, and I briefly consider taking it out.

Though it's probably not nearly as much "help" as the magazines in the basket, the Britannica does have a surprising amount of nudity. And not just text about nudity, mind you, but pictures containing butts and breasts and other areas that would send John Ashcroft into a foaming-at-the-mouth frenzy. And not just classical nudes, but some actual black-and-white photographs of nude women. Like the one by art photographer Bill Brandt, back in the Bs, which, though fuzzy and dark, does upon close inspection in fact contain a nipple. Or the photo next to the entry for Chicago-born photographer Wynn Bullock, which shows a woman lying naked in the forest, also exposing a single nipple. That's two nipples within a couple of hundred pages. It's like very highbrow Hustler. If I had known about this as a teenager in my parents' house, I could have saved myself a lot of time searching for revealing pictures in sweater catalogues. But being an adult, I decided to refrain from flipping through the K volume.

I get my collection over with quickly. Being smarter doesn't necessarily help with this task. Though I will say that, having read about the Bible, I believe that, technically, what I did does not qualify as the sin of Onan. The sin of Onan means that you "let your seed fall to the ground." Since mine falls into a specimen cup, I think I'm safe.

I notice the door has a little yellow smiley face with the motto "Thank you for coming." Some angry collector has scrawled in pen next to it: "Very tacky!" I actually thought the smiley face was a nice touch. On the other hand, the layout of the fertility office could use some work. I have to drop off my specimen cup and its 3 x 10⁸ swimmers at a nurse's station--which requires me to do a perp walk right through the waiting room filled with women reading magazines and chatting on their cell phones.

I can't believe how much work it is to have a baby. Or more specifically, how much work it is for me and Julie. It's baffling to me that all our friends actually got pregnant by having a pleasant bit of sexual intercourse. And here I am, smuggling my bodily fluids around like a felon.

Kierkegaard, Soren

Man, did the world's favorite 19th-century Danish philosopher have some problems. Self-loathing, depression, guilt, anger, father hatred. Kierkegaard was haunted by the fact that his dad--when he was a struggling tenant farmer--stood on a hill and solemnly cursed God, an act that Kierkegaard believed doomed the entire family. But that wasn't even Kierkegaard's biggest issue. In my opinion, that was his inability to say no.

Julie is always telling me I have this problem as well. I end up in all sorts of unpleasant scenarios because I don't want to offend anyone. "A nude whitewater rafting trip in the Yukon in February? Sure, sounds fun." When I was single, this translated into an inability to break up with women. I'd go out with a totally inappropriate partner for eight months too long because I couldn't figure out how to break it off. Things got so bad, I went to see a shrink, a Freudian woman who resembled Janet Reno, to learn how to confront situations like an adult. After about a dozen sessions, I stopped going. I canceled by leaving a message on her machine at 2 A.M. and then wrote her a letter that said: "Thank you for helping me with my issues about confrontation. I think we made a lot of progress." I was aware of the irony.

I thought about this as I read about poor Soren. In his late twenties, Kierkegaard fell in love with a young girl named Regine, and the two got engaged. But then, soon after, he had second thoughts, aware of the age gap between them, not to mention the gap in their mental states. Kierkegaard wrote in his diary, "I was a thousand years too old for her.... If I had explained things to her, I would have had to initiate her into terrible things, my relationship with my father, his melancholy, the eternal night that broods over me, my despair, lusts and excesses, which perhaps in God's eyes were not so heinous."

So not the perfect match, obviously. Kierkegaard decided to try to break off the engagement. Problem was, Regine wasn't hearing it and clung to the skinny philosopher's side. So Kierkegaard resorted to a breakup strategy worthy of sitcom: he dropped her, then staged what the Britannica calls "an elaborate show of caddishness" to preserve her reputation. Nice, but way over the top.

king's evil

A swelling from tuberculosis, once thought to be curable by the touch of royalty. In England, Charles II is said to have touched more than ninety thousand victims. Another reason to be thankful I'm not a king in the 18th century. Because of my germ phobia, I hate shaking hands with anyone, even healthy people with no visible swellings. When I greet friends I do an air shake, which is like an air kiss, but with handshakes--it's a trend I'm trying to start. So to sum up monarchy: Unlimited power and untold wealth--good. Fondling TB sores--bad.

kissing

Julie's in the kitchen, chopping carrots for a vegetarian chili.

I sneak up beside her, press my nose against her cheek, and inhale deeply.

"What are you doing?"

"Just kissing you the way the Lapland people of Scandinavia kiss."

I press my nose against her cheek again and suck in through my nostrils. She stops choppng the carrots and looks at me. It's the look a dog might get if it kept trying to hump her leg.

"Uh, they also do this kind of kissing in southeastern India. So it's not just the Laplanders."

"I'm kind of busy here, honey."

Knox, John

Knox was a 16th-century Scottish priest who wrote a work with the hard-to-forget title First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women. Unfortunately for him, Elizabeth I came to power just as the work was published, and Knox got himself a monstrous shellacking.

First Blast is quite a title, but it's not my favorite so far in the Britannica. My favorite title comes from a book written by Robert Fitzroy, captain of the HMS Beagle, the boat that Darwin took to the Galapagos. It's called Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle Between the Years 1826 and 1836, Describing Their Examination of the Southern Shores of South America and the Beagle's Circumnavigation of the Globe.

I haven't read Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle Between the Years 1826 and 1836, Describing Their Examination of the Southern Shores of South Americana and the Beagle's Circumnavigation of the Globe, but I hear it's quite good. I wonder if my sister-in-law Alexandra's book club might want some copies of Narrative of the--okay, I'll stop cutting and pasting Mr. Fitzroy's title. I spent a good minute or so punching it into my computer, so I thought I'd get the most out of it. But you get the idea: It's long. Almost as long as the entire text of the Mahabharata (the Hindu sacred book that comes in at a hundred thousand verses).