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

And yet, I have to like it. No cutesiness or coyness or irony or false advertising. Fitzroy doesn't try to dazzle you with wordplay, he just tells it like it is. You know exactly what you're getting. I've noticed a lot of old-time titles do this. There are a lot of Narratives of and True Stories of that go on for a paragraph summing up the book. And when I write another book, I'm going to call it Occasional Reflections on Several Subjects, which is the title used by Anglo-Irish chemist Robert Boyle for his book of moral essays. I love that one, too. It's the best one-size-fits-all title in the history of publishing.

Kyd, Thomas

A freelance writer I know pitched me an article today. He wants to write about a fringe director who remade Raiders of the Lost Ark--but had kids playing all the starring roles. A prepubescent Indiana Jones, an eight-year-old Nazi, and so on. I file it under "Eerie Echo of the Past," number 341. It's the exact same concept as children's companies, groups of children who put on plays by the likes of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and Thomas Kyd in the 1600s. They came to be loathed by adult acting troupes, because audiences apparently preferred seeing cute miniature humans recite iambic pentameter to watching their fully grown counterparts.

Still, the article's not right for Esquire. I send him a brief rejection e-mail. I decide to spare him the Shakespeare stuff. The poor guy is already getting his idea squashed; he probably doesn't want a history lecture too. In general, I'm trying very hard to be more selective in what knowledge I impart. I've started to realize that not everybody appreciates brilliant 17th-century parallels.

L

La Rochefoucauld, Francois de

Perhaps the greatest writer of maximes in French history. Among them: "Crimes are made innocent and virtuous by their number." "Virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea." You've got to like maximes, the 17th-century literary equivalent of bumper stickers.

Lacoste, Rene

Some things in this world have gotten better, but one thing has definitely gone south: sports nicknames. I first noticed it when my fellow Esquire editor Andy "Hammering Homunculus" Ward mentioned this in the pages of our magazine, but the Britannica drives the point home.

What happened to names like Cool Papa Bell (a baseball player in the twenties)? Or the Bounding Basque (a tennis pro) or the Galloping Ghost (Red Grange)? Why can't we come up with nicknames like the Game Chicken (an 19th-century prizefighter)? Nowadays, we've got A-Rod and Shaq and "Hey, dildo!" They've got all the spunk and appeal of farmer's lung (a pulmonary disorder resulting from dust inhalation, related to pigeon breeder's lung and cheesewasher's lung).

Rene Lacoste was from the golden age of nicknames. A Parisian tennis player in the twenties, known for his methodical style, he helped lead the French to six Davis Cup victories. They called him the Crocodile. The American press gave him his reptilian nickname, partly for his tenacity and partly because he won a set of fancy crocodile luggage in a bet.

I hadn't known about Lacoste the tennis player. But I did know the shirts, which the Britannica discusses at the end of the entry: Lacoste, it says, founded a line of "sportshirts and other items of apparel with his 'crocodile' emblem (although somehow changed to an alligator)."

This is odd, I thought. What happened? Why did the crocodile suddenly switch to the alligator side? Did Lacoste's marketing department discover a big difference? The public finds alligators intelligent and sexy, but crocodiles lazy and untrustworthy?

I should have kept reading my Britannica. The Lacoste alligator is not a profound epistemological mystery along the lines of "Is there a God?" or "What is the definition of evil?" or "Why is David Pelzer allowed to publish books?" But I kind of wanted to find out the truth. Growing up, my mother had outfitted me with dozens of Lacoste shirts (often paired with bold plaid pants that would embarrass a Connecticut dentist), so there was a personal angle. Plus, I had been reading for four hours straight, and my eyes were about to start bleeding.

I riffle through Julie's bureau drawer and find her periwinkle Lacoste shirt. I study the emblem. I know from my trusty Britannica the difference between alligators and crocodiles: in crocodiles, the fourth tooth in each side of the lower jaw projects outside the snout when the mouth is closed. Is there protrusion? I can't tell, because the reptilian bastard has his mouth open. Great. Next, I check the Lacoste Web site. The Web site does indeed call the logo an alligator--but is suspiciously mum on its crocodile past. Hmm. Have I stumbled onto a cover-up?

I decide I need to do some old-fashioned reporting; I need to talk to someone at Lacoste. I call up the New York headquarters, and am connected to Gigi, a nice Southern-accented woman in charge of media relations. Before I can finish asking my question, she stops me: "It's a crocodile."

But the Web site says...

"Well, then the Web site needs to be fixed," she says. "It's definitely a crocodile. It's always been a crocodile. It's a croc!"

This is very disconcerting for a man who's trying to know it all. I'm up to my snout in conflicting sources. If I can't know for sure about the silly Lacoste icon, what does this say about knowledge as a whole? My best attempt at a conclusion: the Lacoste emblem is a crocodile, but Americans think of it as an alligator. I'll have to be satisfied with that. I'm just hoping Joe Camel isn't a llama.

Langley, Samuel

A Connecticut-based inventor who finished a heavier-than-air machine nine days before the Wright Brothers. When he launched it from a catapult, it got snagged and crashed into the Potomac River; if not, many think he would have gone down in history as the first. How many times a day you reckon he thought about that snag? Probably every hour for the rest of his life.

Langley belongs to another heartbreaking niche of historical figures, just as sad as George Darwin and his band of loser relatives: the close-but-no-cigar crowd. One snag meant the difference between centuries-long fame and almost total obscurity. Langley can commiserate with Elisha Gray, who filed papers with the patent office on February 14, 1876, for his telephone device--just a couple of hours after Alexander Graham Bell filed his. Gray really should have rearranged his schedule: first, the patent application, then the grocery store.

language

Today I've got Sunday lunch at Grandma and Grandpa's. Once a month, my parents and I drive up to my grandparents' house in the suburb of Riverdale, where we spend the afternoon eating chicken and roast potatoes at the largest table I've ever seen. It's huge. My grandfather told me that it was once owned by an obscure Bonaparte, but he could have told me that it used to serve as the main dance floor at the Copacabana, and I would have believed him.

This brunch, we've got two special guest stars, my aunt Jane and her eleven-year-old son, Douglas. Jane's widely acknowledged to be the egghead in my mom's family--a graduate of Harvard, a Fulbright scholar, a speaker of most languages on the European continent (not counting Votic, a Finno-Ugric tongue that has fewer than a hundred remaining speakers). Douglas is equally brilliant. I've never met anyone who takes more after-school classes than he does--German classes, chess classes, fencing classes, and classes in something called Lego robotics. I'm still not sure what Lego robotics is--I guess it has something to do with building robots out of Lego blocks. But it's nice to know, if this journalism thing doesn't work out, there is a career to be had as a Lego robotics instructor.

When we arrive, we sit at Grandma and Grandpa's enormous antique walnut table. Down at the other end, Douglas, who has brought his laptop along, is busy playing a word game. "It's just so good to have everyone here!" says Grandma. "Look at my two grandsons! My two smart grandsons!" Douglas nods and gets back to the word game.

The rest of the family talks about the usual fare--jobs and holidays. Fortunately, the acoustics are good enough that I can hear what my family is saying, even though we're separated by an expanse of dark wood.

Grandma starts passing around the bowls of food. "This is less potatoes than usual," she apologizes.

Douglas suddenly stops pecking away on his computer and looks up.

"Hold it!" he says. "That's incorrect!" Douglas takes out a piece of paper and pencil, checks something off, then leans across the table and slides the paper toward Grandma.

I pick it up. It's something called a "grammar citation." It's got a list of grammar infractions like "free gift" and " 'impact' misused as a verb." Douglas has checked off a box that says " 'fewer/less' abuse." Apparently, grandma should have said "fewer potatoes than usual" instead of "less potatoes than usual."

"Douglas has gotten into grammar," explains Jane. "He's an officer in something called the grammar police."

"Word police," corrects Douglas.

"Isn't that something," says Grandma, chuckling.

"He gave a citation to his teacher last week," says Jane.

"What'd she do?" says Grandpa.

"She said, 'Between you and I.' " replies Douglas. He shakes his head, no doubt feeling both sorrow and pity at her pronoun abuse.

"Tell them some other things you've learned in your books," prompts Jane.

Douglas clicks pause on his word game to give us some nuggets. "Well, everyone's heard of antonyms and synonyms. But there's also capitonyms. That's when the meaning of the word changes according to whether it starts with a capital letter."

I'm not understanding.

"Like Herb and herb," says Douglas, "or Polish and polish."

"I never knew that," my father says.

"Good for you, Douglas," says Grandpa.

It's true. That's a damn good fact. I decide I better try to match my eleven-year-old cousin. I search my mental file for some English language trivia.

"Did you know, in Old English, the gh in the word 'light' was not silent? And in some areas of Scotland, they still pronounce it licht."

No one seems particularly blown away by my brichtness.

"Also, there's something called miranyms," continues Douglas, unfazed "That's the word in between two opposites."

The adults around the table are confused.

"Like when you have 'convex' and 'concave', the miranym is 'flat,' " says Douglas, patiently.

Right now, I've got a mixed bag of emotions. On the one hand, I'm proud. Here we've got a bona fide prodigy, a fellow athlete of the mind, and he shares my blood. It's quite possible that he really does have the genius IQ that I deluded myself into thinking I had back when I was his age. On the other hand, I'm jealous and threatened. Whenever I try to correct people or throw out bits of trivia, I feel about as welcome as an assassin bug at a Sunday barbecue (the assassin bug, by the way, can shoot a stream of blinding saliva up to twelve inches). When Douglas corrects people or throws out trivia, he gets a pat on a head and a smile. Why do know-it-alls turn from cute to obnoxious as soon as their voices turn and they sprout body hair?

"Or with 'hot' and 'cold', the miranym is 'room temperature,' " continues Douglas.

"Well, on behalf of myself, I find that very unique," I say. I've decided to switch my strategy. I won't compete with Douglas on facts; I'll drive him nuts by mauling his beloved English language. Mature, I know.

Douglas digs out his grammar citation, checks off a couple of boxes, and slides one over to me.

"What'd I get one of these for?" I say.

Douglas gets out another, checks off "dangler" and slides it over.

"But I didn't say nothing wrong!"

Douglas looks at me. He's caught on. "You're just trying to get them, aren't you?"

"No I ain't."

"What is the longest word you know in the English language?" Douglas challenges me.

" 'Smiles,' " I say. "Because there's a mile between the first and last letter."

Backed into a corner, I had whipped out a joke I learned when I was Douglas's age. Douglas shakes his head.

"What about 'pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.' "

I've got to give it to him. He knows his English.

"It's a disease you get from the silica dust when volcanoes erupt. I know how to spell it too." He begins spitting out the letters in a rapid monotone staccato. "P-n-e-u-m-o-n..." Game over.

Las Vegas

Mormons were the first settlers. Not sure Joseph Smith would approve of today's topless showgirls and liquor. Though he would like the volcano at the Mirage. Everybody likes the volcano.

Lascaux Grotto

A noted French cave with dozens of Paleolithic paintings, including one of a bird man with an erect phallus. I realize halfway through the article that I've been to this cave, though, of course, I'd forgotten its name. (Thanks, Ebbinghaus.)

Julie and I stopped at the Lascaux grotto on our bike tour of southern France a couple of years ago. This was one of those bike tours where you pay a third of your annual salary to huff up hills with a bunch of other helmeted Americans, most of them dermatologists, though with a sprinkling of periodontists to spice things up. We've been on a couple of these tours, and it's always an exercise in humiliation for me. I never train enough beforehand, and end up spraining my knee or ankle, which means I get shuttled from stop to stop in the company van, sandwiched in between the spare parts and picnic supplies. So that's bad enough. But then there's always the eighty-two-year-old retired dermatologist, who rode forty miles without breaking a sweat, who will ask, "How's your knee doing, young fella?" By which he means to say, "What the hell is wrong with you, boy? I've got hemorrhoids older than you, and I still pedaled up those hills, you nelly." At least that's the way I interpret it.

Anyway, I remember pulling up to the Lascaux grotto on our fancy bikes with their--no exaggeration--forty-two gears. (The first successful bicycles in the 1860s, incidentally, had only one gear, and riding them was such a bumpy experience, they were called "bone shakers.") At the cave entrance, we were met by the skinny French anthropologist who was to be our tour guide. He gave us a five-minute course in human evolution--he seemed particularly interested in telling us about humanoid cranial capacity, which has grown over the years from 800 cubic centimeters to 1350 cubic centimeters. He then led us through the tunnel to the prehistoric art gallery.

"Regard the outline of this bull," said our French anthropologist.

The dermatologists all nodded and murmured.

"The horns on this bull are very well defined," he said.

"Where? I can't see it." I said.

"There," he said, pointing. "Those lines."

"Sorry--where, exactly?"

"Don't worry about him," Julie said. "He only has 800 cubic centimeters of cranial capacity."

Our guide laughed his French laugh. "Tres bien," he said. "Tres bien."

I never did figure out which were the horns on that bull, but all the talk of humanoid evolution reminded my tiny brain of something that has haunted me since I was a kid. If humans manage to survive another few thousand years, they'll continue to grow larger and larger craniums. Which means no matter how smart I am, no matter how much I know, how much I read, how much I absorb, how much I think, I'll still be a member of the species that couldn't do differential calculus in their heads. "Oh, look at the way Homo sapiens solved Fermat's last theorem! And it took them only three hundred years. Isn't that cute!"

Which makes me question my current venture. Even if I'm smarter by the end and write a brilliant book about the experience, I'll still be doing the 21st-century equivalent of scrawling bird men with erect phalluses on cave walls.

last words

Another reason I'll never make it into the Britannica, in addition to the fact that I'm not an Arctic explorer or a Swedish botanist: I can't talk like these guys. I don't have the conviction, the passion. This is clearest to me when I read about the last words of great men. Like Georges Danton, a leader of the French Revolution who was beheaded for opposing the extremist faction. When he was about to be guillotined, Danton told the executioner, "Show my head to the people. It is worth the trouble." As opposed to what I would have told the executioner: "Holy fuck! Holy shit!" Or if you want to get technical, "Holy merde!"

Danton has plenty of company. Men like Giordano Bruno, an Italian philosopher and astronomer in the late 1500s, who went beyond the Copernican heliocentric view of the universe, instead arguing that space contained a multiplicity of worlds like the earth. For this, the Catholic Church gagged him and burned him at the stake. When the judges read Bruno his sentence, he told them: "Perhaps your fear in passing judgment on me is greater than mine in receiving it." How can he be that cool under pressure? He's just been told that he's going to be flambeed, and he responds with a noble, coherent, brilliant quotation. Again, I believe my reaction would be, "Listen, I was just kidding about that multiplicity of worlds stuff. Just joking around. Only one world. I take it all back."

learning

There is a short section on IQs in the learning section. It says that high IQs "are strongly associated with the 35-yard dash and balancing on one foot." This is one of the most strangely specific pieces of information in the encyclopedia. Why a thirty-five-yard-dash? I've never even heard of that. Why not a fifty? Why balancing on one foot? What about tether ball? Is that strongly associated with high IQ? Because that would make as much sense. Also, it seems totally counterintuitive; what happened to the stereotype of the sickly weakling genius? But most of all, it seems unfair. It seems wrong that nature makes people smart and fast and well balanced. Can't nature divide those things equally among her brood? Since I don't have the highest IQ--as evidenced by the Mensa test debacle--I should at least be able to be do that balancing crane stance in kung fu.

lector

I had to skip my morning Britannica reading today. A handful of the Esquire editors were required to show up at the ungodly (for us) hour of 9 A.M. to make a presentation to the magazine's advertising staff. We are supposed to present our plans for Esquire's future issues. Sounds relatively simple. Problem is, I've never been a great speech giver, and I'm moderately stressed out about my presentation.

I've been half hoping the Britannica would help me with my oratory. And the volumes are, in fact, packed with information on classical rhetorical devices. My favorite is one called "aposiopesis"--the deliberate failure to complete a sentence, as in "Why, you..." or "Why, I ought to..." (possible Business Idea: print T-shirts with the motto "Aposiopesis makes me want to..." and sell them to rhetorical scholars for a killing). But outside of sputtering fathers in fifties sitcoms and classical debate lovers, aposiopesis wouldn't seem to be very useful in modern society.

I'm also a fan of inversion, the transportation of normal word order, as in the first lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan": "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree." There's something great about that sentence--slightly disorienting, but majestic. Yet when I tried to write something with inversion for today's presentation, it just came out weird: "In the pages of our magazine will appear women with little clothing." I sounded like a perverted Yoda.

In the end, I settle on three rhetorical devices: anadiplosis, or repetition; asyndeton, or lack of conjunctions (as in Caesar's "I came, I saw, I conquered"); and antithesis, the juxtaposition of two opposing ideas (as in the phrase "Life is short, art is long").

I put on a suit--my Gucci wedding suit, the only suit I own--and go down to the Trump Tower, where the meeting is being held. I speak right after my boss, David Granger, which is always problematic, since he's a good speaker, getting as worked up as a Baptist preacher.

I put down my notes and begin: "This year, the front of the magazine will get smarter. The front of the magazine will get funnier. The front of the magazine will get better in every way." I pause, letting my anadiplosis and asyndeton sink in. I felt self-conscious as I was saying it, as if I was reciting lines from a stilted Jacobean play. But I continue with an antithetical flourish: "GQ's front section is good, but Esquire's is great. GQ is moderately interesting, but Esquire is indispensable."

The ad staff is paying attention. Some are taking notes!

And that is about all I can muster, rhetoric-wise. The rest of the speech is free of eloquence and classical devices--just a disorganized and flat-footed list of upcoming articles.

I'd judge my rhetoric a moderate success. But I think it made for a better speech than the usual collection of "um's" and "uh's." Maybe I just have to learn to trust my Britannica more. At the very least, my presentation went better than Benjamin Disraeli's maiden speech in the House of Commons, which was so unpopular he had to end it with, "I will sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me." So I got that going for me.

Leonardo Pisano, aka Fibonacci

Fibonacci was a 13th-century Italian mathematician who invented the Fibonacci series, which goes like this: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. Each of the numbers is the sum of the two preceding numbers. I look at the sequence again. I know I recognize it from somewhere. It takes me a couple of seconds, but then it clicks: Boggle! It's the scoring system for my favorite find-a-word game, Boggle.

Before we go any further, let me defend poor Boggle. I know professing to love this game is about as cool as admitting that I collect Hummel figurines, but it's truly the best word game ever invented. Scrabble involves too much luck; I'm always getting stuck with a bunch of hard consonants that look like they might spell a Slavic factory town, but nothing in my mother tongue. Boggle, on the other hand, just like chess, is all skill. Everyone's crouched over the same little letter cubes trying to unlock the same hidden words. And I'm not half bad at Boggle; it's one of the few things I can beat my brother-in-law Eric at, mostly because I add an "er" to every word. My strategy is to defend the validity of words like "pillower" with such vehemence that Eric will make some skeptical and condescending noises, but not bother to look them up.

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

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

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

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

liar paradox

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

life span

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

lily

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

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

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

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

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

The dreadlocked florist gives a half snort, half harrumph.

"And I'd like some dogwood with that," I say.

"Dogwood doesn't go with that," he says.

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

"Dogwood's tall and hyacinth is short," he says.

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

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

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

"Because most flowers are bisexual," I say. "Angiosperms are bisexual."

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

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

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

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

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

"Wow," he says. "I love that!"

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

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

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

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

limerick

Another reason to be happy--the following poem:

A tutor who taught on the fluteTried to teach two tooters to toot.Said the two to the tutor,"Is it harder to toot,Or to tutor two tooters to toot?"

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

Lloyd Webber, Sir Andrew

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

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

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

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

"So what'd you think?" my mom asked, when we got outside.

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

"How so?"

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

"That's interesting," she said. "I never thought of it that way."

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

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

Los Angeles

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

Louis XIV

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

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

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

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

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

LSD

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luciano, Lucky

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

Okay, so I could use a little help.

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

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

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

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

lumbar puncture

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

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

2. Call cottage cheese by its alternate name, "Dutch cheese."

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

4. Refer to the Vietnam War as the "Indochina Wars."

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

Lumiere, Auguste and Louis

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

M

Madonna

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

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

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

Mahler, Gustav

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

majuscule

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

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

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

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

"Correct," said Alex.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mammals

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

Mann, Horace

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

manure

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

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

"What would you like for your birthday?" I'll ask Andrea, age seven.

"Gameboy pinball!" she says.

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

"Nooo!!!" she'll scream, running away. "No monkey poop!"

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

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

"What's for lunch?" I ask Natalia, age nine.

"I dunno," she says.

"You think Aunt Julie will be serving whale poop?"

"Whale poop?" she asks.

"Yeah, whale poop is delicious."

"Uh-huh."

"Seriously, a lot of people do eat whale poop."

"Yeah, right."

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

"I'd like some whale poop, please! On French bread!"

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

"Everybody, pretend to be caterpillar poop!" I shout.

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

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

"No, it's me! Natalia! Fooled you."

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

"What's going on here?" she asks.

"Shhh," says her daughter, Allison, age five. "We're pretending to be caterpillar poop."

Lisa looks at me. She is not amused.

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

"But this is caterpillar poop," I say. "Totally different."

masochism

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

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

mechanics

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

mechanics, fluid

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

Does everyone know this?

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

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

memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You remembered!" says Dave jovially.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Stairs!" shouts a man from the back.

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

"Stairs," he says.

"Oh yes, that's right, we took the stairs. The elevator's broken." The class snickers.

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

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

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

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

"But the encyclopedia's 65,000 entries--"

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

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

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

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

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

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

No disrespect to Dave, but I figure it'd be nice to consult another memory expert, maybe one from a school that doesn't have its catalogues on street corners. I force my pride deep into the pit of my stomach and ask my brother-in-law Eric. He's currently a psychology grad student at Columbia University, after having mastered and gotten bored with, successively, foreign diplomacy, computer programming, and investment banking. He allows me to accompany him to a class, though he does make me sit in the back and ask that I stay silent. Afterward, I spend a few minutes talking to his cognition professor, David Krantz, a man with a flower-print shirt and serious glasses.

My main question is, how much can one man remember? And for this, Krantz doesn't have a precise answer. He won't say, "Humans can store two-point-three million facts," or, "You can memorize everything in A to Q, but then you won't be able to squeeze another fact in." Apparently, annoyingly enough, human memory can't be quantified that way.

Instead, Krantz tells me that "memorization is a business where the rich get richer."

Meaning?

"The more you know about a topic, the more you'll be able to remember."

In other words, I'll get richer and richer in history, pop culture, literature--but my quantum physics and chemistry knowledge, which were at poverty levels at the start, will barely climb to the lower middle class by the end. I guess after reading thousands of pages I'd sort of figured this out, but still, it's a little sad to hear it from an expert. I can fill in some holes in my education--but only the shallow ones. The deeper ones I can only sprinkle dirt on.

metric system

I'm a convert to the metric system. I feel un-American even typing those words. I feel like I just admitted that I prefer a nice Linzer torte to apple pie or that I'm too busy to go to Shea Stadium because I have to watch Manchester United on the telly. But I've come to the realization that, kilogram for kilogram, it's just a better measurement system.

I knew very little about the metric system. All I knew was that I resented it creeping into my life--with its liters of Pepsi and ten-kilometer races. Not that I did ten-kilometer races, or bought grams of cocaine, but I did drink the occasional Pepsi, and I didn't like it coming in foreign amounts. Now I say, bring on the metric system. I'm ready for it.

The thing that got me was the exhausting variety of weights and measures out there. Every few pages I'd run into another one--the chaldron, the chain, the link, the wine gallon, the ale gallon, the corn gallon, the Queen Anne's gallon, the gill, the cubit, the avoirdupois ounce, the troy ounce, the cord, the Old London mile, the Irish mile, the Scottish mile, the libra (from which the abbreviation lb. comes), and on and on. And that's not to mention the ways people cooked up these measurements--no doubt after a few gills of whiskey. Like the rod: "The 'rod' was once defined as the length of the left feet of 16 men lined up heel to toe as they emerged from church." What? What's a church got to do with it? Do men's feet change size when they leave a good sermon? And there's the inch. One of the first definitions was the breadth of a man's thumb at the base of the nail. Scientists, however, refined that to the breadth of three men's thumbs--one small, one medium, one large--divided by three. Later, it became the length of three grains of barley. But you might prefer the competing definition of twelve poppyseeds. Exhausting.

Diversity is good in ecosystems and stock portfolios, but in weights and measurements, uniformity is kind of nice. I've come to see the metric system as the Starbucks of measurement systems. Yes, Starbucks is annoyingly ubiquitous--but there's a reason for that. The Frappuccinos are delicious. So stop trying to fight it.

There's plenty to like about the much-despised metric system. It was born during the French Revolution, which automatically makes it cooler. And I knew it was rational--but I didn't know quite how rational. The French scientists defined the meter as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator. And the kilogram was designed to be the weight of one thousand cubic centimeters of water. Then there are those prefixes. I was familiar with the "kilo" and "cento" and "nano," but I was happy to learn about the outer reaches, the "peta" and the "exa" and the "tera." I started dropping them into conversation. I'd pop my head into my boss's office. "I just want a picosecond of your time. Maybe just a femtosecond."

Of course, as with everything lovable, the metric system has its flaws. It turned out the weight of a cube of water was too hard to measure. So that's no longer the definition of a kilogram. No, a kilogram is now defined as the weight of a hunk of metal sitting in this building outside of Paris. This was shocking to me. There's an actual kilogram--a master kilogram, they call it--a platinum-iridium cylinder in a town called Sevres. I had read about how the ancient Egyptians kept a master cubit of black granite against which all cubit sticks were measured. Apparently, we haven't moved past that.

It gave me Movie Idea Number Five: The Great Metric Caper. A bunch of professional thieves--perhaps with Donald Sutherland as the old guy in for one last big job--swipe the master kilogram and plunge the world's weights and measurement system into chaos. Maybe they hold the master kilogram for ransom. And there's got to be a good scene where the Asian thief played by B. D. Wong uses the master kilogram as a jujitsu stick.

Regardless, the master kilogram seems to teach like a profound lesson. In the end, the world hinges on physical things. You can theorize all you want, make abstract arguments for days on end, but eventually you just have to roll up your sleeves and carve yourself a hunk of metal.

Michelson-Morley experiment

Julie wants to see the Einstein exhibit at the Natural History Museum. I agree to go, though I trudge over there with a bad attitude. Maybe it's a rebellion against my father--who has reverence for all things Einsteinian--but I've always been a little skeptical of Einstein. Yes, he was smart. But was he that smart? Was he really a thousand light-years ahead of Dirac and Bohr and all those other neglected shlubs who will never have their faces on T-shirts or children's videos? Was he so smart that he should be synonymous with intelligence itself? I remember being annoyed when a book came out a couple of years ago by a guy who drove cross-country with Einstein's brain. Einstein's legendary brain. Enough already. "I'm going to write a book about driving across the country with Darwin's pancreas," I told Julie at the time. "And after that, I'm taking the bus with Newton's lower intestines."

"You gotta do what you gotta do," she replied, her all-purpose response for when she thinks I'm engaging in crazy talk.

Since embarking on my quest to smarten up, I've gotten even more jealous of Einstein and his unceasing good publicity. Will anyone ever say that I'm as smart as Albert Einstein? Probably not. What about someone saying I'm as smart as Alfred Einstein, his cousin, a noted music historian who also gets a nice write-up in the Britannica? Maybe not even that. So I walk into the museum's exhibit with a grudge.

The first room in the exhibit is filled with domestic relics of the man himself. A couple of pipes that Einstein puffed upon, a compass he fiddled with, a little puzzle he figured out as a kid. In a glass case, I find a letter he wrote to his wife in an attempt to save his doomed marriage. It read: "You will make sure that I get my three meals a day in my room. You are neither to expect intimacy nor to reproach me in any way."

Ha! That's not so smart. That's not so smart at all. I may not have a Nobel Prize on my mantle, but I know you don't write an ultimatum like that to a woman and expect it to work. That's about as likely to work as aeromancy (predicting the future based on atmospheric phenomena).

I wander over to another little plaque. This one says Einstein refused to celebrate birthdays. As he explained: "It is a known fact that I was born, and that is enough." This is good. I go fetch Julie, knowing she'll disapprove. Julie loves birthdays. She manages to stretch her own birthday into a series of celebrations she calls a birth week, and which she's threatening to expand to a birth month.

"Einstein hated birthdays," I say. "Pretty dumb, huh?"

"Wouldn't be my choice," she says. "But then again, I'm not busy solving the mysteries of the universe."

Not quite the outrage I was hoping for.

The next room in the exhibit is devoted to Einstein's physics. I decide it's time I understood them once and for all. How hard can they be? Over the years, I've had sporadic flashes of comprehension. When I was about ten, my dad explained to me that, under the special theory of relativity, those people who reside on the highest floors of apartment buildings live longer than those who make their homes on the lower floors. This is because the earth's rotation makes the higher floors move through space faster than the lower floors, just as the tip of the Ferris wheel is going faster than the hub. Relativity says time slows down as you go faster. So odd as it may seem, you actually age less if you live in the penthouse. About a trillionth of a second less, but still, it's something. This always made me envious of my friends who lived in penthouses. The lucky bastards. As a kid, I remember spending many afternoons at Jonathan Green's twenty-ninth-floor apartment, and not just because we enjoyed tossing cantaloupes off the balcony and watching the splatter patterns. No, I was actually lengthening my life.

So anyway, that was my introduction to relativity. Over the years--in high school physics classes and the occasional pop science book--I expanded my knowledge, though not as much as you might think. And since I haven't gotten to the R's yet, the Britannica hasn't helped me much. (The Einstein entry dealt with his life--his bad grades in geography, his love of sailing--but not his theories).

Julie and I shamelessly eavesdrop on a tour for a visiting high school group. The tour guide--a nice Asian man who took frequent sips from his plastic cup of water--is trying to spice Einstein up for his teenage audience. He says things like, "Einstein was as famous as Justin Timberlake, J. Lo and Ashton Kutcher combined." The kids seem impressed, if skeptical.

Our guide explains something called the Michelson-Morley experiment, which proved that a beam of light projected from a moving object does not go faster than one from a stationary object. Light's a weird animal, he says. As counterintuitive as it may be, it doesn't behave like a Frisbee or softball tossed from a moving pickup truck. It behaves like nothing else.

"Einstein said the speed of light is the same relative to any observer," says our guide. "That's the special case of relativity. If the speed of light is the same, what changes? Time."

Whenever I feel that I'm understanding something profound, I get a little head rush that starts in the back of the neck and shoots toward my forehead. I love that head rush--I used to get it all the time back in my golden intellectual days. And right now, I'm getting a powerful one. The special theory of relativity clicked. I get it. See? That Einstein wasn't in another league from me. If I had been presented with the same data, I might well have come up with the same theory. Right?

On the other hand, the general theory of relativity, which we tackle next, is a bit more complex. The guide talks about how the universe is like Jell-O with an unappetizing fruit cocktail mixed into it--bananas, pineapples, strawberries, you name it. "That's the general theory of relativity," he says. The high school students nod politely. "Space is like the Jell-O. Space is beautiful. We are the blobs of fruit. We mess up space. We bend space. We are the blobs." The Jell-O metaphor isn't quite working for me. No head rush this time. Maybe it's true--I'm no Einstein.

The room we're in has a bunch of his original papers on the wall--papers scribbled with equations and notations that are light-years over my head. Well, at least I know that Berserkers fought naked. You think Einstein knew that? Probably not. Did he know that Hawthorne was obsessed with the number 64 or that Caravaggio killed a man during tennis? Doubt it. As the general theory of relativity slips farther from my grasp, that cushions my ego just a bit.

"You had enough?" I ask Julie. She has, so we increase our life span by walking home at a quick clip.

migration

Julie's going to Seattle this Wednesday to visit her college friend Peggy. A nice little five-day jaunt. She made the reservations several months ago--back when we were confident she'd be plumped up in second trimester by now. But she's not. Still zero signs of any in utero action. Insanely frustrating. Julie and I agreed that she shouldn't be held hostage by our never-ending fertility woes. Plus, she's 90 percent sure that she ovulated on Tuesday, and won't be releasing a single gamete while in Seattle. So off she goes in a cab to JFK Airport.

And that's when I begin to worry. What if she's wrong? What about that 10 percent chance that she is, in fact, ovulating on Wednesday or Thursday or Friday? Should we gamble with this? Should we risk never having a kid because I wanted to stay in New York and Julie wanted to go kayaking with her old pal?

By Thursday midafternoon, I'm on the phone with an airline ticket agent doing some serious damage to my Visa card in exchange for a round-trip weekend reservation to Seattle. I'm migrating. That's the way I think of it. I am migrating thousands of miles to spawn. I'm not so different from the North American eel, which, after fifteen years of paddling around in streams, suddenly sprouts enlarged eyes, turns from yellow to silver, and swims hundreds and hundreds of miles down the streams and out into the ocean and all the way to the warm waters of the Sargasso Sea (east of the Caribbean), where it does its reproductive business.

That's me on Friday evening, with enlarged eyes, sitting in the aft of an American Airlines jet and migrating to another time zone. (Incidentally, Charles Lindbergh was the first pilot on what would become American Airlines).

I get to Seattle by midnight--but the migration isn't over. I have to take a cab to the ferry, which will in turn take me to the obscure hippyish island on which Peggy lives. The ferry, it turns out, doesn't run all that often after midnight. So for an hour and a half, I'm stuck sitting on a dock with a couple of in-lust teenagers, an angry-looking burly man who resembles an extra in a sixties motorcycle gang movie, and an oddly well-appointed middle-aged woman. It's too dark to read my trusty Britannica. So I'm left staring at my fellow cast of ferry waiters.

The teens grope some more. The angry man seethes. And the middle-aged woman applies some lipstick. I hope for her sake the lipstick is not made from cinnabar, like the red war paint of 19th-century Indians in California. Cinnabar is a type of mercury, and the Indians' red war paint--unbeknownst to them--actually made them sick from mercury poisoning. Maybe that'd be a good way to stop wars, I think. Camouflage paint that makes everyone sick.

Well, it's not a particularly profound thought, my cinnabar rumination. But I have the pleasant realization that I'm not bored. I'm sitting here with nothing to do--no books, no TV, no friends, no deck of cards--and normally I'd be going out of my gourd, but I'm not. I'm fine. I've got my war paint to think about. Thanks to the Britannica, my brain is like a playroom, lots of little toys to keep me occupied. Or, to switch metaphors, my rambling trains of thought now have much more interesting landscapes out their windows.

When I finally get to hug Julie hello, it's 3 A.M. And my migration isn't quite over. I still have to spawn. After a fourteen-hour door-to-door trip, I have no interest in spawning whatsoever. But if those eels can do it after swimming hundreds of miles, I can make the effort after a ferry ride. This had better work.

Milton, John

The British poet went blind because he read too late at night while at school. That's something I've learned: scholarship is dangerous. There's a platoon of men who've gone blind (sometimes in both eyes, sometimes in one), who've gotten curvature of the spine, who've suffered exhaustion from too much reading. It makes me feel like my quest--despite its couch-bound nature--is actually treacherous, which gives me a macho thrill.

mime

Poor mime. Everyone loves to mock the mime. Zima, Carrot Top, mime--these are the prefab punch lines of my adulthood. And admittedly, mime is not my favorite form of entertainment. But maybe mime would get a little more respect if people learned of its glorious past. Well, actually, it's not-so-glorious past. More like it's lascivious and demonic past.

Mime started in Greco-Roman times and--well, maybe I should let the Britannica explain: "Though only fragments exist, it is clear that the usual mime plot, while free to indulge in biting topical allusion, centered principally on scenes of adultery and other vice. Evidence exists that acts of adultery were actually performed on the mime stage during the Roman empire. Execution scenes with convicted criminals in place of actors are on record."

So there you go. Live sex acts, actual executions--I have to say, that does sound more interesting than a guy in white face paint wrestling with an invisible umbrella.

minimalism

In my defense, I'm exercising a lot of willpower. Julie and I were having lunch in a little town outside Seattle, and her friend Peggy--observing the darkening clouds--said: "Look at that moody sky."

I did not say, as I was tempted to: "You just committed the pathetic fallacy" (which is when you assign emotions to inanimate objects). This wasn't easy. People need to realize that.

miscellany

A new trivia book is coming out called Schott's Original Miscellany. It's a slim and charming volume that features, among other things, the complete list of Elizabeth Taylor husbands, a glossary of waitress argot, and a catalogue of rock star deaths. The publishing company wants Esquire to cover it, so they've invited me--and a handful of other journalists--to dinner with the author, a British bloke named Ben Schott. I figured, why not? Schott and I can trade trivia, maybe have a little brain-to-brain combat.

The dinner is held at a high-decibel Italian restaurant called Da Silvano in Greenwich Village. Unfortunately, I am seated at the round table at the exact farthest point from Schott. The only way I can interact with him is if I call him on his cell phone, or maybe by engaging in the elaborate greeting ritual of the black-tailed prairie dog, which involves throwing its foreparts vigorously into the air, directing its nose straight up, and uttering an abrupt yip.

With Schott out of reach, I'm stuck talking to my table mate, a woman who says she works for a small New York paper. She is unusually attractive for a journalist, with long black hair and a face that wouldn't look out of place in a Tommy Hilfiger catalog. She is also, I decide, completely insane. Either that, or she's more hammered than I've seen anyone since my friend John drank fourteen Olde English 800s in college.

"My mother loves Ben," she confides to me.

"Oh, how does your mother know about Ben?" I ask. I figure this is a fair question, since the book hasn't been released in America, and Ben resides full-time in London. But she chooses not to answer it directly, instead saying this: "My mother loves him so much that she bought a house so she could communicate with him."

She smiles at me and bites her lower lip. As the dinner wears on, I figure out that was sort of her trademark: make a cryptic statement, then smile and chew on her lip. She also enjoys rearranging her hair so that it covers her face completely, giving her a little private time to come up with new cryptic statements.

But anyway, back to her mother, who had me truly perplexed. "I'm sorry, I don't follow," I say.

"She bought a house so she could communicate with him," she repeats.

I still shake my head.

"In Costa Rica," she says. Her tone indicates that she thinks this will clarify things once and for all, and that maybe I should stop asking all these dumb questions.

I don't care how much knowledge I have, there is just no way to process this information. So the dinner is looking to be quite the waste of time. But a couple of hours--and several plates of carbs--later, I do finally weasel my way into a seat next to Ben Schott. So in the end, I suppose I didn't need a semaphore to communicate with him.

Turns out he is a lovely chap. That's what I'd call him, a chap. Very genteel, much like the Britannica itself. He is well groomed and sharply dressed, self-effacing, and he seems just pleased as punch to meet me.

We trade some talk about our favorite defenestrations--he likes the second one in Prague that kicked off the Thirty Years' War. Then I figure I'll impress him with some of the Britishisms I've picked up in my Britannica. If you recall, I'd already scored a big success in this department with the Coriander/Cilantro Incident of 2003. So I feel I am in safe territory.

"So do you think we'll have an old wives' summer this year?" I ask Schott.

He looks at me much the same way I had looked at my dinner companion after she told me about the Costa Rica house.

"You know, an old wives' summer. Isn't that what the British call Indian summer?"

"No, actually we call it Indian summer," he says.

Oh. That's not good. The Britannica said it was called old wives' summer in England--but it's hard to argue that to a man who actually speaks the Queen's English.

"Well, I hope the timothy grass didn't give you allergies this year."

Again, confusion.

"Timothy grass--that's what causes allergies in Britain, right? In America we've got ragweed. There you have timothy grass?"

I can feel him about to turn away to talk to an actual journalist who might be interested in discussing his book. So I quickly throw out a final question:

"I was just wondering--what do the British call those machines in Vegas?"

"Oh yes, one-armed bandits."

"No, fruit machines," I say, frustrated.

"Oh yes, we do call them fruit machines. Because they have fruit on the little displays."

I know why they called them fruit machines, dammit. I wanted to clarify to Schott that I'm not a complete dimwit. But too late--he is off and talking to someone else.

I didn't get to impress him with any other British-to-American translations, so I'm printing them here.

*Our "ladybug" is their "ladybird."

*"Lumber" in Britain refers to old furniture.

*What we call "English" in billiards, they call "side."

*A surgeon in Britain is called "Mr." The honorific "Dr." is reserved for physicians.

*Aluminum in Britain is called "aluminium."

We barely speak the same language, I tell you.

After my conversation with Ben ends, I see him having a chat with mysterious Hair Girl. I can't hear what they are saying, but I can tell from the look on his face that she is up to her old cryptic tricks, perhaps the same ones involving communicative Central American houses. I wonder who he finds more baffling: me or her. Sadly, I'm not sure.

missing links

Julie and I are having some friends over tonight. No particular occasion--though it is Paraguay's Independence Day (May 14), so that's more than reason enough.

"Honey, can you get out the cheese knife?" asks Julie.

I could if I knew where it is. I open five drawers before I stumble on the cheese knife. I pick it up and look at it. And look at it some more.

It strikes me at that moment that cheese knives must have quite a story to tell. No doubt, cheese knives have an inventor. Who was he? What was he like? And what about the titans of the cheese knife industry? Who are they? What are the cheese knife legends and rumors? And there must be an eccentric but lovable cheese knife designer who revolutionized its look, right? And then there's cheese knife science--the blade shape best for cutting cheese, the debate over what metal to use in the blade, and what wood varnish to use on the handle.

And I have read none of this in the encyclopedia.

I am staring at the cheese knife for a good twenty seconds, thinking about this, slack-jawed, like someone who dropped too much bad brown acid at Woodstock.

"Great," Julie says, as she returns to the kitchen. "I'll take it."

"Oh yes," I say, snapping awake. "Uh, here's the cheese knife."

The cheese knife revelation sends me into a mini panic. Everything in the world is packed with facts. Just look around the apartment--the little knob on the cabinet, the toaster, the lipstick on Julie's lips, which are right now asking me for the ice tongs. And ice tongs--they have their own history too.

What do I know of these things? Nothing. I am in the Ms, and I know nothing.

Montaigne

I like this 16th-century French writer quite a bit. I like that he coined the term "essay," which translates to "attempts," or a little "project of trial and error." That's what I want my Esquire articles to be. Little attempts, even if my attempts happen to involve more Wonderbra jokes than Montaigne's attempts. It just takes a lot of pressure off when you call them attempts.

But even better than the origin of the word "essay," I like the story of how Marie de Gournay--a French intellectual at the time--fainted from excitement when she read Montaigne's work for the first time. She fainted from reading. What a great image. We've become far too jaded. I've been intrigued, bored, titillated, annoyed, amazed, but I've never even come close to fainting while reading any book.

Which is sad. I wish ideas could still get people so excited that they fainted. I wish people--including me--had a more visceral reaction to reading. The closest I've come to fainting during Operation Britannica was when I felt queasy after reading about the botfly, which lays eggs in horses' nostrils, and I had to stop eating my ice cream sandwich.

moron

I think I'm starting to lose my sense of humor. I was watching a Friends rerun with Julie, and there was this scene with Joey, the show's certified moron (Moron, by the way, is also the name of a town in Cuba). In the scene, Joey observes his costar turn a lock. He marvels at this, and says: "It's amazing how keys open doors." It gets a big laugh. It's supposed to show that he's got the IQ of a candelabra.

But all I can think is that, yes, he's right, it is amazing how keys open doors. I think back to the diagram in the lock section, with all the pin tumblers and springs, and am proud that I finally understand how keys work. I don't understand keys as well as Joseph Bramah--the famed locksmith who created a lock that remained unpicked for fifty years, despite his promise to reward the picker with PS200--but still, I understand them. Joey and I--we both know that keys are amazing.

Morozov, Pavlik

Here we have one of the most odious little schmucks in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. A truly horrible little human being. And, I'm afraid, one who reminds me a lot of myself as a youngster.

Pavlik was a communist youth who eventually became glorified as a martyr by the Soviet regime.

The son of poor peasants, Morozov was the leader of the Young Pioneers' group at his village school and was a fanatical supporter of the Soviet government's collectivization drive in the countryside. In 1930, at age twelve, he gained notoriety for denouncing his father, the head of the local soviet, to the Soviet authorities. In court Morozov charged that his father had forged documents and sold favours to kulaks (i.e., rich peasants who were resisting the collectivization drive). Morozov also accused other peasants of hoarding their grain and withholding it from the authorities. As a consequence of his denunciations, Morozov was brutally murdered by several local kulaks.Morozov was subsequently glorified as a martyr by the Soviet regime. Monuments to him were erected in several Soviet cities, and his example as a model communist was taught to several generations of Soviet schoolchildren.

I know I should have felt sorry for young Pavlik. He was, after all, the victim of Stalin's psychotic brainwashing regime. But I couldn't help feeling a bit of glee when I learned he got his comeuppance, the sanctimonious little fuck.

In Pavlik, I saw the worst qualities of myself as a twelve-year-old. That was the age when believed I was the smartest boy in the world. And like Pavlik, I decided I knew far more than my dunderheaded parents. Plus, like Pavlik, I was a Marxist. Somehow, I had gotten my hands on The Communist Manifesto. I understood maybe 14 percent of it, but I did like the catchy saying at the end about throwing off chains. So I declared myself a communist.

Some of my childhood intellectual endeavors make me proud--my analysis of Andrew Lloyd Weber's Starlight Express comes to mind. That didn't hurt anyone, and I think I might have been right. But this communist phase makes me cringe. I was so thoroughly convinced of my correctness. Embarrassingly so. I couldn't believe my father worked for a capitalist law firm, exploiting secretaries by giving them only four weeks of vacation a year. If there had been proper authorities, I might have called them and denounced him.

Occasionally, I'd engage my father in a debate. I remember one on the beach in East Hampton, as we walked collecting beach glass. My dad said that Marxism was a nice theory--it would be great if there were no poverty and everyone cooperated. But in reality, communism just didn't work. In reply, I gave him one of the half dozen lines I had memorized. It could have been about how communism would cause the "withering away of the state" or that capitalism contains the "seeds of its own destruction." Something like that.

My dad tried to get me to clarify by asking reasonable questions. It soon became clear to both of us that I didn't really understand what those catchphrases meant. Which only got me angrier and more self-righteous. So I repeated my catchphrase, told him that he should read The Communist Manifesto, and then stomped off the fascist beach. At the very least, I thought to myself, he'll understand when the revolution comes.

I'm not sure what Pavlik's motivation was. But I'm pretty sure, looking back, that this was the intellectual version of our heated games of Wall Ball. My dad had far more knowledge and life experience than me. But if I could just beat him at one thing--if, say, I could overthrow the socioeconomic system he was a part of--wouldn't that be something?

Mosconi, Willie

"When his father forbade him to play pool, hoping that he would pursue a career in vaudeville, young Mosconi practiced with potatoes and a broomstick." I like the image of a dad hoping his son will pursue pie-inthe-face humor. But I am also impressed that pool champion Willie followed his dream by using misshapen vegetables. Another inspiring overcoming-odds story.

motion

Julie and I drive down to New Jersey for a little suburban Saturday (we buy lower-temperature gas in the morning, at my suggestion). We're going to visit Julie's brother Eric and his wife, Alexandra. As always, we start the day playing mixed doubles with them at their tennis club.

Eric is infuriatingly good at tennis. It reminds me of that fact I read about in the intelligence section--the higher the person's IQ, the better he or she is at the thirty-five-yard dash. Maybe the same holds true for tennis. It seems that nature hasn't heard that you're not supposed to put all your eggs in one basket.

Making things worse, Eric is one of those types with a closet full of the proper equipment. Today, he's arrived at the court in his white-collared shirt, white shorts, and white wristbands, all with a tasteful blue trim. He takes out his latest tennis racket, which is made from some material usually reserved for NASA's Mars exploration vehicles.

We begin our pregame leg stretches.

"You up to L yet?" Eric asks. "For 'loser'?" He chuckles. "You must have read about aces in the A section. You'll be seeing a lot of those."

"Leave my husband alone," says Julie.

"I'm okay, sweetie," I say. I turn to Eric. "After I'm done with you, you're going to need Vladimir Nabokov to give you some lessons."

"What?" Eric says.

"Nabokov was a tennis teacher before he became a writer. He also appeared as an actor some German movies."

"Well, you're definitely not up to T for 'trash-talking,' " says Eric.

"I thought that was very good, A.J.," says Julie.

Julie doesn't actually believe my Nabokov trivia was an appropriate comeback, but she knows what it's like to be tormented by Eric. She endured a childhood of it, including one particularly vicious fight over the merits of Burger King versus McDonald's.

Regardless, I am feeling more confident than usual. I've come up with a bold new strategy. I've been brushing up on the physics I learned in the Britannica, visualizing the mechanics of flying spheres, and I've semiconvinced myself that this will make me a better player. I will see the court in angles and forces and arrows. I will be Master of the Natural Laws of Tennis. I will turn knowledge into power, specifically a powerful forehand.

As we warm up, I tell myself to be aware of the Magnus effect. The Magnus effect is what causes tennis balls with topspin to dive downward. It's actually a special case of Bernoulli's Theorem which we can thank for keeping airplanes aloft, and has to do with a greater pressure on top of the ball than under it. Every time the ball comes to me, I watch that yellow fuzzy projectile spin, understand what's going on, and thwack it back. I am doing it! The Master of the Natural Laws of Tennis is in the house! I am playing as well as--if not better than--my impeccably dressed brother-in-law.

"Nice shot, A.J.!" Alexandra says, after one of my down-the-line Magnus-enhanced forehands.

When the match begins, Julie and I jump out into an early and somewhat surprising lead. We're up 2-0. This causes Eric to walk and talk very briskly.

I keep focusing on my beloved Magnus effect. But I'm not forgetting about the parabola of the lob, discovered by Galileo himself. I'm not even forgetting about how gravity is stronger toward the Equator, so the north side of the court should have a little more bounce. Okay, well, I'm trying to forget that one, because that's probably not going to help me. And I'm trying not to get caught up in the Coriolis effect either, which says that a projectile moving north will drift to the east because of the earth's rotation. That won't likely have a huge effect on my ground strokes. But still, the Master of the Natural Laws of Tennis is thwacking back forehands and backhands, visualizing the projectiles in all their Newtonian splendor. We are winning! After one of my knowledge-enhanced forehands, Eric dumps his volley into the net.

"Eric!" shouts Eric.

That's the word I've been waiting to hear. A sure sign that my Harvard-educated, wristband-wearing, cavity-free brother-in-law is pissed as hell at himself. There's no other thing I'd like to hear, with the possible exception of "the pregnancy test is positive."

That makes the game worth it. And that, sadly, is also the highpoint of Julie's and my own parabola. Because, in the end, Eric and Alexandra beat us. As much as I try to keep in mind the Magnus effect, I eventually fall under the sway of my Piss-Poor Backhand effect. So be it. We have had our moment of glory among the yellow spheres.

motion picture

The first true talkie wasn't the The Jazz Singer, which the Britannica dismisses as "essentially a silent picture with a Vitaphone score and sporadic episodes of synchronized singing and speech." The first 100 percent talkie: The Lights of New York, in 1928. More myth shattering, courtesy of the Britannica.

Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Academy of

This is the organization that gives out the Oscars. I know this well, seeing as I spent several weeks every year at Entertainment Weekly writing breathless articles about who was going to win those little gold statuettes. In fact, I have firsthand knowledge of the Oscars.

It happened in 1997, right after the movie Shine--the one about the schizophrenic pianist--came out, to much critical acclaim. The actor who played the pianist as a young man was named Noah Taylor, a gawky-looking Australian fellow with a pageboy haircut and thick black Kissinger-style glasses. I'm sorry to report that I also had a pageboy haircut and thick black Kissinger-style glasses, not to mention his narrow face and prominent nose. I looked like Noah Taylor's clone, or at least his older brother.

I found out that Noah wouldn't be attending the Oscars, so I decided to go in his stead and write an article about it. It would be an undercover investigation of what it's like to be a movie star. My conclusion: it's pretty damn good.

At first, I was worried that my little ruse wouldn't work. But as soon as I stepped out of the limo in my rented tuxedo and onto the red carpet, the cameras started snapping. The crowd shouted, "Noah! Noah!" the paparazzi jostled, fans demanded my autograph (I wrote, "Shine on!"). I was touched by how many supporters were outraged that I didn't get a nomination. "There's always next year," I said in my fake Australian accent, which sounded remarkably like the Lucky Charms leprechaun.

I gave interviews to eager reporters (I said I wanted to do a big disaster movie next). Chris Farley told me he was a fan. I got so cocky that I went up to Geoffrey Rush--the costar of Shine, and a guy who actually knew what the real Noah Taylor looked like, and said perkily, " 'Ello, Geoffrey! It's me!" I've rarely seen anyone so dismayed. It was clear he had no idea who I was, or who I was pretending to be. He backed away slowly.

In any case, having written about them and attended a ceremony, you'd think I'd know a thing or two about the Oscars. And yet, I realized I don't even know what the word "Oscar" refers to. I'm constantly being surprised by my ignorance of the most obvious things, those things that are right under my prominent nose. Why didn't I ever bother to look up the word "Oscar"? Why didn't I even think about it? It turns out--according to the Britannica CD-ROM, which I dipped into at the office today--there are competing theories as to the origin of the name Oscar. Some say the academy librarian came up with the name, because the statuette looked like her uncle Oscar. But Bette Davis liked to take credit, saying the "backside" of the statue looked like her husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson. "Backside" is Britannica-speak for "ass."

Mozart

When he was thirteen, he heard the secret song of the Sistine Choir and copied it out from memory. I need a memory like that. Maybe he used Dave Farrow's memory techniques.

mule

Julie's not pregnant. My Seattle trip was a failure. Three thousand miles and way too much money for nothing. When this kid comes, he'd better appreciate what we're doing for him. If he comes. I see the word "sterile" in the write-up of the mule (offspring of a male donkey and a female horse) and the hinny (a female donkey and a male horse) and it kills me.

Mussolini, Benito

I wasn't totally ignorant about Il Duce. A few years ago, I had done some cursory research on the fascist dictator for a TV show I worked on. At the time, my friend Rick and I were writing freelance scripts for something called Celebrity Deathmatch, which was one of MTV's more sophisticated offerings. It featured clay figurines of famous people beating each other up and playfully ripping out each other's internal organs. The first match was between Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. But by the time I got there, the show was running out of both celebrities and new types of internal organs to pluck out (the kidney had been removed far too often, I was told; try the spleen or pancreas). Rick and I were assigned to write a match between two Italian stallions: goose-stepping tyrant Benito Mussolini and Oscar-winning actor Roberto Benigni. So I dutifully read up on Mussolini. I remember being dismayed to learn that he started his career as a journalist. My profession already falls between telemarketers and international weapons dealers in the list of least respected career choices; we don't need murderous World War II leaders on our team. In any case, that's what stuck in my mind. (By the way, in case you're wondering, the death match ended with a stunning upset: Benigni won by tossing Mussolini in the air like a pizza pie. I told you. Sophisticated.)

The Britannica gave me a whole new look at Mussolini. Namely, I got a fascinating insight into a bizarre theme that ran through his life: mistresses.

Mussolini grew up poor, his family crowded into two rooms on the second floor of a small, dilapidated palazzo in the town of Predappio. His dad was a blacksmith who, the Britannica says, "spent most of his money on his mistress. The meals that were eaten by his children were meager." So Benito must have had some serious issues with Papa Mussolini. And he must have thought that a mistress was a high-heeled incarnation of evil itself. Here was this strumpet drinking pricey Chianti and wearing gold earrings, while Benito was lucky to get a few strings of vermicelli for dinner. An angry young man, Mussolini spent his youth getting into trouble and stabbing fellow students at his school with his penknife.

Then, in 1909, when he was twenty-seven, Mussolini fell in love with a sixteen-year-old girl named Rachele Guidi. Where'd he meet Rachele? On a blind date? At a boccie game? No, he met Rachele because she was the daughter of his father's mistress. Jesus, those are some twisted family dynamics. Marrying the offspring of your father's wicked mistress? (Rachele was a daughter from the mistress's deceased husband). I would not want to do the seating arrangements at that wedding. If there was a turn-of-the-century Italian version of Jerry Springer, the Mussolinis would have been prime guests.

You wonder if Mussolini, who in his spare time went on to create worldwide havoc and oppress millions, might have learned from his childhood that mistresses are hurtful and wrong. Nope. At the end of his life, when he was strung up by his heels at a gas station in Milan, who was strung up alongside him? His mistress Claretta Petacci.

I wanted to know more about Claretta. I wanted to know if there was something kinky going on there, too, like maybe she was the cleaning lady of his father's mistress. I gave into temptation and went on Google, the Britannica's less trustworthy rival, but one that, admittedly, does have a fact or two not found in the EB. Google didn't turn up much on Claretta, but I did find something very strange: Mussolini had another mistress in the 1930s. This woman, named Margherita Sarfatti, came to the United States to try to get Benito some good PR; she eventually got a job as a pro-fascist columnist for the Hearst newspaper chain. And here's the really startling part: she was Jewish.

I guess my point is, Mussolini had some serious relationship issues, for which we can probably thank his father. Try as you might, you can't escape your upbringing; fascist dictators don't fall far from the tree. I'm happy to report my father never squired a mistress around New York. His mistresses were reading and knowledge and big thick books. So I've inherited that weakness--but at least I'm not breaking any commandments, banning free elections, or making staccato speeches.

mutualism

The relationship between two species in which both are benefited. Thank God. I needed a dose of goodness. It hasn't been easy, reading about the natural world. I knew it was a jungle out there, but I didn't know the jungle was quite so violent, bleak, dangerous, deceitful, and cutthroat. Over the last few thousand pages, I've read dozens and dozens of brilliant and creative ways that animals have figured out to kill one another. There's the anglerfish, a fish that snags its prey with its own little fishing rod that comes out of its back. Not to be confused with the archerfish, which knocks its prey off overhanging branches with a stream of spit. Or the ambush bug, which traps butterflies with pincers and sucks out their bodily fluids. And that's just a tiny sampling of the As.

I was particularly disturbed to read about the cuckoo. I knew from Cocoa Puffs commercials that the cuckoo might have a personality disorder, but I never imagined the depth of its depravity. The cuckoo is what is called an aggressive mimic. The female cuckoo surreptitiously lays her eggs in the nests of other species. The unsuspecting mom of the other species--who is fooled because the cuckoo eggs look like her own eggs--will hatch the baby cuckoo, which proceeds to murder its adoptive brothers and sisters by pushing the other eggs out of the nest. The prick.

So you can see, it can get upsetting. Which is why it was so good to arrive at mutualism. Finally, some happy stories in nature, like the sweet tale of the intestinal flagellated protozoans and the termites. The protozoans live inside the termites' stomachs. The two species would never survive without each other, but together, the termites eat the wood and the protozoans help digest it, and they live happily together. The end. Or take the wrasse, a cleaner fish that does a little dance to tell the big fish it's time for some dental work. And the big fish relaxes, opens its mouth, and lets the wrasse eat its leftovers.

I need to focus more on this side of life. As Julie always reminds me, I have to fight my tendency toward pessimism. In general, I don't just see the glass as half empty, I see the glass as half empty and the water as teeming with microbes and the rim as smudged and the liquid as evaporating quickly. Julie is always telling me to look for the good in the world, and she's right. The Britannica is a perfect test case. Since these thirty-two volumes present all of life--from the incomprehensibly horrible to the inspiringly wonderful--I just have to find the wonderful and celebrate that. Yes, I realize that for every happy partnership, there's a thousand bugs ejecting toxic saliva at their prey. Still, I'd rather be deluded than depressed.

myrrh

So that's what myrrh is. Frankincense I knew, and gold I was familiar with, but myrrh always mystified me. It's a substance obtained from small trees and was used both as incense and to relieve sore gums. And that's it. I'm finished with the Ms. I have ingested thirteen of the twenty-six letters finished--I should know 50 percent of all knowledge.

Actually, more than 50 percent. The Britannica frontloads its letters, so the As and Bs and Cs are longer than they deserve to be--not to mention that the second half of the alphabet has Q, X, Y, and Z, which each comes in at barely longer than a novella.

I'm having doubts aplenty. I'm worried, in particular, about my science knowledge. I can follow everything up to the 19th-century mechanistic view of the world. But once the leptons and wavicles start coming in, then I'm lost. Then the words go in one eye, out the other. I could just as well be reading a TiVo instruction manual in Macedonian. This is more proof I was born in the wrong era. I would have done a lot better in Goethe's time.

Worse, I'm worried about the value of reading in general. In the section on mind, philosophy of, I learned of John Locke's parable about a blind man. The blind man wants to know what the color scarlet is like, so he interviews dozens of people about the color scarlet, thinks a long time about the topic, then, at long last, he victoriously announces that he knows what scarlet is like: "It is like the sound of a trumpet." I sometimes wonder, am I the blind man? If I'm just reading about life--about literature, science, nature--without actually experiencing it, maybe I'm hearing false trumpets. Maybe my time would be better spent out in the world, experiencing it.

N

names

Julie and I have been talking about names for our yet-to-be-conceived child. Julie's both an unflagging optimist and a planner, so she figures we should get started now. She's already got a list in her Palm Pilot--Max, Jasper, Kaya, Maya.

Thanks to the Britannica, I've got lots of new ideas. Over dinner one night, I decide to test them out.

"I've got a good name for the kid," I tell her.

"Oh yeah?"

"How about Crippled Jacobs?"

"That's a horrible thing to say," she says.

"No, it's just that many cultures use bad names to scare off demons. Crippled Jacobs or Ugly Jacobs--that kind of thing."

"Uh, no."

"They're called apotropaic names."

No response.

"How about Mshweshwe Jacobs? After the founder of the Sotho nation. He changed his name to Mshweshwe, which is supposed to be the sound a knife makes when shaving."

I mimed a little shaving. "Mshweshwe."

"Probably not."

"What about Odd? O-d-d. Like Odd Hassel, a Norwegian chemist who won the Nobel Prize."

"Oh, that one I really like," Julie says. "That one sounds just great."

Napoleon

Finally, I arrive at the little big man himself. In an odd way, I feel like I know Napoleon already. Dozens of bits and pieces about the French emperor have bobbed up in the previous eighteen thousand pages, giving me an unfinished but compelling portrait. I know, among other things:

*A disgruntled Aaron Burr tried to get Napoleon to conquer Florida.

*Napoleon was a Zionist--or at least "thought of establishing a Jewish state in the ancient lands of Israel."

*Napoleon loved ice-skating.

*The Napoleonic Wars were so expensive, England started the first income tax to pay for them.

*A French soldier named Nicolas Chauvin showed such simpleminded devotion to Napoleon, he is memorialized in the word "chauvinism."

*Napoleon used balloons for military reconnaissance, and appointed a man named Nicolas Conte--who also invented the pencil--to be head of the balloon corps.

*Napoleon knew he might want to dump Josephine someday, so when he married her, the crafty emperor made sure there wasn't a parish priest present at the ceremony. This slight technicality allowed him to dispose of her without a sticky divorce.

*Napoleon commissioned a sculptor named Antonio Canova to make a huge statue of himself in the style of a classical heroic nude. (This one I find particularly surprising. Can you see George W. Bush allowing a statue of himself nude? Clinton, maybe. But most of today's leaders like their nipples covered.)

*Napoleon's sister slept with Metternich, the Austrian statesman.

*Napoleon sold the western half of the United States to Jefferson for less than three cents an acre.

It's a bizarre collection of Napoleon arcana, an admittedly idiosyncratic portrait of the man, but I'm kind of proud of it. I like its randomness. Maybe that says something about me--that I'm overly attracted to the quirks of history. Or maybe it's because I'm trying to justify the days and days I've spent reading the encyclopedia. But in true Napoleonic style, I prefer to see something grander in my grab bag of Bonaparte lore. I prefer to think that it proves just how interwoven history is. Napoleon didn't just affect 19th-century European alliances, he affected income taxes and hot air balloons and my parents' private joke during the eighties that my dad was a male chauvinist pig, which led to a rash of pig-related gifts for his birthday every year, including pig salt and pepper shakers.

As for the Napoleon entry proper, it's fine. Nothing spectacular. He was a brilliant general, he and the pope weren't the best of buddies, he loved his Voltaire. I'm still, at the end, convinced that the heap of Napoleonic slivers was more revealing.

Nation, Carry

The formidable, nearly six-foot woman who fought for Prohibition by smashing barrooms with her trademark hatchet. According to the Britannica, "she also railed against fraternal orders, tobacco, foreign foods, corsets, skirts of improper length, and mildly pornographic art of the sort found in some barrooms of the time." Tobacco and short skirts I can see. But foreign foods? What's so evil about those? I had no idea this was controversial. I'm glad Carry Nation lost, and I live in a world where I can eat my mooshu vegetables with impunity.

national park

Julie and I are spending the weekend in my parents' house in East Hampton. It's a nice house, with tasteful wood floors and a classic porch--and lots and lots of buffalo knickknacks. That's the main decorating motif: 21st-century bison. Buffalo signs, buffalo mugs, buffalo photos, buffalo stuffed animals.

This buffalo invasion is a result of yet another one of my father's practical jokes. It's a story I've heard so many times, I think I can get it right. When their friends the Odells bought a house in East Hampton, my mom and dad hatched a plan. They sent an official-looking note to the Odells--on faux government letterhead--announcing that the Odells' just-purchased land had been claimed by the National Park Service as federal grazing area for the endangered buffalo. My dad threw in some legalese like "eminent domain," and they signed a bureaucratic-sounding name.

The Odells, my parents guessed, would figure out the perpetrators. They didn't. So my parents took it to the next level: they got my aunt--a former actress--to show up unannounced at the Odells'. My aunt was wearing safari shorts and a pith helmet, clipboard in hand, and she demanded the Odells evacuate for the buffalos. Doors were slammed. Calls were made to the police. My aunt retreated.

This is how my parents spend their time.

When the Odells figured out the responsible parties, they retaliated by sending my parents several pounds of bison jerky. This in turn was responded to with an escalating buffalo merchandise war. One day, the Odells are going to get really pissed, and my parents will come home to find a bloody buffalo carcass in the living room.

In any case, we arrive in time for Saturday lunch, which entails eating off buffalo plates and drinking out of buffalo glasses.

Naturally, I open with a buffalo fact--how could I not? I point out that the town of Buffalo, New York, was probably not named for the animal, since there aren't any buffalos in Buffalo. The most popular theory is that the name is a mispronunciation of the French phrase beau fleuve, or "beautiful river," in reference to Buffalo Creek.

My buffalo knowledge exhausted, the topic somehow drifts to former child stars--I think the connection was a new show with Emmanuel Lewis--and my father chimes in:

"One of the Brady Bunch kids became a porn star."

Huh. I thought about that. I wasn't sure that was true. And Julie--she knew that wasn't true. You don't mess with Julie on Brady Bunch knowledge.

"No," she says. "I can tell you what they became. None of them became porn stars." And she told us: Cindy was a sneaker designer, Bobby became a cameraman, Marcia had a sitcom a couple of years ago.

Nice one, I think to myself, as she continues ticking off the stars. Good for Julie. My dad may be more knowledgeable than Julie and me about a lot of areas, but Sherwood Schwartz sitcoms is not one of them.

neat's-foot oil

This is a pale yellow oil derived from boiling the feet of cattle. Good Lord. I'm trying to eat an apricot fruit roll here.

nervous system

Much more detail on brain damage. This time, quantified detail. After the age of twenty, humans lose 50,000 brain cells a day to atrophy. You probably lost a couple of dozen just reading that sentence. Whoops! There go a bunch more. I still have enough neurons to do a quick calculation on my Palm Pilot: since my twentieth birthday, about 30 million of my precious bits of gray matter have gone belly up. Thirty million! Sure, I've got a few billion left, but still.

I'm glad I didn't know this back in my carbon-monoxide-obsessed days. But now it's more incentive to keep reading--I've got to compensate for my evaporating cortex.

New Year

In India, there's the ritual boiling of rice. In Thailand, people throw water playfully at one another. Here's one of those rare times that I know more, thanks to my sister's husband Willy, a native of Cuzco: in Peru, on New Year's, women wear yellow underwear.

Newton, Isaac

Before my reeducation, I knew the basic points about Sir Isaac: British scientist, believer in deism, discoverer of gravity, alleged victim of a falling apple. The Britannica doesn't fully endorse the apple theory, calling it an unconfirmed legend. But I was pleased to learn that Newton's verified inspiration for his theory of gravity is just as interesting as falling fruit--maybe more so.

Newton's revelation came during a six-year self-imposed exile from British society. It was 1678, and he had just suffered the first of his nervous breakdowns, which caused him to lock himself away in his home. Yes, Newton was a complete nut job, the angriest and nastiest scientist in history. The Britannica comes right out and uses the phrase "pronounced psychotic tendencies."

Among his many feuds was one with philosopher John Locke, to whom he sent strange, paranoid letters accusing Locke of trying to "entangle [him] with women." Newton also hated the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The two were in a battle over who had invented calculus, and toward the end of his life, Newton expended an enormous amount of energy discrediting Leibniz--even after Leibniz died. As the Britannica puts it: "Almost any paper on any subject from those years is apt to be interrupted by a furious paragraph against the German philosopher.... In the end, only Newton's death ended his wrath."

But back to gravity. So Newton had gone AWOL for several years. Up to that point, he had been a traditional 17th-century mechanistic scientist who saw the world as a bunch of billiard balls colliding. There was no such thing as action at a distance. But during his seclusion, Newton became obsessed with occult works about alchemy and magic treatises, many of them in what was called the hermetic tradition, even copying these texts by hand. These occult books talked about substances having mysterious sympathies and antipathies toward one another, forces that could affect something even without touching it.

This unconventional idea allowed Newton to take the intellectual leap. This was his apple. The occult forces inspired him to envision forces of attraction and repulsion that worked at a distance, a breakthrough that eventually led to his theory of universal gravity.

This, to me, is fascinating. Newton--the man who finally gave us a vision of the universe as a rational and orderly place--couldn't have done it without the help of those weird occult books. Is there a lesson there? I think so. I'm going to keep my mind open, try to be more tolerant of unorthodox ideas, because even the kookiest of them can inspire a profound theory. Maybe I shouldn't be so dismissive of the Kabbalah, or tarot cards, or my New Age aunt from Berkeley who swears that staring at the sun for two minutes every morning is good for your health. No, that last one is crazy.

nonfictional prose

It's Sunday morning and Dad invites Julie and me to the beach. My father loves the beach. Or more precisely, he loves sitting on the beach. The temperature doesn't matter. He's not interested in paddleball or Frisbee. He just likes to sit in his beach chair and work. He either works on his twenty-fifth law book or he reads hardbacks--big important nonfiction hardbacks.

Like many in his generation, he is drawn to the real information, the kind with fiber and vitamins and minerals, not the Ring Ding-quality information I fill up on. My dad devours books like Ezekiel. He reads so intently on the beach that my mother once painted him a T-shirt with the following image: his beach hat floating on the ocean. The implication was that he'd be so engrossed in his reading and writing, he wouldn't notice if the tide rose and swallowed him up. I think he might read right through the apocalypse. He'd just brush those raining frogs off the page. He might look up, make a mental note that the ocean had turned to blood, then get back to business.

He's got the same weakness I have--we both love information so much, we tend to choose it over actual experience. Case in point: when we'd go on trips to Europe, he'd bring along his Fodor's. We'd get to the Parthenon, and Dad would read passages aloud from the guidebook about its history--the role of Athena and the Centaurs and the Doric columns. Then he'd lower the book, glance at the decaying big marble building for exactly three seconds, then be ready for his next chapter, uh, tourist attraction. And I'm happy to do the same. Which is what I tell Dad. I won't be able to make it to the beach, but there's an excellent section in the Britannica on waves, and how they break when the wave depth equals 1.3 times the wave height.

norms

Julie and I are on line at JFK's Alitalia counter. We're off on a week-long trip to Italy to attend the Memorial Day wedding of our friends Rick and Ilene.

I'm worried that we'll be stopped by security. Won't three clunky volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica passing through the X-ray machine raise a red flag? It's not exactly the usual vacation-friendly Elmore Leonard paperback. But apparently, Alitalia has respect for scholarship, because we breeze right through.

The flight is an overnight one, and after reading about nonsense verse and Nordic skiing, I slip my Britannica into the seat pocket and lie back for a nap. I get about ninety seconds of sleep before it starts. The snoring. Two rows behind us, in row 17, seat D, we've got a snorer. This isn't regular snoring--this is Fred Flintstone-style snoring. It's about the same decibel level as the two-thousand-pound jet engine hanging from the wing. I expect to see the window shades go up and down in its rhythm.

"My God," I say.

"Wow," says Julie, who has pushed her eyeshades up to her forehead.

I turn around. There he is, his mouth agape, a meaty doofus, red-faced and plump as a Tuscan tomato, squeezed into a tight yellow tank top. I'm not alone. I notice a dozen others like myself turned around in their seats, marveling at this acoustic phenomenon. No one within a seven-row radius is sleeping.

A stewardess walks by, and I'm just cranky enough to stop her.

"Can you wake him up?" I ask.

"I'm sorry, that's not our policy," she says, in an Italian accent.

"But no one on the plane can sleep."

"We don't wake passengers up unless there's a safety reason."

"Well, actually, sleep apnea can be quite dangerous. You can lose oxygen to the brain for up to a half minute."

Doesn't seem to register. "You can wake him yourself if you want."

She walks off. Damn. I consider poking the pudgy snorer in the arm and running away, but decide instead on the better strategy of hating him from afar.

Every couple of minutes the snoring stops, and I have a false moment of hope, but then it revs back up again. I'm screwed. All the knowledge in the world can't solve this dilemma. That said, my scholarship does help me in one way: I can now see the snoring situation through a clear historical and philosophical framework.

"This is a classic ethical dilemma," I say to Julie. "Classic."

Julie studies me. She isn't sure if this is going to be more or less pleasant than the sound of the snoring.

"I read about this in the ethics section," I continue. "We've got here a clear-cut example of utilitarianism versus deontology."

"Meaning what?"

I explain: the utilitarians believe in the greatest good for the greatest number. So they'd wake him up. If the philosopher Jeremy Bentham were pushing the dessert cart on Alitalia, you can bet your ass that the Snoring Wonder over there would be wide awake, with some espresso forced down his throat for good measure.

But deontologists would let him sleep, because they believe in personal rights. Unfortunately, our flight attendant is a deontologist. Deontologists say that if you're all starving in a lifeboat, you still don't have the right to kill and eat the sickest person.

Julie seems mildly interested--more than average, anyway.

"And which are you?"

"Well, I think we should wake the snoring jackass up. So I guess I'm a utilitarian."

"Huh," says Julie.

"Unless I was the one doing the snoring. Then I'm a deontologist."

Julie laughs. But sadly, I'm not really joking. I'm a utilitarian for other people and a deontologist for myself. Clearly, I could use a little more growing in the morals department. But at least I know how to label the theories. Which makes me feel better.

North Italy

I was hoping that the Britannica would be good substitute for an Italian-English dictionary. I was crossing my fingers that the Italy section would tell me how to order my pizza with no anchovies and ask how far to the nearest taxi stand. No such luck. That's not to say the Britannica lacks handy-phrase translations--they just aren't in Italian. Just so you know, I've compiled a little phrase book of things I've learned how to say:

English: Let us, each one of us, move indeed to the west across the creek.Hokan Native American language: Yabanaumawildjigummaha'nigi.

English: The girl ate mush and three biscuits but she wasn't satisfied.Traditional Gullah slave language: Uma-chil' nyamnyam fufu an t'ree roll-roun, but 'e ain't been satify.

English: You are going to remain lying down.Haitian Creole: T-ale reste kushe.

English: I have good friends.Esperanto: Mi havas bonajn amikojn.

I'm not sure why the Britannica in all its wisdom chose those particular phrases to translate. But if I'm ever walking to a Starbucks on the other side of a Hokan reservation and there's a creek in the way, I'm in excellent shape to encourage my Hokan pals to cross it. Also, I can stage a kidnapping in Haiti. But mi havas no Italian chops.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"See?"

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

Sharon says she'll think about my tip.

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

"Well, he's breast-feeding."

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

"Uh-huh."

"Just a thought. Right, Sammy boy?"

I stroke the outside of his foot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Really?"

"Yeah, almost got him arrested."

"That's fascinating."

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

number games

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 x 37 = 111

6 x 37 = 222

9 x 37 = 333

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

numismatics

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

nursery rhyme

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

Nyx

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

O

oath

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

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

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

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

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

Now that's an insult.

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

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

obscenity

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

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

"Such as?"

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

"Never heard of it."

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

Huh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't think so."

occupational disease

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

olive oil

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

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

"Great tip," he says. "Thanks."

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

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

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

"Why, yes sir," she says.

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

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

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

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

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

Olympus Mons

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

"You've got to do something," says Julie.

"What am I supposed to do? Fix the air conditioner?"

"Something."

"Sorry, I forgot to bring my power drill."

But she's right. Something has to be done.

A quick but relevant digression: Before we left for Italy, Julie and I rented an old black-and-white movie called Ball of Fire. A friend had recommended it to us because it's a romantic comedy about encyclopedias--a genre that doesn't yet have its own aisle at Blockbuster. We loved it. The film--cowritten by Billy Wilder--is about eight professors who live in a brownstone and scribble away day and night on an encyclopedia. These professors, as you might expect, have wire-rim glasses and bow ties and are very adept at bumbling. The only semicool professor is the young one, played by Gary Cooper, who specializes in language. He's writing the entry on slang, but realizes he's been locked in this brownstone for so many years, he's totally ignorant of modern-day slang. So Gary Cooper ventures out into the world, and encounters a hotsy-totsy burlesque singer--played by Barbara Stanwyck--and despite her atrocious grammar and her unfortunate connections to the mob, they fall in love.

The movie is a weird mix, at once deeply anti-intellectual and pro-education. The movie's anti-intellectual part is smack-you-on-the-face obvious--these professors have filled their heads with information but neglected their hearts, so they know nothing about life. On the other hand, there are some scenes where learning triumphs--specifically a climactic scene (warning: I'm giving away a key plot twist here) wherein the professors are being held at gunpoint by a bunch of thugs.

The desperate professors think back to the story of the Greek scientist Archimedes, who burned the entire Roman fleet by training a big magnifying lens on the ships. So these dweeby men use the lens from their microscope to burn the wire holding up a painting, which then falls and clunks the villain on the head, knocking him out and allowing the professors to escape.

I found a couple of things about this scene interesting. First, I know from the Britannica that the Archmides story was a myth--he didn't actually burn the Roman fleet--so that felt good. (Likewise, the film's narrator described these men as "knowing what tune Nero was fiddling when Rome burned." I told Julie that actually Nero was not fiddling while Rome burned.) But more important, I was jealous. I wanted to use my knowledge like this. I wanted to use it to capture the bad guy or save the heroine. In my constant quest to put my knowledge to work, I've had only a handful of modest victories, the herb and crab soup incident being the most impressive.

Which brings me back to the air-conditioning conundrum. What to do? I thought back to the history of air-conditioning. I could remember only that the Graumann's Theater in Los Angeles was one of the first places to be air-conditioned. And also that, in the days before electricity, Indians used to hang wet grass mats in the window. If life had sound effects, there would be a loud ding right about now.

I took two big white towels from the bathroom, sprayed them down in the shower, and hung them in the open window. I can't say for sure they lowered the temperature of the room, but I think they did. And regardless, I felt better. I was taking action. I was putting my knowledge to work. I was a hero, just like Billy Wilder's microscope-wielding professors.

onion

We've come back to the United States, but Julie's mind is still in Italy. She's yearning for some more of that pizza. She decides to make it herself, with me as her sous chef.

I chop my eggplant and zucchini. We're both quiet, focused on our chores. Next up, the onion chopping. I peel my onion, take it to the sink, turn on the faucet, and start slicing it under the flow.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm cutting the onion underwater."

"Why?"

"It says in the Britannica it stops you from crying."

This was an Heloise-style hint from the Britannica--one of those rare useful ones--and I was quite excited to be putting it into practice.

"Nope, too dangerous."

"But it's in the Britannica."

"Nope, I'm the executive chef. You're the sous chef."

Here I'm confronted with an unfortunate situation: the Britannica versus my wife. Two big sources of authority. Which do I choose? Well, the Britannica is pretty trustworthy. However, as far as I know, it can't carry my child or ignore me for several days or throw out the T-shirts that it hates.

So I decide Julie wins this one. The onion will be cut without water and I will cry.

ooze

Ooze, I learn, is sediment that contains at least 30 percent skeletal remains of microscopic floating organisms. You've got to marvel at the specificity of that. Thirty percent; 29 percent and you're out of luck, buddy. You may be sediment, but you're no ooze.

Opium Wars

It's Friday night, and Julie and I have rented a movie. We are frighteningly loyal fans of movies, and this year alone have provided some lucky Hollywood executive with enough cash for three Gucci suits and a Bikram yoga class. Tonight, we rented a movie called Shanghai Knights. It's a buddy comedy with Owen Wilson and Jackie Chan set in 1887 England and China.

In the first scene, the villain breaks into China's imperial palace with a bunch of evil members of China's Boxer gang.

"The Boxers were nuts," I tell Julie. "They were called Boxers because they thought their boxing training would make them impervious to bullets."

"Not now, honey."

I sort of shrug and go back to eating my Indian takeout chickpea dish.

A few minutes later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle shows up as a character. He's working as a detective at Scotland Yard, where Jackie Chan has been thrown in jail. Conan Doyle at Scotland Yard? I don't think so.

"Actually Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a medical student before he became a writer."

"A.J., please."

I'm good for the next half hour. But then, the villain reveals his plan to take advantage of China's Opium Wars. That's too tempting. I read about the Opium Wars a few days ago, and they were a memorable tale. One of the causes was a crusading Chinese official who dumped confiscated opium into the ocean to try to squash the drug trade. He was considerate enough to write an ode of apology to the gods of the ocean for defiling their home. I thought that was a nice touch, writing a poem apologizing to nature for polluting it. Exxon should start doing this. In any case, the opium dumping--just like the Boston Tea Party before it--really angered the Brits, who were making lots of money from the opium trade. So England started a war with China.

This happened sometime in the 1830s. I can't remember the exact dates, but it was in the 1830s for sure--way before 1887.

"Hey, Julie, the Opium Wars were--"

Julie pauses the movie. "Okay, new policy."

"What?"

"Whenever you give me an irrelevant fact, it's a fine of one dollar."

"Come on."

"A one-dollar fine."

"These facts were relevant," I say.

Julie thinks for a second.

"Okay, a one-dollar fine for any irrelevant fact, and a one-dollar fine for a relevant fact that interrupts a movie."

"This is crazy."

"I've got to do something."

opossums

Opossums have thirteen nipples. Good to know. Also, the notion that the opossum gives birth through its nose probably comes from the female's habit of putting her face into the pouch to clean it just before giving birth. I had never heard of this notion. I was simultaneously illuminated and disillusioned.

opposites

I'm dyin' here. That's my fellow editor Andy's favorite phrase to express general anxiety, one he uses several times a week at the start of exasperated e-mails, and it seems applicable right now. I'm dyin' here. To be more specific, I'm still having a hell of a time processing all this information, figuring out what it means. I can't see the forest for the trees, and in this case the forest is the information equivalent of the Siberian boreal forest, which makes up about one fifth of the world's forested area, so that's a lot of goddamn trees.

I'm looking for answers--and there are answers. That's not the problem. The problem is there are too many answers, thousands of answers, and they all seem to conflict with one another. I'll come up with a thesis, and pat myself on the back for my incisiveness, and then a couple of hours later I'll decide my thesis is absurd, and that the exact opposite thesis is correct. Then I'll switch back to the first.

I'll give you an example. I'll decide that the Britannica provides evidence to back up the old saw that patience is a virtue. For instance, ticks wait on twigs for weeks, months, sometimes years, for a mammal to pass underneath. And then they drop onto the fur and suck happily away on the blood. So be like the tick. Good things come to those who wait.

But then I'll read something that supports the opposite side, the importance of being impulsive, making quick decisions, of following that other old saw, "Just do it." For instance, Napoleon. He lost at Waterloo because he waited too long to attack. He waited till the afternoon, when the sun had dried the mud from the overnight rains, but by that time the Brits had received reinforcement. Historians agree: he should have just done it.

So what the hell should I do? Should I be patient? Or impulsive? I want a guide, someone to tell me this is right, this is wrong. I watched a little of Dr. Phil the other day, the blunt-talking TV host. Maybe I need a Dr. Phil for the Britannica.

orgasm

They can be experienced from infancy. What? Did I have orgasms when I was an infant? Did I smoke a tiny cigarette afterward?

oyster

Oysters can change sex according to the temperature of the water. I always knew there was something emasculating about warm baths.

Ozma, Project

Project Ozma was an attempt by some American astronomers to find intelligent life in the universe. It took place in the sixties, was named for the princess in The Wizard of Oz--and was a spectacular failure. For the past couple of weeks, I've been conducting my own search for intelligent life here on earth. Since I've announced to the world that my goal is to become the smartest man in the world, I figure I should suss out the competition. Which is why I called a man named Ron Hoeflin.

Ron is the founder of four high-IQ societies--HiQ, if you really want to sound cool. HiQ societies are clubs for those brainiacs who make the average Mensa member look like a knuckle-dragging, drooling Australo-pithecus. Mensans must score in the top 2 percent on the IQ test. That's nothing. Kids' stuff. Ron started the Top One Percent Society, which is for, naturally, the top 1 percent. His One-in-a-Thousand Society is for the top 0.1 percent. The Prometheus Society is for the top 0.003 percent. And the mighty Mega Society is for the top 0.0001 percent. Ron's IQ varies depending on which test he's taking, but he clocks in at 190 on a good day.

I found Ron because he was profiled in Esquire a few years ago. Ron later wrote a letter to the editor listing the various egregious mistakes the writer made in the article--Ron uses Wite-Out, not Liquid Paper; his father was a ballroom dance instructor, not a ballroom dancer, and so on. I'm already nervous about meeting him. I vow to myself to take meticulous notes.

Ron greets me at the door of his Hell's Kitchen apartment. It's tiny, even by New York standards, but his rent is lower than his IQ: $150 a month. Ron lives there with his two cats, Big Boy and Wild Thing, and a radiator that clanks louder than the bassist at your average Metallica concert. On the walls are a series of futuristic drawings of women with pronounced biceps, wearing G-strings and wielding swords.

"They're from a fantasy calendar," says Ron. "I got tired of seeing all my narcissistic diplomas up on the wall."

Ron's fifty-nine years old, a bear of a man with graying hair and smudged glasses. He's legally blind, but he can see things up close, which forces him to read with a magnifying glass. He grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis, memorized pi to two hundred decimal places as a kid (he still remembers the first fifty digits) and eventually got a Ph.D. in philosophy from the New School for Social Research. He makes his modest living putting together newsletters for HiQ societies. As he'll tell you himself, he's shy and awkward, not exactly a social butterfly, barely even a social caterpillar; he reminds me of Dustin Hoffman's idiot savant in Rain Man, but without the idiot part. I like him immediately.

He seems interested in my encyclopedia project. Turns out he's an obsessive reader too. Every day, without fail, Ron reads philosophy at the Wendy's on Eighth Avenue on Fifty-sixth Street over an iced tea, a Caesar salad, and a chicken sandwich. Why Wendy's? "It's got good lighting, and it's more social. Even though I don't talk to people, there are people around me, which I like." It was there that he read the entire Encyclopedia of Philosophy in 420 days, about ten pages a day. "Some articles on logic," he tells me, "were just so technical, I couldn't finish them."

Sweet Jesus! This is wonderful news. Even a verifiable megagenius like Ron has trouble finishing entries. Next time I'm mired in text about vector bundles and Mobius strips, I've got Ron's confession to comfort me.

Ron has been working on a book called To Unscrew the Inscrutable: A Theory of the Structure of Philosophy. At one point it was nearly four thousand pages but now he's shaved it down to a fifth of that, about 748 pages. He shows me some of it. The idea--as far as I can figure, and I'm probably wrong about this--is that all philosophical systems can be categorized by a number. So his Chapter 2 covers two-part systems like the yin and the yang and the wave particle duality in quantum physics. His Chapter 3 covers the Christian Trinity and Freud's tripart system (ego, id, and superego). And so on. It sounds smart. He's talking quickly, scribbling diagrams of squares inside circles, shooting off on tangents, dropping phrases like "anticipatory goal object" and "root metaphor" and "super-string theory," and I'm saying, "Right, right, right," because I don't want to look like a moron, but the truth is, I have no idea what he's talking about and no way to judge whether it's a good theory.

Ron tells me that, after ten years of work, he's just recently finished writing the book, and is ready to print it out, but his printer is broken, and he can't afford a new one. This makes me so sad that I want to hug him, which he'd probably hate.

He asks me what I've learned in the encyclopedia. I figure I should give him a philosophy fact. "Did you know that Rene Descartes had a fetish for women with crossed eyes?" I say.

"Well, my mother died on exactly the same date that Descartes did. February eleventh."

I nod. We listen to the Chopin in the background. Several seconds tick by. "So how would you define intelligence?" I ask him.

"That's a very difficult question," Ron says. If he has to be pinned down, he tells me, it probably has to do with trial and error, learning from mistakes, moderating our thoughts and actions like a thermostat, like the painter who dabs paint and, if it doesn't look good, dabs in a new place.

"Do you think I can become smarter by reading the encyclopedia?"

"Depends what you mean by smarter. You could say a computer can get smarter by feeding it more information. But in terms of hardware, there's not much hope for humans. You're stuck with the brain you were given."

It's not quite what I was hoping for, but it's not a terrible answer. I've always preferred software to hardware. At least I can improve the programs in my brain.

I ask him about geniuses. Is there anything to the stereotype that geniuses have psychological problems?

"Well, yeah," he says. Ron clicks on his computer to show me exactly what problems he suffers from. On the screen pop up the results of his personality test, with a bar graph showing the different aspects of his character.

"See? I zoomed all the way to the top on the sensitivity scale. I'm too sensitive."

Ron is shockingly open. I've been a journalist for almost fifteen years, and this is the first time someone's whipped out a personality test to show me exactly where all his flaws lie. If only the celebrities I interviewed at Entertainment Weekly had done this. I would have loved for talk show host Bill Maher to quantify for me exactly why he's such a huge jackass. Again, I want to hug Ron, but instead I go with an attempt to bond: "I'm very antisocial as well."

"At least you're married. I never got married."

"There's still time," I say. Ron hasn't had a girlfriend in a some time, though at one point he dated professional genius and Parade columnist Marilyn vos Savant. I make a mental note to have Julie fix him up with an attractive woman with an IQ bordering 200.

It's about 4 P.M., time for Ron to go to Wendy's to do his daily philosophy reading. He's dabbling in feminist tracts, but he's not too impressed. On the walk to Wendy's, he tells me that he heard you can raise your IQ by six points if you take a sauna right before your test. Perhaps that's the secret. I should abandon this encyclopedia and just take a sauna. So much more efficient! Ron smiles weakly. I shake his hand good-bye.

I'm a big fan of Ron's. He seems sweeter and more humble than those Mensans I met at the Staten Island convention. He also breaks my heart. On the subway home, as I flip through a copy of the Mega IQ test written by Ron (three xeroxed pages of absurdly difficult analogies and spatial problems), I make a note in my Palm Pilot to buy an advance copy of Ron's book to help him pay for a new printer. And I come to the ingenious conclusion that maybe it's not such a good thing to be the smartest man in the world--something I knew back when I thought I was the smartest boy in the world. Maybe it's better to be dumb and happy.

P

pachycephalosaurus

In my periodic check on how I'm faring, I stack the Britannicas up on the office floor. Look at how that pile has grown, I chuckle to myself, shaking my head proudly. It's really getting up there. Seems like yesterday when that cute little stack was barely up to my ankle. And look at it now! As I dive into the P's, it's shot to above my belly button, like I've been rubbing the covers with somatotropin growth hormone.

So I'm getting there. I'm not Ron Hoeflin, but I'm no pachycephalosaurus (a dinosaur with a thick mass of solid bone grown over its tiny brain, also known as the "bone-headed dinosaur").

Paige, Satchel

Here was the hardest-working man in baseball. Before his major league career--which began when he was surprisingly old, in his late forties--Paige barnstormed the country, traveling as many as thirty thousand miles a year, pitching for any team willing to meet his price. Any team at all. He played for various teams in the Negro League, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America, and "wearing a false red beard, he also played for the bearded House of David team." That was a baffling sentence. This was one of those rare times I felt compelled to do some additional detective work. Bearded House of David team? An Internet search revealed that the House of David baseball team was made up of the members of a Michigan-based apocalyptic cult who all wore long beards. A baseball-loving cult with excessive facial hair. My journalist's mind is trained to find trends, put things in folders with other facts. But after much thought, I can honestly say that a bearded baseball-playing apocalyptic cult does not belong to a category. It is a trend of one.

Paine, Thomas

When Thomas Paine died, most American papers reprinted an obituary from the New York Citizen that said: "He had lived long, did some good and much harm." Today he's a beloved Revolutionary War hero; back then, the majority thought him a scoundrel.

His life had more ups and downs than the upper Ural mountain range. He failed at an impressive number of jobs--he once tried to invent a smokeless candle, which sounds like a pretty good idea, but it didn't take off. His marriages ended badly.

On the other hand, the man could write a pamphlet. His Common Sense series was a huge hit--the first sold 500,000 copies; a later one was read by George Washington at Valley Forge and launched the phrase "These are the times that try men's souls." Paine refused to take profits on it so that cheap editions could be sold.

Things went sour after the war when Paine wrote a defense of the French Revolution. His ideas were solid--relief for the poor, pensions for the aged, public works for the unemployed, a progressive income tax. But in England, where he was living at the time, it got him charged with treason. Things worsened when he wrote another pamphlet attacking organized religion. Though he made clear in the pamphlet that he was a deist and believed in the Supreme Being, he still got charged with being an atheist.

And that's how he died--broke, drunk, and seen as an infidel. Oh, and his skeleton was later lost en route to England. It took decades for his approval rating to climb. Point is, you just can't predict your reputation in history. I guess you just have to write your pamphlets and hope you eventually get understood.

parallelism

My aunt Carol is visiting from Connecticut. She's got a lot of competition, but I had to choose, I'd probably say Carol is the single smartest person to share my DNA. And she's not just smart--she's a bona fide intellectual. She's like those characters in Woody Allen movies who wear turtlenecks and talk about Rilke--except she doesn't wear turtlenecks and she's completely unpretentious. Carol studied with Paul de Man and currently holds a job as professor of German literature at Yale. She's published books on major thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Claude Levi-Strauss. I haven't read all her books (sorry Carol) but I do love having them on my bookshelf, since, just like the Britannica, they add much-needed gravitas to my room.

This trip, Carol has given me another serious book: Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, which she says is very appropriate to my current life. I'm flattered she thought of me. When I get home, I open it up to the page where Aunt Carol has left a pink Post-it. I begin to read: Sartre's narrator is at the Paris library. He's observing a character called the Self-Taught Man, who spends a lot of time in the stacks.

[The Self-Taught Man] has just taken another book from the same shelf, I can make out the title upside-down: The Arrow of Caudebec, A Norman Chronicle by Mlle Julie Lavergne. The Self-Taught Man's choice of reading always disconcerts me.Suddenly the names of the authors he last read came back to my mind: Lambert, Langlois, Larbaletrier, Lastex, Lavergne. It is a revelation; I have understood the Self-Taught Man's method; he teaches himself alphabetically.

It is a revelation to me as well. A fellow adventurer through the alphabet. This is wonderful news! Sartre goes on: "He has passed brutally from the study of coleopterae to the quantum theory, from the work of Tamberlaine to a Catholic pamphlet against Darwinism, he has never been disconcerted for an instant. There is a universe behind and before him."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

I flip forward, skimming. The Self-Taught Man seems like a good guy. He's for universal love, he admires youth, he's a humanist. I like him. I wish I could dive into the book and have a conversation with him over some unpasteurized cheese at the cafe.

I skip to the end of the book. Ah, here's the Self-Taught Man again, back in the library, where he belongs, with his beloved books. He seems to be having a conversation with two young boys in the library. Huh, what's this about? Now the Self-Taught Man is putting his hairy hand on the smooth palm of a little brown-haired boy. Uh-oh. Now, writes Sartre, the Self-Taught Man "timidly began to stroke" the boy's hand.

Jesus H. Christ! The Self-Taught Man is a child molester. This is unbelievable. There's more.

The Self-Taught Man's "finger passed slowly, humbly, over the inert flesh...he had closed his eyes, he was smiling. His other hand had disappeared under the table. The boys were not laughing any more, they were both afraid."

Dammit!

First I read about Bouvard and Pecuchet, two doofuses who blow up their own house. Now comes the Self-Taught Man, who spends his afternoons timidly stroking little boys under the table. I can't believe the hostility my quest--or similar ventures--engenders from major thinkers. I'm just trying to read the encyclopedia here, people. Just trying to make myself a little smarter. Does that make me a card-carrying member of NAMBLA? What's next? Is someone going to accuse me of having body parts in my freezer or of selling plutonium to Syria?

I went on the Web. Turns out Sartre used the Self-Taught Man to represent rational humanism, a philosophy he considers bankrupt. What a mean-spirited jackass. Just because he disagrees with a point of view, he links it to pedophilia. Plus, I happen to prefer rational humanism to his absurd Marxist-inflected existentialism.

I called up my aunt to ask if she was implying anything about my sexuality. She said, no, she had read Nausea decades ago and had forgotten about all about the Self-Taught Man's boy-fondling behavior. Which makes me feel a little better.

"In fact, Henry and I were just talking about your quest," says Carol. Henry also teaches at Yale, and is also frighteningly smart, the author of dense books about Hegel's theory of time and Kafka's theory of the state. "Henry was saying that this is a very American quest. It's very American and democratic, the idea that you can improve yourself. It's a noble idea."

Now I feel a lot better. That's the first time someone has called me noble. So Sartre can go straight to existential hell.

Paris

The storming of the Bastille was surprisingly lame. When the mob forced open the doors, the prison had been largely unused for years and was scheduled for demolition. It "held on that day only four counterfeiters, two madmen and a young aristocrat who had displeased his father." Seven people? That barely qualifies as a storm. More like a light drizzle. Couldn't they have stormed something a little more impressive?

passenger pigeons

These birds--which, judging by the picture, were much better looking than the chunky gray head bobbers that coo and cluck on my windowsill--officially became extinct when the last known representative died, on September 1, 1914, in the Cincinnati Zoo. Humans hunted passenger pigeons into nonexistence. But in the 1800s, there were billions of them. This I know. Way back in the B's under animal behavior, the Britannica printed a remarkable passage by Audubon that I haven't been able to get out of my mind. It said:

The air was literally filled with pigeons; the light of noonday was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots not unlike melting flakes of snow...the people were all in arms.... For a week or more, the population fed on no other flesh than that of pigeons. The atmosphere, during this time, was strongly impregnated with the peculiar odour which emanates from the species.... Let us take a column of one mile in breadth, which is far below the average size, and suppose it passing over us without interruption for three hours, at the rate mentioned above of one mile in the minute. This will give us a parallelogram of 180 miles by 1, covering 180 square miles. Allowing 2 pigeons to the square yard, we have 1,115,136,000 pigeons in one flock.

My thoughts after reading that passage, in no particular order: People are terrible, I can't believe we killed so many pigeons...Thank God I wasn't around when that flock was flying overhead--those dung snowflakes sound nasty...Did any of the 1.1 billion pigeons think to himself, I'm really special. I'm not like these other losers?

Well, in somewhat of an order, I guess. Because that last one haunted me especially. Reading about massive numbers of a particular species does that to me. I pride myself that I'm an individual, that I'm unique. But I doubt that a Venusian scientist would be able to distinguish me from the other 5 million Manhattanites who converge on midtown every day to sit in front of computer terminals and talk on the phone. I'm just one member of a huge nonflying flock.

The Britannica points out that passenger pigeon flocks are the second largest social unit in history, topped only by desert locusts. Third place? Modern-day China. Locusts, pigeons, and China: that seems vaguely insulting to the Chinese people, to be classed with locusts and pigeons. But I guess it's only insulting if you refuse to accept that humans are animals.

patch box

A rectangular box used as a receptacle for beauty patches in the 18th century. Back in the days of Louis XV, says the Britannica, black patches of gummed taffeta were popular with chic women (and men) who wanted to emphasize the beauty and whiteness of their skin. The smart set had plenty of patch designs to choose from. For the understated, there were the simple spots. But the truly fashionable had patches in the shapes of stars, crescents, elaborate animals, insects, or figures. Placement was also important, seeing as these patches had their own language: a patch at the corner of the eye symbolized passion, while one at the middle of the forehead indicated dignity. Women carried their patch boxes with them, in case they wanted to slap on a fresh one during the royal ball.

This is good to know, seeing as I have my very own patch. Apparently I was born about 250 years too late, since I've always thought of it as a big ugly mole, not as a fashionable accessory that enhances the whiteness of my skin. My beauty patch, sadly, isn't in the shape of a giraffe or spider--just the regular old spot. But it is on my face. It's on the right side of my nose, which makes me wonder what my patch would symbolize to a courtier in 18th-century France. Probably "Je suis un jackass."

I love learning the lengths that humans will go to make themselves attractive to potential mates. The French in particular were good at this. In addition to carrying her box of patches, a stylish gal in the court of Louis XIV needed to affix a fontange (tower) to her head. This was a complex wire frame, often in the shape of a fan, that held her hair, along with artificial curls, dangling streamers, ribbon, starched linen, and lace. A huge tower of hair and black splotches on her face--va-va-voom.

Of course, if I'm tempted to feel superior when reading this information, I need only think back to my own attempts at preening in high school. They weren't pretty. They involved not only several increasingly goopy types of hair gel, which was bad enough, but also something much worse: an ear clip. This was a little silver band that attached to the middle of my ear. The ear clip was for those milquetoasts like me who lacked the backbone to get their ears pierced. It was something you could remove before going to Thanksgiving at Grandma's, much like the gummy taffeta of the 18th century.

patriotism

We're out at my parents' house in East Hampton for July Fourth. I come down to breakfast and announce my big July Fourth fact: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the same day--July 4, 1826, fifty years after the founding of the country. Jefferson died at noon, his last words being, "Is it the Fourth?" Adams died later in the afternoon, his last words being, "Thomas Jefferson still lives." He was wrong.

Been holding on to that one since the J's. Feels good to get it off my chest.

perception (of time)

I'm thirty-five years old, which isn't young, but it won't qualify me for any special rates at the Boca Raton Denny's either. Still, it's old enough that I've started to notice something disturbing, a phenomenon my grandparents talk about a lot: time has sped up. The years are vanishing more and more quickly, the calendar days flipping by faster than a falcon in full dive (150 mph).

The Britannica has an explanation for this: elderly people find time shorter because they notice long-accustomed changes less frequently.

I'm not 100 percent sure what this means. Which long-accustomed changes in particular? They notice the daily setting of the sun less frequently? The changing of the seasons? The rhythms of the body? The Buckingham Palace guards? Regardless, I get the gist. Old people adapt to stimuli. To put it bluntly, old people are less perceptive.

I wonder if I can fight this change. Can I stop the acceleration of time by remaining observant? By keeping my mind open to changes and filled with wonder at the world, instead of tuning it out? That would truly be an accomplishment. I vow to try, though I know it's about as likely as stopping the sunset.

Perry, Matthew

Ever since my banishment from Jeopardy! I've been checking the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Web site every day for audition times. There haven't been any. Just an apology from the producers and a photo of an agonized man who has apparently just lost a lot of money--I guess it's supposed to be amusing, but it just increases my frustration.

The prime time version--the one with Regis Philbin--has long since been canceled. I'm just trying to get on the syndicated version--the one that runs in the afternoon every day, around Oprah time, and is hosted by a woman named Meredith Vieira, who doesn't shout nearly as much as Regis.

Finally, after several weeks, the agonized man face is gone. Auditions! Here in New York! I sign up for a Tuesday night, not knowing what to expect. Coincidentally, an intern at Esquire tried out on Monday night, and when he shuffles in on Tuesday morning, I pump him for details. They aren't inspiring. He failed, as did almost all of the one hundred hopefuls, and he warns me that the audition quiz will "pound your brain and ego." So I'm already on edge when I arrive at the ABC studios on the Upper West Side.

I'm not relaxed by the situation there. For forty-five minutes, all of us potential millionaires stand outside the building in the rain.

"This is fun, huh?" I say to the wet woman next to me.

"Yeah," she says. "This sucks. Final answer."

We both have a chuckle. She's wearing loose black clothing and has a middle part in her hair that wouldn't be out of place at a Renaissance fair. Her face reminds me of an attractive Broom-Hilda, the cartoon witch.

"So what do you do when you're not trying out for quiz shows?" I ask.

"I'm unemployed right now. That's why I'm here."

Jesus. Did I learn nothing from my Mensa experience? Remember: do not ask about occupations at gatherings where above-average IQs are involved. Still, my guilt over the faux pas is tempered by relief, because I have a realization: this middle-parted woman should get my spot. I'm just here to get my ego massaged; she actually needs the money. She's got utility bills, phone bills, maybe some kids with middle parts. She deserves a chance more than I do--that's just basic marginal utility economics. So if I lose, I'll just tell all my friends and family, "Oh, I took a dive for a friend in need."

And then she takes out her BlackBerry pager. Shit. There goes my excuse. Anyone with a BlackBerry pager isn't sleeping on vents in Central Park or waiting in line at soup kitchens, unless those soup kitchens are serving twenty-three-dollar bowls of bouillabaisse with sprigs of parsley. Now I've got no reason to throw the test. Pressure's back on.

My BlackBerry-owning friend tells me that this is her second day of trying to audition. Yesterday, the Millionaire folks gave her the wrong time to show up, then treated her with all the dignity of a used napkin. I shake my head. We speculate that they treat us badly because they feel threatened by our intellect. It's a good feeling--the feeling of being part of an oppressed but brainy minority.

After forty-five minutes of waiting--during which, for some reason, I start mentally reviewing vice presidents on the chance that they will play a major part in the Millionaire quiz (Hubert Humphrey, George Dallas, Charles Warren Fairbanks)--we are ushered into a huge room. The room has posters of actual millionaires--ABC stars like Drew Carey.

The Millionaire helpers pass out the quizzes and the official Who Wants to Be a Millionaire number 2 pencils to the hundred-plus hopefuls. We have eleven minutes to answer thirty multiple choice questions. Now go!

The questions are of midlevel difficulty. They aren't like the disturbingly simple hundred-dollar questions on the show, the ones like "What color is an orange?" but they also aren't the million-dollar variety, like "What was the name of Cardinal Richelieu's pet cockatoo?"

I dive in.

What does not follow a straight path?

(a) the Equator

(b) the Tropic of Cancer

(c) the International Date Line

(d) the meridian

I knew it! I knew it thanks very much to the Britannica, which had a map of the International Date Line taking a jog to the west so that it would avoid the Aleutian Islands. I'm feeling good, feeling cocky.

Which planet cannot be seen with the naked eye?

(a) Mercury

(b) Saturn

(c) Jupiter

(d) Neptune

Again, the Britannica to the rescue. I know my planets. I remember the poor telescope operator Challis whose claim to fame is that he failed to discover Neptune. Neptune's the tough one to find. Neptune it is.

I zip through the rest. And here's the weird part: the questions that leave me baffled mostly focus on my former safe haven, pop culture. What country is Latina pop star Shakira from? Not a clue. If I were keeping up with my People magazines instead of burying my nose in the Britannica, I would know.

This is big. I've officially made the switch in where my gaps lie. As I've started to fill in holes in history and science and literature, new holes have opened up in pop culture. I make a guess about Shakira's native land (it's Colombia) and am finished a good four minutes before they tell us, "Pencils down!"

"So how'd you do?" I ask my unemployed BlackBerry owner.

"Pretty well," she says. "I didn't know the one about Captain Matthew Perry."

"Commodore Matthew Perry," I correct her.

"Yes, Commodore Perry. I didn't know which country he opened up to trade."

"That'd be Japan," I say, suppressing the urge to pat her on the head. "Did you think it was the Republic of Courtney Cox?" I chuckle.

She doesn't react.

"Because, you know, the actor on Friends is named Matthew Perry as well," I say. "And he's going out with Courtney Cox on the show."

God, I can be a condescending schmuck. Meanwhile, the other end of our table has become very noisy. A fierce debate has erupted over the question "Which advertising character is known for lying?" The correct answer is fast-talking eighties car salesman Joe Isuzu, but one man is arguing that Madge--the Palmolive lady--was also a stinking liar. Madge refused to admit that her soft hands were the result of submersion in Palmolive. A lie.

But the argument will have to wait. The tests have been graded by Millionaire's speedy computer. We were each assigned a number--mine is two--and the emcee begins calling out the winners.

"Number three!"

The crowd claps grudgingly for number three, who stands up and takes a deep waist bow.

"Number eighty-six!"

More halfhearted applause.

As he reads off number after number, I start to doubt myself. Maybe Shakira screwed me. "Number fourteen!" Maybe after months of stuffing my head, I'm still so ignorant I can't get an audience with Meredith Vieira. "Number two."

Thank God! "Yes!" I shout, as I jump up and do a Rocky fist pump. I'm as happy as Lindbergh landing at Paris (his prize: $25,000).

There are about fifteen of us winners--my BlackBerry friend among us--and we are instructed to migrate to the back of the room. Our crucible isn't over. We still have to clear another hurdle: the interview. We are smart enough, but are we interesting and presentable enough? Do we have enough personality and basic hygiene? Are we semiattractive?

I am just as nervous about passing the telegenic test as I was about the knowledge quiz. It reminds me of a particularly humiliating episode in my career. This was about ten years ago, back when I was in my mid-twenties and trying to sell my first book--an analysis of the eerie similarities between Jesus and Elvis. One of the publishing companies said they loved the book, but they had just one request: could they see a photograph of me?

"Why do they want a photograph?" I asked my agent. "Is this normal?"

"They just want to make sure you're presentable, so you can go on talk shows. Just to make sure you don't have three heads."

So I went to a photographer at a department store near San Francisco, where I was living at the time. The photographer put me in front of some oscillating fans so as to tussle my hair just right, gave me some flattering upward lighting, and snapped a few dozen pictures. I sent them in.

A week later, my agent calls. "I'm sorry, they've decided to pass."

As you can imagine, this was not the best news for my ego. Apparently, I wasn't good-looking enough to be an author. An author. I wasn't asking to be a soap opera actor or a news anchor or a Gucci model. I just wanted to sit in my room alone and write books. But apparently I wasn't even attractive enough to do that. Did Nathaniel Hawthorne have the ladies' hearts aflutter? Did Herman Melville have killer abs? Maybe so.

In any case, I'm hoping that the Millionaire folks are a little more liberal. The interviews are one-on-one affairs, and mine is with a young brunette named Wendy.

"So how would your friends describe you?" she asks.

I hate that question. What am I supposed to say? That they think I'm wildly entertaining and shockingly intelligent? "I guess they'd describe me as lanky."

She seems confused. "That's all they'd say?"

"Maybe lanky and brown-haired."

She knits her brows. Uh-oh. This is not going well. I learn my lesson, and answer the rest of her questions in as orthodox a manner as possible. My delivery, however, is not ideal. I spend the remainder of the interview mumbling and shifting my eyes. Instead of the effervescent game show contestant that I should be, I come off as if I've just been arrested for shoplifting marital aids.

Wendy takes out the Polaroid.

"Okay, say 'cheese'!"

I thought it'd be funny to say "Emmentaler cheese, which is what the Swiss call Swiss cheese, which gets its holes from the carbon dioxide that is formed while it ferments at seventy-five degrees." But I don't. I just say "cheese." Which is probably a good thing.

pet

It's believed that the ancient Egyptians used geese as guard animals.

Petrarch

I'm completely ignorant of this man, but he sounds like someone I should know about. Here's what I learn: He's a 14th-century Italian poet famous for his chaste love of a woman named Laura. He first spotted Laura on April 6, 1327, at the Church of Saint Clare at Avignon, when he was 22 years old. He loved her, says the Britannica, almost until his death, even though she was out of his reach. And from this love sprang the poems that made Petrarch's name.

Oh boy. Another one of these guys. There are at least a dozen such fellows sprinkled through the encyclopedia. Like Dante, who dedicated most of his poetry to a woman named Beatrice, whom he loved and worshiped since he saw her at age nine, even though he never got so much as a single peck on the cheek. Or Byron, obsessed for decades with his cousin, who had spurned him as a young man.

What's the word we have today for men like this? Oh yes. "Stalker." If they were around now, Beatrice and Laura would slap restraining orders on their respective obsessors. Perhaps something like "Mr. Petrarch is forbidden to come within one hundred yards of Laura. In addition, he is forbidden to write sonnets, octets, epics, couplets, limericks, or haiku that name or allude to Laura in any way, most especially ones that compare her to a summer day."

And what about the husbands? Yes, these yearned-for women were, in many cases, married, but you never get these schmos' side of the story. Beatrice, the daughter of a noble Florentine family, got married to a man named Simone. If he didn't, Simone needed to have a little conversation with Dante:

"I can't help but notice that you keep writing love poetry to my wife. Well, you see, I married her, which makes her my wife. You know what you might want to try? Writing some poems about the sunset. The sunset isn't fucking married."

I know I shouldn't be thinking these thoughts. I know they make me sound like a philistine. I know I'm looking at the long and marvelous history of romantic love through my shallow 21st-century lenses. I'm supposed to be smartening up. Shouldn't I marvel at the depth of their emotion? Shouldn't I be inspired to read their love poems?

Instead, I just want to tell them to shut their cake holes and get over it. I want to tell them to go on Dr. Phil and get their head chewed off. I want to tell them what I tell my friend John, who is still hung up on his college crush, a woman who later went on to star in an Adam Sandler movie. "John, you can't have her. It's over. Sign on to match.com and find yourself a new woman. Okay?"

Of course, Petrarch and Dante probably didn't have match.com available. They'd have to settle for something more primitive, like video dating services. But you get the idea.

philosophy

I studied philosophy for four years. But I'd trade everything I learned for this passage, originally written by a scholar named Robert Ardrey and quoted in the Britannica:

But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.

Amen. That's great stuff. If ever I was going to faint like the woman who read Montaigne's essays, this would be the time, because that is a powerful set of sentences. That has been the major and ongoing battle as I read the Britannica and live my life--the battle to find the bright side, which is something I'm not constitutionally inclined to do. Never has the case been stated better. Of course, I don't like poems. But I'm happy to substitute that we are known among the stars by our movies, books, a great joke, a comfortable pair of shoes, a beautiful and towering building--and not by our corpses.

Phryne

I now know far too much about odd legal proceedings. I know about the 9th-century trial of Pope Formosus. He didn't do so well under cross-examination, seeing as he was--I believe this is the technical term--dead. His successor--Pope Stephen VI--hated Formosus's policies so much, he had Formosus's corpse exhumed, propped up on a throne, and put on trial. Shockingly, Formosus lost. As punishment, his fingers were cut off and his corpse was thrown into the Tiber River.