Another Day Goes By

I slept in today again, partly because I wanted to fully get over the headache from last night, and partly because I didn't sleep very well. Finally got into a nice fitful doze past 5am, so had ended up waking only around noon.

It was a nice sunny afternoon, something that I did not realize mainly because I was stuck in my room trying to do work. I emphasize trying. My stunning resolve seems to have fallen apart with a mixtures of various distractions. A chief distraction has been my discovery of Yahoo Answers which is rather addictive - you earn points for helping to give answers to a whole plethora of random queries.

I also finished the book I mentioned in the previous post called "Know It All" which was about one man's quest to read through the whole of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I have to say that I felt a great deal of kinship with a lot of what he wrote, and for his quest in general. To be fair, I did once attempt to read through an encyclopedia cover to cover, but that was when I was all of 7 years of age, and I gave up around "ac" - this being my old 1987 edition of the World Book encyclopedia. I had loved reading the encyclopedia as a kid - the reason I gave up was more along the lines of my enjoying the sense of discovery one got by browsing around and flipping through the pages.

I must admit that I identify far too closely with a number of the remarks that Jacobs makes for comfort. I can totally understand the electric feeling he says he gets when he discovers some totally unrelated and random fact - like the fact that "screeched" is the longest one syllable word in the english language (quite appropriately one would think). I also share his ambivalence about the dividing line between knowledge and intelligence, and whether building up the former has any bearing on the latter, though my love of knowledge is that I cannot refrain myself from cluttering my head with useless information, even if is not only total useless, but in fact detrimental to intelligence. His many attempts to drop a telling fact, and the reactions he received when that happened caused me to wince in sympathy, particularly his description of how the opposite party goes "oh, that's interesting" even as their eyes start to wander off.

However, if one needed any further proof of the essential sadness of my life, it lies in the way that I responded to Jacob's facts themselves. When he mentions that 'bedlam' actually originated from the Bethlehem hospital, I not only went "knew that!" but couldn't help but wonder if Jacobs knew that this is now the site of the Imperial War Museum. When he commented on how Attila the Hun proved his ruthlessness by having the people who buried him killed, I went aha! but that is nothing compared to Qin Shihuang, the first emperor of China who had tens of thousands of artisans, and engineers killed - in fact, anyone who had even worked vaguely on his tomb, which was a enormous number of people considering there was an entire army of terracotta warriors buried with him. When he spoke of the Gettsburg Address and how Lincoln was not the keynote speaker, but had to wait for someone to ramble on for 2 hours before he took to the podium, I went "knew that!" immediately, while adding the fact that Lincoln had not composed the speech on the train and scribbled his notes for it one the back of an envelope as commonly believed. (I admit to learning that particular tidbit of information from a Bill Bryson book no less - Mother Tongue - in an extract printed out for my A level class). And so on it went.

Cappucino originating from the Cappuchin monks and the colour of their robes? Easy! George III and his bouts of madness - easy enough again. I could even explain that his madness was caused by a hereditary condition that caused the build up of waste chemicals in his bloodstream (learned this from a lecture given at the Oxford Literary Festival by Steve Jones recently). Even better - he used the metaphor "leaving Iwo Jima before the flag was planted" in his book, and I couldn't help but want to point out that that famous photo was actually staged, as well as the fact that the famous photo of the Russian soldiers placing the flag on the Reichstag is also staged - read it in a book called On Photography by Susan Sontag.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both dying on the 4th of July? That is an old chestnut, along with the fact that Adams' last words were "Jefferson still lives". I admit to not knowing that Jefferson paid a newspaper to libel Adams, but I do know that his house was called Monticello and that he invented the dumbwaiter (most useful of devices). Less spectacularly, I knew that one of the pioneers of the film industry was the appropriately named Lumiere (similar to luminous), but what sprang to mind immediately was that it was also the name of the candlestick character in Beauty and the Beast.

If you haven't started wondering if there is something seriously wrong with me, then you had better look yourself in the mirror. Bandying facts is a hazardous enough pastime; doing it towards an inanimate object and going hah and one-upping a person who is thousands of kilometres (the author lives in New York) away and who doesn't know you exist is completely off the wall barmy. To top it all off, Jacobs describes the thrill of triumph he felt when he spotted an error in the Britannica - that Robert Frost was considered an alumni when he didn't actually graduate from Harvard. I spotted an error in his book, and emitted a sound of triumph that caused a few startled glances (I was sitting in a pub having lunch while reading) - he mis-spelt Chicken Tikka Marsala (it is Masala) - a mistake that Massala, who is actually the nemesis of Judah Ben Hur from everyone's favourite easter movie, might easily have made.

To sum it all off, I googled Jacobs and found that he has a wonderful little website and blog, and I have proceeded to send him an email with regards to how much I enjoyed his book, of course suriptiously mentioning that one error...