Since several people have sent me this link, I thought I’d share: the U.S. Geological Survey is have a “Spring Mega Sale” through June 4, with big markdowns on tens of thousands of maps, charts, and other publications. Many items are of midcentury vintage, and some are as priced as low as $1! So much beautiful stuff here if you like maps.

WORDPLAY WEDNESDAY! Take the last name of a TV character, and the first name of his lifelong best friend. (There’s a small cheat here in that you have to use a nickname.) Anagram the two words together to get the name of powerful real-life political figure of the same era as the show. (Like if you could mix up FLINTSTONE and BARNEY to make HUBERT HUMPHREY instead of, um, NIFTY SNOT ENABLER.)

Every word in these three columns hides a secret–a concealed word in consecutive letter somewhere within it. Choose one word from each column to make a trio whose hidden words all belong to the same category. For example, you can form a trio out of MACHINATION, INCUBATE, and VAGABOND from the three columns, because they contain CHINA, CUBA, and GABON respectively: three countries. Can you find the other nine hidden themes?

Edited to add: Answers on this message board thread. Highlight invisible white text to read.

One of the most interesting people I met writing my book Maphead was Chris Guillebeau. Chris is an insanely bright high school dropout who decided in his twenties that he wanted to travel–to every country in the world, if possible. When I met him in Portland a couple years ago, he was at 149 countries visited. Today, he’s up to 183.

Unlike most of the compulsive checklist travelers I met, Chris is not retirement-aged or obscenely wealthy or both. He’s just very motivated, and very good at cheap, efficient travel planning. He makes a living dispensing travel and small-business tips on his website, and today he has a new book out from Crown! The $100 Startup is a study of people like Chris who have managed to live their dreams without ever spending a day in a “real job.” How do they do it?

I know next to nothing about this motivational/business-type book space, but I can personally vouch for his idea that working for yourself doing Your Favorite Thing is about a million times better than some soul-stifling 9-to-5 cubicle job. If you’ve ever thought about starting your own “microbusiness” (just you, essentially), the laser-focused mind of Chris Guillebeau might be a good resource to consult first.

Another writer who helped inspire Maphead was Katharine Harmon, who’s compiled a couple of lavishly illustrated and remarkably successful books about cartographic art–artwork incorporating maps. Some of these are found art from the history of maps: World War II-era souvenir maps of Europe, phrenological diagrams of the skull, Polynesian ocean maps made from coconut fronds, “allegorical” maps from turn-of-the-century magazines. Many more are the dazzling creations of contemporary artists who love maps as a medium: Kim Baranowski, who puts potential nuclear targets on pull-down classroom maps to make them scarier; Ai Weiwei, who made a three-foot-high map of the world by carefully stacking two thousand layers of cotton fabric; Corriette Schoenarts, who takes photographs of casually discarded clothing that, on second glance, has been strewn in the precise shape of countries and continents. There’s a new marvel on just about every page of You Are Hereand The Map as Art, and I can’t recommend them highly enough.

When I found out Harmon lived in Seattle, I tracked her down and she was kind enough to meet with me for coffee and talk maps for a while. She’s not mentioned in the final draft of the book, but her ideas were really helpful–and I could always flip through one of her gorgeous books when I needed inspiration.

I know there’s been some discussion here in the past of people whose three names all have the same number of letters. You know: Henry Cabot Lodge, Joyce Carol Oates, Ronald Wilson Reagan, Helena Bonham Carter, Francis Hodgson Burnett.

I didn’t know of any four-word variants, until yesterday, when I was looking at a literary encyclopedia and noticed that Pulitzer Prize-winning former U.S. poet laureate Robert Lowell, arguably the most important American poet of his era, was born Robert Traill Spence Lowell. His parents wanted the symmetry so bad that they doubled the ‘L’?!

Some Googling also turns up Nobel-winning physicist Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton. Are there others, of any word length?

A real highlight of the Maphead tour was getting to meet the legendary Marco Polo! The late Mr. Polo is looking pretty good considering he died about seven hundred years old. Also he appears to be some sort of a bandleader or pirate.

This “Marco Polo” is actually Jonathan Wright, the star of Team Marco Polo, a Seattle-produced educational series designed to teach American kids about the world. Sort of like Big Blue Marble or Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? or whatever the globally-minded after-school show of your childhood was, but updated for the 21st century. Right now you can see a bunch of the show’s segments on the web, but the producers are hoping to bring the series to TV at some point.

The conceit is that 13th-century Venetian explorer Marco Polo has time-traveled to our day, and still loves talking travel and exploration and stuff…but is also a bit of a buffoon. Here’s my promo for their show:

And here’s Marco interviewing me about my book, sort of:

My favorite new Team Marco Polo video: a catchy way to learn all the countries of the world. (“Czech Republic in the house!!!”) The Marco Polo guys tell me you can download the mp3 for free if you “like” the video on the Team Marco Polo Facebook fanpage.

A slightly cool map thing that I’ll probably write about for Conde Nast’s blog one of these days: so I’ve seen a few articles on-line suggesting that Treriksroysa, on the Norway-Finland-Russia border, is the only place on Earth where three time zones converge.

That’s actually not true: there’s apparently a tiny tripoint town in the middle of the Australian desert that’s a big hit on New Year’s Eve. Wikipedia says there are 28 tri-points worldwide in total, mostly a result of China and India’s respective decisions to keep all their vast countries on one time zone. It looks like you can step back in time three hours just by crossing between China and Pakistan…or even three and a half hours by crossing between China and Afghanistan! Is this the weirdest such jump possible?

Wordplay Wednesday! Make two ten-letter words by putting the same eight letters (in the same order) in both sets of blanks.

N E __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __

       __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ A T

One will be a word describing something very low. The other can be either high or low, depending on your personal preference.

To celebrate the paperback release of my book Maphead, Simon & Schuster is holding a little sweepstakes! I’ve never had my own sweepstakes before so this is very exciting for me.

Just go enter by May 18 over on their website, and you could win one of thirty signed copies of the book OR even the grand prize–a Suunto Core multifunction watch with all kinds of cool geo-geek stuff in it like a compass and an altimeter.

Contractually I‘m not allowed to win, so I want one of you to get out there and win this thing for me. Not “for me” like you have to give it to me after they send it to you, but like in place of me, like if I was dead and it’s what I would have wanted.

Here’s a very late-breaking reminder that I’m doing what might be The Last Maphead Book Event Ever tonight at Third Place Books. The Lake Forest Park one, not the Ravenna one. The fun starts at 7. (The event starts around 6:30. No, just kidding. What a tired and also confusing joke.)

For some reason my Appearances page says 6:30, actually. But no, the bookstore says 7.

I also wanted to mention a great email I received from longtime Tuesday Trivia subscriber Colin Smith. Colin submitted a fun Question Seven idea of his own, and added that he teaches school in Riggins, Idaho, where he assigns the weekly Question Seven to his students for extra credit, to build research and problem-solving skills. Very cool. When Riggins, Idaho, one day becomes an international center for technology and innovation, I hope they put up a statue of me in the park. Riding a horse labeled “TUESDAY TRIVIA” like in a political cartoon.

If you don’t subscribe to Tuesday Trivia but you want to be super-smart like Mr. Smith’s tenth-graders, sign up for the weekly quiz at left.

Home! Just got back from the airport, the book tour behind me. Except for Friday’s grand finally, here in the Greater Seattle Area.

Since the blog has been a bit sparse this week, here’s a morsel of Wordplay Wednesday that occurred to me on the plane.

1. Take the full name of an iconic TV character–who has, if memory serves, an orange sofa.
2. Add the letter ‘M’ to the front of the character’s name to get another iconically orange object.
3. Now add the letter ‘E’ and anagram the whole shebang to get the full name of a former world leader–one who shares the same religious persuasion as the TV character, by the way.

Who are they?

Edited to add: Solution quickly provided by bwouns on this thread. (Highlight invisible text to read.)

The Whatcom Literacy Council in Bellingham, Washington, invited me to their annual “trivia bee” benefit on Friday night as a “lifeline”: teams who didn’t know an question could, in lieu of answering, display a replica of my face, indicating that they’d just take my answer instead. Sometimes I knew it, sometimes I didn’t. Que sera, sera. Did you know that licorice was a legume? Well, me neither.

I wanted to thank the fine bookstores in Salt Lake City, Denver, Oakland, and Bellingham who hosted last week’s Maphead signings, and everyone who came and chatted. Maybe I’m a biased observer because I was the one all hopped up on Diet Dr Pepper and wearing a smart blazer, but I thought all the book events were really fun. Two separate people told me a great geography factoid: during the late 1980s, the University of North Carolina had the highest paid geography graduates in the U.S. by a large margin. Do you know why? The answer is apparently a textbook example of why arithmetic means can be misleading, but I’d never heard it before. If I had, I would have used it in the book. (In Mormon circles, incidentally, a similar story is told about Steve Young inflating BYU’s law school ranking.)

PORTLAND! Tomorrow morning I’m going to be on your televisions on AM Northwest at 9:something a.m., and then signing books at the Beaverton Powell’s at 7 p.m. Hope to see you there.

Tuesday night I’m speaking at a banquet honoring “Star Scholars” in Ventura County, California. I didn’t put it on my Appearances page because I didn’t know if it was open to the public. Turns out it is–if you pay $50 for dinner. Sort of a big if. I only mention this because people have complained that there’s no L.A. signing on the Maphead tour. If you shell out for the junior achievers thing I will totally come to your table while you’re eating your chicken and peas and make smalltalk and sign your book.

I only have a few seconds, but as a public service announcement for Bay Area readers: I wanted to re-recommend my 7:30 signing tonight at Oakland’s Diesel bookstore. There was a thing about it in the San Francisco Chronicle today, and if you’re watching KGO at about 3:10 this afternoon, I’ll be talking maps on ABC 7Live as well.

Thinking of taking a walk down to the corner of Post and Steiner, where the old Winterland Ballroom was. That was the venue for The Band’s famous final concert, “The Last Waltz.” RIP Levon Helm.

I inadvertently confused Denverites (an actual kind of person that exists) with Detroitites (not a real thing) in a Tuesday Trivia question a few months back. And now here I am in Colorado surrounded by actual Denverites, reminding me of my shame. If this fair city is your home, I’m talking about Maphead and signing copies of same at the Tattered Cover Book Store on Colfax Avenue tonight at 7:30 pm.

Thanks to everybody who showed up in Salt Lake City last night. The bookstore literally ran out of books, which is a classic piece of good news/bad news for an author. (For readers, mostly bad news. Sorry.)

Wordplay Wednesday! (Returning after a long absence.) Two quick questions.

1. Studies have shown that “moist” is the English language word that makes people the most uncomfortable–and yet there are lots of five-letter words that end with -oist: foist, hoist, joist, etc. But can you think of a common six-letter word that ends in -oist? I can think of two that are usually capitalized, and two that aren’t.
2. Take a word for something that a guitarist might do, and add to the end of it the surname of a 1980s vocalist. Divide this set of letters, in the same order, in a different place, and–voila!–you’ll have the surname of a 1980s guitarist, followed by something a vocalist might do! Who are the artists in question?

Edited to add: Quickly solved (in a team effort) on this message board thread. (Highlight the invisible text there to read the answers.)

What’s this? The hilarious, bestselling geography-geek orgy Maphead is now available for sale again, but it costs like half as much and has cool extra features?!? What great news!

I guess what I’m saying is my book hits stores in paperback today! Why are you still reading this? You should be making your way to a bookstore or online bookseller right now to buy one for you and then a bunch as gifts!!!

If you’re on the Wasatch Front somewhere, hop in your car (big SUV, I suspect?) and come see me at The King’s English Book Shop in Salt Lake City’s lovely Sugar House neighborhood tonight at 7. I’ll talk a bit and read a little from the book (but only a little because that’s usually the boring part at author events!) and then there’s going to be a little geography game with prizes. How fun is that? What else are you going to do on a Tuesday night.

Then tomorrow night, Denver, and Oakland the night after that.

I haven’t written much about my Antarctic adventure on this blog yet, but I did tell the folks at Conde Nast Traveler that it wasn’t what I was expecting. If Frozen Planet has interested you in seeing the bottom of the world, my little write-up might be worth a look.

Tomorrow, Maphead hits bookstores in paperback! As I’ve mentioned before, the new version has a couple little addenda (a geography quiz, some tongue-in-cheek tips for book groups) and a few embarrassing errors fixed. “Chloropleth” has been correctly re-spelled as “choropleth.” (Six months too late to prevent the Twitter abuse I received on this point from a possibly inebriated ESRI cartographer.) Ardmore, Tennessee has been correctly transplanted from Ardmore, Louisiana. And so on.

I’ll try to keep the blog updated from the road on my little five-city tour. I look forward to seeing some of you there.

“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut. I wish I’d remembered this quote last year…it would have been the perfect epigram for the Maphead chapter about obsessive completist travelers.

I’m in the middle of my own peculiar dancing lesson this month: I spoke at Penn State last week, and now I’m on the road for a little mini-book tour of Salt Lake City, Denver, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. This is all because Maphead comes out in paperback Tuesday! If you’re curious about geographic geekery but didn’t want to pay hardcover prices, this is your big chance. Pre-order here or here or here, among other places. Oh, and I’m doing that trivia benefit in Bellingham, Washington that I usually do every April, and speaking at a students’ award banquet in Ventura County, California as well. Whew.

Unrelated postscript! A few years ago, there was some conversation on this site about pairs of books that describe the same events from different points of view. The examples I could think of all were all genre fiction or kiddie lit, but on various planes this month I finally got around to reading Marilynne Robinson’s novels Gilead and Home–a sudden burst of productivity after an almost 25-year gap between novels. Weirdly, I had no idea until I was a few pages into Home that the books are companion novels that fit the bill perfectly: the exact same events in a small Iowa town are told from the respective viewpoints of the two households involved. Anyway, both are highly recommended even if you’re not into the po-mo narrative trick. Beautiful, elegiac prose.

I want to thank everyone who suggested titles for my upcoming book of parental mythbusting. I feel bad that I can’t use all of them at the same time, but that would be a crazy long book title, like if Fiona Apple was working on a book of parental mythbusting. (Wait, she’s not, is she? Thank goodness, we would have been dead in the water.)

What makes it especially hard is that many, many of the unsuccessful submissions were the funniest. The art of book-title-choosing is very different from joke-writing. You don’t want the biggest laugh or the cleverest discovery. You want the lowest risk, the one that makes sense to the broadest swath of the bookstore-browsing public. All five of our finalists were comparatively straightforward compared to the manic genius of the rest of the list.

Here’s a bunch of our favorites that didn’t make the cut. Thanks to all who submitted.

Momnipotent
Sit Up Straight While You Read This Book
Don’t Cross Your Eyes While You Read This Book (or They’ll Stay That Way)
You Don’t Know Where That’s Been
If All Your Friends Jumped Off a Bridge
Ken Jennings Is Smarter Than Your Mom
Father Knows Less
Your Mom’s a Liar
Hairy Palms: Your Momma Don’t Know Jack
Parental Wisdom & Other Fairy Tales
That’s All Right Momma
Kvetch Phrases
(Don’t) Listen to Your Mother
Told You So
Necessities: The Inventions of Mother
If You Crack Your Knuckles, Your Face Will Freeze That Way and Won’t Digest for Seven Years
Your Mother Was Wrong
Ken Jennings Is a Stranger with Candy
Take That, Mom
Unsolicited Advice
Facts Only a Mother Could Love
Who Told You That?
Parentology
Mother, May I?
“Your Face Wil Freeze Like That” and Other Mom-strosities
Mom-isms: True or False?
Wait One Half Hour Before Reading
Nagging the Naggers
The Parent Trap: Antiquated Adages
Yo Mama So Misinformed
Don’t Sit So Close To This Book
Don’t Read This Book in Dim Light: You May Not Go Blind, But Your Mother Will Yell at You
Mombusters!: When Mother Doesn’t Know Best
Your Face Will Freeze Like That!: The Book Mom Warned You About
If You Read This, You’ll Go Blind!
Smart-Aleck
(Don’t) Do What Your Mother Says
Wait 30 Minutes After Eating This Book To Go Outside With Wet Hair
Keep Making That Face
Mommy, Are You a Dirty Liar?
Ken Knows Best
Mis-Mom-Ceptions
If You Fall Out of That Tree and Break Your Leg, Don’t Come Running to Me!
Ken Jennings Is Smarter Than Your Mom
You Should Have a Child Just Like You Someday
Parental Discretion Advised
Mom’s Bombs
Mommon Sense
Parental Guidance Not Suggested
Mother THINKS She Knows Best
You’ll Go Blind If You Do! (and other parental threats)
Why My Face Is Stuck Like This
How to Confuse Your Children
A Child’s Guide to Eating, Swimming, and Other Deceptively Difficult Tasks
Mom and Dad Isms and Aren’ts
I Love You, Mom (But You Are Such a Liar)
Unconventional Wisdom
You’ll Get Worms
Lies Our Parents Told Us
Gum Swallowing, TV Staring, Swimming After Meals, and Other Things Mom Was Wrong About
The Seven-Year Gum
I Ran With Scissors
Mom-ent of Truth
Shit Your Dad Said
What To, What Not To, and Whatnot
That’s What Mom Always Said
Parental Wis-Doom
It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Lied To
Parents Say the Darndest Things
Lies Ken Jennings’s Mother Told Him
Don’t Read This Book, You’ll Strain Your Eyes!
Trust Me, I’m a Parent
Mom Is Always Right, Sometimes
Mom and Pop Quiz
The Mother of All Trivia Books
Your Parents Were Wrong and So Are You
Put on a Sweater, I’m Cold
Momma Said There’d Be Cliches Like This
Whizdumb: The Silly Things Otherwise Smart People Tell Their Children
Don’t Put Beans Up Your Nose
An Apple a Day, But Not Before Swimming
With a Grain of Salt
Don’t Read Books By Strangers
How Many Times Do I Have to Tell You?
Things Your Mom Told You About (But You Did Them Anyway)
Momniscience
Parent Theses
If I Told You Once, I Told You a Thousand Times
Folkslore
Mom Rules
Mark My Words!
Motherflunker
Suburban Legends
You’ll Kvetch Your Death
Lies My Mother Told Me
Liars, Damned Liars, and Parents
Old Wives’ Fails
Pop (and Mom) Culture
Arch Debunker’s Place
If I’ve Told You Once…
Stunting Your Growth
Do You Know Where This Book Has Been?
Do-Over
Mom vs. Science
When I Was Your Age…
Trust the Wise, or Roll the Eyes?
The Bible 2
Mom-and-Pop Science
Bitch Been Lying 2 U

I was at Disneyland this week with my kids and my brother’s family, which is why the blog has been dark. So no matter how you spent last week, you should be happy: you weren’t managing four kids in Disneyland spring break crowds.

I got home to find a big box on the front porch full of…Maphead paperbacks! In publishing today, the typical window between a book’s hardcover and paperback releases has shrunk from a year down to closer to six months, which is why Maphead comes out in paperback in a week and a half, even though the hardcover only came out in September. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be doing a little book tour to celebrate the paperback release.

If you haven’t read Maphead but would be more appreciative of its charms at a $15 price point (much less if you shop online) let me confirm that this is a nice-looking package. The cover is now one of those die-cut dealies (the titular head is a cutout). And the back matter now includes a tongue-in-cheek guide for book clubs and an “Are You a Maphead?” trivia quiz adapted from the one I did at a few hardcover signings. If you come to one of the paperback signings later this month, let me confirm: there will be trivia. And candy.

The polls are closed, and over one thousand voters have spoken. My book about parenting myths and cliches, due out in January from Scribner, will be called Because I Said So! Clever subtitle to follow.

I haven’t counted exactly, but I think somewhere between 15 and 20 people suggested this title. (My wife also pitched it a few months back!) I am grateful to all of you for your insight and cleverness, but the first person to submit this entry in the contest was one Philip Romano, who will win acknowledgment in the book and a signed copy. Also, thanks to all who voted–it’s nice to be able to go to my publisher with empirical evidence that hundreds of people also like the same book title I do.

Also: Wordplay Wednesday! Not so hard today. Take a word that means “believer,” and stick a word meaning “talk” right in the middle of it. You’ll get a new word, for someone who’s a big believer in talking. What is it?

Just a quick reminder: if you haven’t yet voted on the book title poll, you have just a day left to do so! Because I Said So! curently has a big lead, but it’s not too late for a groundswell of support for a different title to knock it off its perch.

The manuscript itself is due at the publisher’s in less than a week, which is why the blog’s a little quiet right now. Back to work!

I want to thank everyone–over a hundred of you–who submitted suggested titles for my next book. As I noted in this week’s Tuesday Trivia mailing, my editor and I both laughed long and hard over many of the suggestions. After much agonized, Sophie’s Choice-like dithering and debate, we’ve narrowed the field down to these five finalists. (I’ll run a more complete list of entries next week, so you can enjoy them as much as I did.) Your vote, my friends, will decide what the book is called when it hits stores this coming winter.

To recap: this is a trivia/pop reference book with a parenting angle. It will present over 100 commonly spouted parental warnings and other cliches: don’t swim right after eating, drink your eight glasses of water a day, wear a scarf or you’ll catch your death, don’t swallow your gum, and so on. Each one will be fact-checked by me using the best research and evidence available, and judged to be either true or false. Many of these mom-and-dad standbys get passed down from generation to generation unexamined, but with this book, you finally get the unvarnished truth.

Several of the finalists were submitted by more than one entrant, so if you were chronologically the first to submit our winning entry, I’ll notify you via email. Our five finalists are…(drum roll)…

• Because I Said So!
• Don’t Sit So Close to the TV!
• Mama Said
• Mark My Words
• Your Mother Should Know
  

Do you have a favorite? Note than in all cases, the chosen title will be explicated by a straightforward subtitle: “Taking On the Myths, Tales, and Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Their Kids” or “The Truth About Your Parents’ Direst Warnings” or something along those lines.

Voting will close Wednesday, March 28 at noon Pacific. Here’s the poll, go get ‘em.

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Woke up today to find that Time had listed my Twitter feed among the “Humor” recommendations on its “140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2012″ list! The number of much-funnier-than-me Twitter people who did not make this list diluted the honor for me a bit…but not entirely. I’m now waiting for Time to call so I can give my legnthy acceptance speech. Got it all ready to go.

In other news, here is what trees watch on PBS when they are high as f***.

I’ve posted my schedule for my Maphead paperback mini-tour next month to the Appearances page: if you don’t live in Salt Lake City, Denver, Oakland, Portland, or Seattle, it looks like you’re just going to have to drive across the country to see me/hear me read a few anecdotes about maps/touch the hem of my garment as I walk across a charming indie bookstore.

I also posted the date and times for the Whatcom Literary Council Trivia Bee in Bellingham, Washington, which I sometimes get invited to help out with. This year I thought I was going to be a no-show due to the book tour, but at the last minute I found out I can squeeze it in. It’s a fun evening and a great benefit for community literacy…trivia fans from Seattle to Vancouver should think about stopping by.

I have a couple other events next month that I was going to add, but I took a closer look and I guess neither is open to the public. But if you’re a Penn State student or Ventura County gifted kid, check local listings.

While I have your ear: here’s a cool interview about maps I did with Big App Show podcaster (and former MTV veejay!) Adam Curry. And I have two new columns up today, a “Maphead” piece for Conde Nast Traveler about Spiral Jetty, the artwork you can see from space, and a sad “Debunker” column about how Davy Crockett didn’t wear a coonskin cap. Also a cool on-line trivia thing coming up that I will be talking about as soon as it works!

My geography-geek book Maphead is coming out in paperback in a month, and I’m happy to say that a little book tour is all lined up for the western U.S. If you’re in Salt Lake City, Denver, Oakland, Portland, or Seattle, come hang out with me at a local “independent bookstore” (I think they still have those) during the last half of April. Schedule to be posted shortly.

Speaking of new books: Tuesday saw the release of a new book by award-winning “middle-grade” author Donna Gephart, which normally wouldn’t be on my radar much except that this tween release is called Olivia Bean, Trivia Queen. Check out the cover.

Yes, it’s about a quiz-obsessed middle-schooler who dreams of appearing on Jeopardy!’s annual Kids Week, and I’m even name-checked as her personal savior hero on page 123. So this is a must-read for the pint-sized know-it-all in your life.

While I’m plugging: Steven L. Peck is a friend-of-a-friend who this month is releasing an amazing novella called A Short Stay in Hell from a teensy D.C. publishing house called Strange Violin Editions. Steve is an evolutionary ecologist at Brigham Young University (did I just blow your mind?) and the book is nominally Mormon-themed (the protagonist is Mormon, that’s about it) but I think it deserves a wider audience.

A Short Stay in Hell begins with its narrator dying, only to find himself in hell (Zoroastrianism was the one true religion, it turns out). Hell in his case is an endless library, a la this famous Jorge Luis Borges story, and the story starts out as an intriguing bit of resurrection science fiction (along the lines of Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld books, which Peck tells me he’s never read) and turns into a brilliant, chilling exploration of the nature of infinity. All in less than one hundred pages. Highly recommended to Borges fans, or, really, speculative-fiction readers of any stripe. It’s available on Amazon and elsewhere.

If you subscribe to my Tuesday Trivia weekly e-mail quiz, you already know what I’m about to say here. (If you don’t subscribe, what is wrong with you? Sign up at left, now! In fact, hold your breath until you’ve signed up, to make sure you remember you do it quickly!)

Here’s what I wrote at the top of this week’s mailing:

I’m currently finishing up my next book, a trivia/pop reference kind of thing that investigates the warnings, naggings, and other cliches that parents are always passing along to their kids: don’t swallow your gum, don’t swim right after you eat, that kind of thing. Some of these classic bits of Mom wisdom are true, many others are not. I have a publisher, I have (most of) a manuscript. All I need now is a title, and I have yet to come up with a really great one.

So I’m going to hold a little contest. This week, e-mail your title suggestion(s) for a book of parental-wisdom-debunking to ken@ken-jennings.com . . . or, if you submit Tuesday Trivia answers, you can just include your suggestion along with the other seven answers. I’ll choose a handful of finalists and we’ll hold a final vote next week. There are free signed books and an in-print acknowledgment in it for the winner, plus a zero-percent share in my book royalties!

So there you go. Even if you don’t subscribe to the mailing list, feel free to e-mail me your title suggestions, and maybe you’ll be one of the finalists in next week’s poll.

Wordplay Wednesday! Not so tough this week. Take the last name of a legendary star with a curvy figure. Divide the last name in half, and put the two halves in reverse order, as two separate words. Now you have something that can give you a curvy figure. Who’s the star?

I’m pretty sure that was the longest dry spell in the five-year history of this blog, but I had a pretty good excuse: I was on an expedition with some friends to the Antarctic Peninsula, where Internet access is hard to come by. (Except for the guys at that Ukrainian research station we visited, who probably look at a lot of porn.)

I’ll probably be writing more about my antipodean adventures here and elsewhere in days to come, but I just stumbled off a plane and am exhausted and that day is not today. In lieu of four thousand words, here are four pictures proving that I either (a) just got back from Antarctica or (b) am pretty sharp with PhotoShop.

This will be the last post on this blog for a couple weeks–I’ll be traveling, and it looks like Internet access will be spotty or non-existent. A friend actually talked me into going to Antarctica (!) with him, and we’re on our way today. Should we survive our expedition, blog posting will resume in mid-March. If not, it’ll be in a few decades when they dig me out of the ice, like Captain America.

I’ve set up Tuesday Trivia to run as usual while I’m gone, and my weekly pieces will continue to appear at Woot and Conde Nast Traveler. In the spirit of Family Circus, I’m also going to have my kids contribute jokes to my Twitter feed while I’m gone.

One last quiz to tide you over: can you name these literary works even though every word in their titles has been anagrammed? (Well, not short ones like articles and prepositions.)

1. Rented Is the Thing
2. A Scatterer Amend Eiders
3. Thelma
4. In Arches of Slot Item
5. The Erects Danger
6. Negation
7. Resist Racier
8. A Mage of Hornets
9. Tasing in the Heart
10. Seat of Need

There’s an interesting piece today in Slate on the cultural origins of the dotted rectangle-shape that people (well, Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, anyway) make in mid-air to suggest that someone or something is a total square.

The first example the author can find is the 1957 Looney Tunes classic The Three Little Bops. I happen to know the meme was around long before that.

Check it out: a panel from a Harvey Kurtzman/Jack Davis Alice in Wonderland parody in the December 1954 issue of the comic book Mad, just six months or so before Mad converted into the magazine format we know today.

I doubt this is the dotted-line-square ur-text either. (Though early Mad was super-influential, so you never know.) Somebody old correct me if I’m wrong, but beatnik types probably were doing this with their fingers in real life, right? Does anyone know of any media borrowings older than 1954?

Edited to add: Slate’s Forrest Wickman updated his piece with a link to this blog entry! I’ve finally made the big time.

Can you figure out what these TV shows have in common? Some are pretty obscure, and the connection might be too, but Google might help on both counts if you’re stumped.

Edited to add: Just posted answers here.

Paul Bailey, of Game Show Congress fame, just sent me some postcards for the second annual Trivia Championships of North America, to be held once again in Vegas this August. The art (this time circus-themed, since TCONA 2 will be at Circus Circus) is once again by Mitch O’Connell, and it’s quite lovely.

Last year’s inaugural TCONA was a blast, and I hope you’ll consider keeping August 10-12 open if you want to check out the fun this year. I myself am currently juggling some family reunion stuff in August, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to make it down that weekend. Stay tuned.

Wordplay Wednesday! Here’s another vaguely geographical thing, because I have that book about maps and all (that you should all buy and read). Take the first two letters off certain country names and you get other words: Yemen is “men,” for example. What nation would you behead by two letters to make…

• A Greek god?
• A mammal?
• A bird?
• A terrorist organization?
• A Beatles song?
• A board game?
• A British prime minister?
• One of the 12 tribes of Israel?

These are pretty hard, but a quick circuit through the world should give you at least a few of them.

Edited to add: And here are your answers (highlight text to read, in some cases).

A reader sent me a link to a cool map-related thing I’d never heard of before: a Peace Corps initiative called the World Map Project. While serving in the Dominican Republic as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1987, Barbara Jo White noticed that paper maps didn’t last long in rural classrooms, and wondered if painting a world map as a mural would work instead. The project was a hit with the community, and since then, Peace Corps volunteers have painted thousands of the maps in schools, hospitals, parks, and community centers on five continents.

The whole thing was inspired by a Boston album, which makes this far and away the best thing ever inspired by a Boston album. I apologize to all babies conceived during “More Than a Feeling” (currently almost 3% of the U.S. population).

Here’s a step-by-step guide from a typical recent World Map Project addition in Nicaragua. You can donate to new World Map Project murals (this one, for example) on the Peace Corps website.