As always, when I don’t have time to really post something: baby pictures!

By the way, Caitlin’s not really standing up yet. But this is the picture you get when you pull away the supporting hand just as the camera clicks. Movie magic!

Yesterday driving on the freeway, we were behind a car with the license plate 435 – PGA. Not very interesting–until Mindy noticed that the car was a white VW Golf! A Golf with a “PGA” plate–that made me very happy for some reason. Are there other clever combinations of car models with three-letter license plate strings that you’d like to see?

Also yesterday, I got my root canal. To be more endodontically accurate, I used to have root canals, but now they’ve been filled with “Gutta-percha” polymer. (Fun fact from Wikipedia: the cane that Preston Brooks used to beat aboliitionist senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor in 1856 was made from Gutta-percha wood!) It’s actually a pulpectomy…the root canal is just where they do it. Calling it “getting a root canal” is like having your appendix out and calling it “getting an abdomen.”

Anyway, my endodontist complained that I had a very small mouth. It made me wonder what other freakishly small-mouthed celebrities regularly counfound their dentists.

John Cusack	President James Buchanan
Victor Garber	Myrna Loy
Tom Chaplin of Keane	Henry

Last Friday Mindy and I were going downtown for a belated birthday dinner, and lo and behold, no less than Scott McCloud was doing a book signing just two blocks from a little French place we we like. So I got to stop in and say hi, as pictured. (Thanks to another Scott, Scott Ryan, for taking pictures, since I hadn’t thought to bring a camera)

Scott McCloud is a cartoonist who has managed to transform himself into a sort of comics evangelist/theorist/academic type, merely by virtue of the fact that he thinks a lot–and well–about the medium, and writes and draws persuasively and entertainingly about it. I have a well-thumbed copy of his first nonfiction work, the seminal Understanding Comics, and really enjoyed the recent follow-up Making Comics.

Scott and his charming family are on a 50-state road trip (!) to promote Making Comics, which impressed the heck out of me, since a wimpy 15-city tour pretty well kicked my butt last fall. I had plenty of chances on the Brainiac tour to suffer the phenomenon of wanting to chat with someone I knew (or knew of) at a signing, but not wanting to hold up the line. Well, it’s equally frustrating from the other side of the table as well.

In real life, I was amazed to see, Scott actually has pupils! It turns out the McClouds are Jeopardy! fans, so they were probably surprised to see that I actually have a lower torso and legs. Anyway, check to see if the Amazing McCloud Road Show is still coming to your state (Washington was their 39th stop). Understanding Comics is as much a rumination on the nature and possibilities of art in general as it is a dissection of comics in particular, so you needn’t be a comics fan to enjoy it.

The rest of the country won’t be getting any mail delivered today, but I have a few hanging around I’ve been meaning to answer. Here’s John:

I have a suggestion for your blog page. When you pose a trivia question (as you did today), or are asking for help decorating your daughter’s bedroom wall, please include an email link for responding to you. Thanks.

Wait, you’re emailing me to say you can’t figure out how to email me? Actually, when I ask a question on the blog, it’s not because I’m secretly hoping for a deluge of identical emails that all say “It’s H. G. Wells and Orson Welles!” It’s always nice to hear from readers, and there’s a “Contact” link on every page of the blog, but typically most people like to discuss these things over on the message boards.

Don, possibly in a passive-aggressive mood, wonders:

I must confess a certain amount of jealousy, and I would assume many others share that. How much hate mail do you get the average week/month/year?

Wait, so do I count this one or not? Actually, I can’t remember the last time I got hate mail. It’s not that nobody disliked me on Jeopardy!…it’s just that it’s been (whoa!) three years this week since I went on the show. Find any archived Internet conversation about me from 2004, on Slashdot or wherever, and as many as half the posts will be along the lines of “omg can you believe this nerd, good thing none of the questions will be on what its like to kiss a girl” or “i hate this looser if hes so smart why is he a morman.” But last year when the clueless New York Post called me an ungrateful bastard for joking about Jeopardy!, a lot of that bubbled up into a little Five Minutes’ Hate and I got plenty of cranky lectures in my inbox. I made the mistake of trying to reply soothingly to many of these, but it turns out you can’t make a crank into a non-crank with a single carefully composed paragraph, so I just had it let it go.

Short answer: sure, plenty of people probably dislike me for whatever reason. But few of them care enough to write me to tell me so. And in person, people are usually very nice, so it’s fine by me if they want to be asses on the Internet.

Karen’s subject line said “FFFFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAAAAQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQ.” I’m not sure how to pronounce the 18 Q’s in a row part.

Do people think it’s funny to ask you a question and then sing the theme song of Jeopardy! at you while you are trying to answer? And if so, do you ever just want to punch them in the face?

Actually, there is a group of people that think this is funny. They are called “drive-time radio DJs” and I think we all know by now that they have a different definition of “funny” than you and I do. Honk honk! Whizzzz! (Just kidding DJs of America! From what I can tell, four out of five trivia-loving American kids will grow up to be radio DJs, so I probably shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds as long as I’m writing trivia books.)

Except for that, no, normal passersby in the street don’t ambush me with questions much, much less whistle the Jeopardy! think music to follow up. My theory is that it’s because it usually takes 30 seconds or more to dredge up that great trivia question you heard once, so there’s no time to turn a casual encounter with me into a trivia showdown. It’s like when somebody says, “Quick, what’s your favorite joke?” You probably can’t do it, right? Same with trivia.

In yesterday’s entry, I meant to suggest the cosmic irony of a film critic having to see a bad movie as his very last film on earth.

But Mindy pointed out another interpretation: is it possible that Simply Irresistible is so bad it actually causes fatal brain tumors in some viewers? Simply Irresistible is officially Mindy’s Least Favorite Movie, by the way.

I’m apparently going to be one of the “honored champions” in Topps’ 2007 line of Allen & Ginter cards. I wonder if there’s ever been a game show winner on a baseball card before, or I’m some kind of Jackie Robinson of nerds here. Anyway, I learned a lot about the industry yesterday. I was asked to autograph a small quantity of the cards, but they didn’t just send me the cards to sign–someone had to come to my home, an Autograph Verification Representative or some such funny title, and physically watch me sign every card. I guess this keeps a Jason Giambi from having his kids or his driver or a homeless guy or somebody just scrawl something signature-like on every card.

I had to contribute a “relic” to Topps as well, snippets of which will somehow be included in select sets as collectibles, I guess. A “relic”? Jeopardy! doesn’t really issue uniforms, Topps. I gave them a $20 Costco dress shirt that I undoubtedly wore on-air a few times, since I don’t own 75 dress shirts. Boy, what a thrill that’ll be for the sports fans.

From the entry on late film critic Gene Siskel:

“The last film he viewed was the Sarah Michelle Gellar romantic comedy Simply Irresistible.”

Ouch.  In other news, William Styron was reading The Da Vinci Code when he died and Julia Child’s last meal was the new Bacon Swiss Double Melt from Wendy’s.

To celebrate my birthday, I get to go to the endodentist in about ten minutes!  That’s great.  And if he says I don’t need a root canal for my birthday, I get to celebrate this afternoon by going to my regular dentist’s office to get a crown!  I’m the birthday king!

This McSweeney’s list has inspired a mini-meme (“I shall call him mini-meme!”) of bloggers compiling their own lists of specialty categories, which I think is pretty fun.  Sadly, I’m the only blogger on the Internet who can’t make one.

But I think the McSweeney’s guy shouldn’t be so cocky about Urkel or professional wrestling, especially if it’s 1980s professional wrestling.  If you have any questions about Ricky “the Dragon” Steamboat’s match against “Ravishing” Rick Rude at Royal Rumble 1988, I’m so your guy.

Before I forget, the answer to yesterday’s question is H. G. Wells and Orson Welles, both of War of the Worlds fame.  It did turn out to be eminently Google-able, alas–it’s just that I had the date wrong when I first posted it.

We had some good news yesterday–Caitlin had been diagnosed at birth with hip dysplasia, meaning that her hip joints (just one, it turned out) weren’t fitted right.  She’s been sleeping for the past few months in an ungainly harness, even though the doctor said there wasn’t really any good evidence that the harness would help her particular kind of hip dysplasia.  If the harness didn’t do the trick, he said, she’d need surgery as a toddler.

Anyway, X-rays showed yesterday that her hip joint is now fitting normally and we can ditch the harness (craiglist, eBay, ceremonial burning on a Viking ship, no idea what you do with a used Pavlik harness) forever.  Great news.

I’m mostly posting this here to save me the trouble of individually e-mailing everyone whom we’d told about her hip and who was worried along with us.  If we forgot to call, consider yourself e-mailed!  Also, if you never got a thank-you note for the wedding gift you sent when Mindy and I got married in 2000, I think a blanket blog mention should count for that as well.  Thanks for the ____!  It was great.  We use it all the time.

Here’s a little Monday morning trivia culled from something my dad e-mailed me last week. I’ll ask it in a vague, annoying way to make it less Google-able.

On October 28, 1940, two great artists met in San Antonio, Texas, while the older man was in town for a brewers’ convention. They discussed the younger man’s new film and the older man’s newest novel. These two men are forever linked in the public mind, and even pronounced their last name the same way, but this was the only time they ever met. Who are the two men?

(By the way, I just installed a new phpBB mod over on the message boards that should cut down dramatically on spam postings. It may take a few days to kill off old bots that are already registered, but I don’t think we’ll see new ones registering anymore.)

The new Brainiac cover for the paperback edition is starting to show up at on-line retailers, so here you go.

Not sure what’s up with that guy in the middle, but he sure does like trivia! And planets. Mostly planets. Is that supposed to be me?

I’d like the thank the New York Times for adding the “Extended List” to their more familiar top-fifteen list of best-sellers, so that lots of self-congratulory midlist books like mine can put “National Bestseller” on the paperback cover!

The paperback will be out October 30.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to start thinking about planets again. Not Pluto though. You can’t see the trivia lobe that considers trans-Uranian objects here. It must be on the other hemisphere. Maybe on the back cover?

Last year, I pondered Jude Law’s new job description as Michael Caine remake fill-in. I asked if readers could think of someone else who’d replaced the same actor twice; no one really had anything.

But I just discovered yesterday that Hector Elizondo took the Alan Arkin part in two consecutive failed TV series: 1976’s Popi and 1980’s Freebie and the Bean. The best part is he could do it again! He’s totally right for the part in a wacky Little Miss Sunshine TV show. Bring it on, ABC.

Remember when Buzz Aldrin socked that guy in the jaw because he was pretending to be an interviewer from Japanese TV but he was really just a conspiracy crank hectoring Buzz to admit that the Apollo missions were all faked on a soundstage? That was awesome.

Last night, during the commercial break in a pretty great Lost, I came up with my own moon-landing-style conspiracy theory, this one regarding the svelte, sexy “Jared” of Subway ad fame. I know each of you probably has your own Jared conspiracy theory (CGI Jared, lipo Jared, twin brother Jareds, etc.) but mine is simpler: they filmed all these ads, years of ads and potential ads and clips, years ago, when he first lost the weight and became their spokesman. He immediately put all the weight back on, of course, but now they have decades of Jared in the can. It’ll get creepy in a few years when everyone notices he’s not aging.

Maybe I should be more like the rest of the Internet and put this energy into my Lost theories instead of focusing on the ads. Um, okay. Jared probably has four toes. Go run with that.

If you’re a fan of my friend Earl’s from his appearance in Brainiac, you’ll be happy to hear that he and his wife Judi had their first baby (London Grace) on Monday. Congrats Earl!

Not long after we moved to Seattle last summer, I wrote up a little explanatory gloss on the 1987 Young Fresh Fellows song “Aurora Bridge,” about some beloved local landmarks.  The only lyric I couldn’t explain was a reference to a place called “Georgio’s” that serves martinis in the second verse.

Lo and behold, ten months later, I get an email from no less that YFF founder (and current R.E.M. multi-instrumentalist) Scott McCaughey, wanting to explain the Georgio’s reference!  Scott’s e-mail reads, in part:

Georgio’s . . . was a  divey restaurant/bar on “the Ave” (i.e. University Way) that we frequented often in the early Fellows days, largely because it was a  dive, and “martini’s” were basically a tumbler full of gin for about $2.  It was just north of 45th, then it moved into the bigger space another block north that had been a Shakey’s up until that point.

And that’s the rest of the story.  I’d like thank Scott for the excellent customer service, explaining 20-year-old song lyrics to random fans.  Readers, if you have any questions about, say, any dBs or Husker Du lyrics, send them in.  Hopefully we can take care of them within ten months or so.

From Caitlin’s wall: Angelina, Babar, and Clifford.   I’m telling you, this is the last time I’m trying this in a room with nine-foot ceilings.  I feel like Michelangelo, only without the talent.

In our continuing series of Dopey Things Your Teachers Lied About: the tongue map!

You remember the tongue map from elementary school? Sweet in the front, salty on the sides, etc.? Well, it isn’t true. It comes from a misinterpreted graph in a mistranslated German psychologist’s paper from 1901. And scientists have known about the mistake for like 30 years! Which means when my teachers were telling me about the tongue map, while I was putting pretzels and lemon juice and baking chocolate on different points of my tongue and nodding sagely at the difference…there was no difference. You can taste all tastes (oh, and there’s been more than four since 1909) pretty much equally well on all parts of the tongue.

Mindy felt bad about this because she has done this particular psychosomatic “experiment” with kindergarteners before. You’re part of the problem, Mindy! Gangway for science!

From Becky, a Tuesday Trivia fan:

I’m preparing for an audition on Jeopardy! Do you have any study recommendations? Thank you!

I always hear the same recommendations when I ask this question of Jeopardy! veterans (I almost said Jeopardy! vets, but that sounds like the people that give Alex Trebek’s Chow his heartworm medicine). And I concur with their expert advice:

1. Don’t try to master the Jeopardy! subjects that intimidate you because you know nothing about them (opera, baseball, whatever). Forget those. Instead, look at Jeopardy! standbys you know but might be a little rusty on (world capitals, presidents, kings of England, etc.) and get them fresh in your mind.
2. Spend some quality time with The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, which has pithy, what-you-need-to-know capsules on thousands of Jeopardy! subjects. Mike Dupee’s How to Get on Jeopardy! . . . and Win! is also full of great lists and quizzes, but it’s sadly out of print.

Reader Emily got shafted!

I’d be very much interested to know your opinion concerning the ridiculous ending to the San Diego Academic League city championship. My school, Scripps Ranch High School, was playing La Jolla High School in the to-be-televised final match. To skip a half-hour of poorly-pronounced and vaguely-worded questions, I’ll summarize by saying that at the end of the match, the score was tied. The tiebreaker question asked, as best as I can recall, “Which country was the first to be established with the help of the United Nations?” One of my teammates buzzed in and answered Israel — this was ruled incorrect and the correct answer given as Libya, to the surprise of the team, our coaches, and our friends and parents sitting outside the TV studio. According to the tiebreaker rules, our wrong answer meant that we lost a point, and so the other team won the match.

However, we were sufficiently mystified by the answer “Libya” that upon our return home a few of us researched the question online. We found sources from the United Nations and the CIA World Factbook to suggest that Israel was, of course, founded before Libya (the former in 1948; the latter in 1951) and that both had been founded by UN resolution. We had the resolution number and citation for the Israel resolution. We lodged a formal protest the next day, but after a few days’ negotiation our protest was ruled against. The commissioner of the city league found some sources that seemed to indicate that Libya was the correct answer, and he mailed some computer-printed sheets to our coach. One of these sources was allegedly from the Encyclopedia Britannica (although there was no heading, URL or other clues to suggest that this was the case), and unequivocally stated that “Libya was the first country established by the United Nations.” The other source came from a website called “Debbie’s Encyclopedia,” the URL of which begins with “members.aol.com,” and says on the subject: “Libya was the first country to be established by the United Nations. It is the only nation with a single-colored flag. It’s green.” I’m pretty shocked that these unreliable sources were used to discount our sources that included United Nations resolutions, but the match was broadcast on Sunday and there was nothing we could do.

In your vast bank of knowledge and experience in quizbowl, Mr. Jennings, I’d just like to seek your professional opinion concerning the accuracy of this question. We can’t find any source to suggest that Libya would be the right answer, and really no conclusive information at all. Can you think of evidence for either side, or in your opinion is this just a poor question, particularly for a city tiebreaker?

You don’t need any particularly vast experience in quiz bowl to see that this question sucks, and that your “commissioner” is either a bit of a dim bulb or, more likely, doesn’t care much about the early history of the United Nations and just wants this to go away. My former BYU quiz bowl teammate Nephi lives in La Jolla. Maybe I should send him down there to put a rock with the Libyan flag on it through someone’s window.

This kind of disputed finish wasn’t uncommon in the college quiz bowl world when a similarly monolithic and complacent organization was running the show, but things are a lot better now that the prestigious tournaments are being run by player-organized groups like ACF and NAQT. Mistakes still happen, of course, but not they’re not made by unfeeling idiots.

I’m sorry to say there’s not really much you can do at this point, other than know in your heart of hearts that your team won the match. (Since the final was broacast on TV, you might be able to get a local journalist to write a human-interest story, but I doubt it’d change anything.) Your school may want to work with other schools to try to get this broken tournament fixed before next year. Obviously, you can’t just oust all the entrenched incompetents, but an easy fix might be to get better questions. NAQT, in particular, offers high-quality high school questions at outrageously low cost.

Bill$Dollar has a friend with an antenna and a beef.

“What unusual distinction is shared by these countries, and no others? Afghanistan, Australia, Burma, Canada, French Polynesia, India, Iran, Nepal, New Zealand, and Sri Lanka.” I sent this question to a friend with the hint following and he said you forgot Tonga. Nit, nit, nit. He DXes (listens to distant radio signals: FM, AM, TV) so he know this stuff.

Maybe poor Emily, above, can send your friend her copy of The CIA World Factbook. Tonga is on boring ol’ UTC+13 time last I checked.

Best subject line of the week: Gretchen wants to say

Apologies for mistakenly sending you fishing lure photos

Hey, no apologies necessary! Those were the best fishing lure photos I got all week. I’m serious; check these babies out.

Something I came up with the other day that’s too hard and convoluted for anything but a blog post:

Take the protagonist of a well-known play.  Add the letter ‘I’ to the protagonist’s name and rearrange the letters, and you’ll get the name of one of the play’s female leads.  Add the letters ‘LOM’ to the protagonist’s name and rearrange the letters, and you’ll get the name of the play’s villain.

What’s the play?

Mindy: Have you thought about what you want to get Dad for his birthday?

Dylan: (no hesitation) I’m going to get him a toothbrush.

Mindy: Why do you want to get him a toothbrush?

Dylan: Well, it’s very useful.

Mindy: Okay, what do you think Caitlin should get Daddy?

Dylan: Socks.

What happened to the carefree naivete of childhood? It looks like Dylan has inherited the hardy Depression-era gift-giving ethic of Mindy’s grandma, and his descendants can all count on a eight-pack of Irish Spring from him for Christmas for the next eighty years or so.

As far as I know, no one’s noticed the stolen joke in Brainiac.

From Chapter 4, on nineteenth-century trivia:

The best facts, as in Timbs’s book, are the ones you would never find in a Trivial Pursuit box.  Southwick informs us that a Colonel Townsend of Dublin had the ability to stop his heartbeat at will and “at last lost his life in the act,” that lightning turns milk sour, and that Adam, of Adam-and-Eve fame, was born on October 28, 4004 B.C.  Adam is a Scorpio!

When I was writing this, the paragraph originally ended, “Adam has the same birthday as Manfred Mann and Brian Piccolo!” which is pretty weak.  It suddenly occurred to me that an astrological sign would be funnier, and one quick horoscope check later, the punchline became, “Adam is a Scorpio!”

A few weeks later, reading that chapter back in the MS, I had a sinking feeling.  I walked to the bookcase and grabbed Good Omens, a funny British end-of-the-world novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.  There it is, first chapter, second page:

Archbishop James Usher (1580-1656) published Annales Veteris et Novie Testamenti in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004 B.C.  One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004 B.C. at exactly 9:00 A.M. . . . This proves two things: firstly, that God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say circuitous ways.

( . . .)

Secondly, the Earth’s a Libra.

I hadn’t read Good Omens in years, but it’s pretty clear where the joke came from, isn’t it?  Except that my Adam variant isn’t quite as funny.

I figured I’d leave it in as an “homage.”  (Translation: try to fool the 99% who won’t know it’s stolen.)  But I’m tired of living a lie, so I’d like to publicly thank Messrs. Gaiman and Pratchett for their Reverend Ussher joke.  If it’s any consolation, I paid full price for Fragile Things in an airport bookstore during the Brainiac tour.  I figured it was the least I could do.

It’s been pointed out to me that, a few hours after midnight tonight, it will be

02:03:04, 05/06/07

Plan accordingly. (If you miss it, you can enjoy something similar early tomorrow afternoon, but I think we all know that won’t be quite the same.)

I can’t believe I’m linking to Jeff Wells’ blog two days in a row–I don’t even read it all that often–but I’m still laughing at this thread of comments. A discussion of Hal Hartley’s new Henry Fool sequel quickly turns into a funniest-hypothetical-sequel-name round table. My personal favorites include Isn’t She Still Great, Cop and 3/4, and Ballistic II: Sever vs. Ecks. I’m totally cracking up just typing those out. For pure crypto-racist Mr. Sparkle humor, nothing beats IKIRU 2: RETURN OF HUMAN GHOST AND FRIEND OF PARK CHILDREN PLAY FOREVER IN TIME MR. FRIENDLY SPIRIT.

The suggestions for children’s book characters on Caitlin’s wall have been very helpful–it’s weird to see posters on the thread duplicating my exact thought processes as they try to put an alphabet together. Here’s the final-for-now list, which is strikingly close to the message board consensus:

Angelina Ballerina
Babar
Clifford
My Father’s Dragon
Eloise
Frances
Curious George
Harry Potter
the Iron Giant
James (of Giant Peach fame)
Kanga
Lowly Worm
Madeline
Nancy Drew
Olivia
Peter Rabbit
the Queen of Hearts
Raggedy Ann
Scarecrow
Mr. Toad
The Ugly Duckling
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Wilbur
Lorax/Yertle/(On Beyond) Zebra

That last one breaks pretty much every one of my rules–after coming up dry on all three letters, I decided to just do XYZ in one long panel, with three Dr. Seuss characters hanging out. The Lorax will be posed with crossed Truffula trees to make the X connection less tenuous.

I really wanted the John Tenniel Alice to be A, but then I was left without a Q. And I decided Ramona Quimby was a total cop-out. (Also, she’s not terribly recognizable, since she’s been illustrated by three or four people.)

D probably requires the most explanation–I didn’t have a great D, having decided I’d rather draw Scarecrow than Dorothy anyway for Oz. Then I remembered Ruth Stiles Garnett’s charming My Father’s Dragon trilogy. I get the impression they’re not that widely read though. Any love for Elmer Elevator out there?

P is the big logjam. Peter Rabbit is so iconic that I couldn’t really bump him in favor of Pinocchio, Peter Pan, the Poky Little Puppy, Paddington, Pippi Longstocking, etc…but I was tempted. For a while I considered making J the Beatrix Potter letter with Jemima Puddleduck to free up P but, really, Jemima Puddleduck?! I knew Peter Rabbit. I worked with Peter Rabbit. And you, Jemima Puddleduck, are no Peter Rabbit.

Choosing between the Velveteen Rabbit and the Very Hungry Caterpiillar was tough. Choosing between Wilbur and a Wild Thing was killer, especially when I decided not to make Max the X. Not getting Where the Wild Things Are in is probably my single biggest regret. Stupid alphabet.

I’ll post pictures as events warrant, but it’s going to be pretty slow going with Ken Jennings’ Trivia Almanac due to Random House in June.

Just days after I ranted a little about fictional “Where are they now?” updates at the end of movies, my favorite film blogger Jeff Wells, at Hollywood-Elsewhere, started a thread about movie epilogues. His personal favorite is a “Where are they now?” epilogue that actually works–the one from Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. It’s borrowed from the first chapter of Thackeray’s novel, so, used as an epilogue, it post-dates American Graffiti, but it’s still pretty funny.

Audience-participation question: I’m starting a mural on the walls of Caitlin’s room. I played with a children’s-illustration look when I did some Winnie-the-Pooh murals on Dylan’s nursery walls back in the day (photos still on this dead site) and I liked the way it came out. So my idea for Caitlin’s room was this: a classroom-style alphabet strip around the top of the room, with each letter illustrated with a different children’s-book character who begins with the appropriate letter.

Mindy and I went back and forth and put together a list, but I thought I’d give The People a chance to vote, let me know if I forgot anyone. You guys like books, right? More than Mitt Romney does? So which 26 characters would you choose? Keep in mind the goals: as far as is possible, each character should be immediately, iconically recognizable on a mural, authors and works shouldn’t repeat, and yet no real classic should be completely omitted. Cheats may be necessary (X?) but minimized.

So who would be on your kiddie-lit alphabet? I’ll post pictures as the painting takes shape.

On the message boards yesterday, tyg pointed out a Fox News interview where Mitt Romney, asked to name his favorite novel, gushed about L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth. This is possibly the worst answer to a standard campaign question that I have ever heard in a lifetime of bad campaign answers. It even beats Michael Dukakis’s self-professed vacation reading of 1988, Swedish Land-Use Planning.

It fails on every possible level. Ideally, a candidate’s answer to the “favorite book” question will be sincere and plausible, but it should probably be more. It should also be crafted carefully and cynically to give the most advantageous impression of the candidate.

Mitt–Battlefield Earth?! From what science-fiction fans of my acquaintance tell me, Hubbard’s fiction, frankly, sucks. Plus, insomuch as there’s any subtext here, it’s “I’m incredibly lowbrow” or “I’m so green I didn’t think of and wasn’t prepped with an answer to this question” or, at worst, “The Mormon question isn’t enough; I want to be linked with an even iffier religious movement!” Plus, it’s not like the widely-held best SF novel of the last thirty years isn’t by a fellow Mormon!

Romney later clarified that his favorite book was the Bible. Yawn. That’s almost no better. I guess reporters should always preface this question with “Other than lame cop-out answers…”

What’s a better answer to this question? It’s tricky. Choose something light and you look dumb. Even a reflexive, good-American, seemingly unimpeachable response like To Kill a Mockingbird inadvertently gives the impression you haven’t opened a novel since seventh grade. But go too highbrow and you will either provoke disbelieving snickers (enjoy that Camus, Mr. President!) or seem even stiffer and outer-of-touch (so, The Red and the Black, Al?).

Since there’s very little good conservative art, this question is an ideal chance to hip up a stodgy candidate, particularly a Republican. (No Ayn Rand!) But you don’t want to shock anyone with an even slightly subversive choice, so no Salinger or Vonnegut–hell, nothing satirical or youth-culturey at all. If it’s edgier than Fahrenheit 451, you’re screwed. If the questioner slips and says “book” and not “novel,” always go nonfiction, particularly history, particularly American history. Because, in a way, talking to America about your novel-reading is a no-win scenario. Reading Barbara Tuchman in the Oval Office seems presidential. Barbara Kingsolver, not so much. You might as well be telling Jim Lehrer about your quilting circle.

Bill Clinton used to say One Hundred Years of Solitude was his favorite novel, and you’ve got to admire The Master–that’s a pretty damn savvy answer. It’s a fun book, with broad comedy and even genre (fantasy) elements. But it’s also epic and serious, with an unimpeachable scholarly reputation. It’s foreign (you’re losing me…) but it’s in Spanish (ah, Latin vote!–nicely played). It’s Oprah-ready (and was even a Book Club selection post-Bubba). In fact, the only possible way Clinton could have improved that answer would be to consider his base a little bit more. Duh, Toni Morrison! Just as widely-read, just as brilliant, just as capital-L Literary…but it’s by a black woman!

If Song of Solomon or Beloved isn’t right for your campaign, drop back and punt with something safe. Should be American, should be instantly recognizable, but can’t seem too musty-schoolroom. Old enough to have no divisive political content, recent enough to seem approachable. If you’re iffy about Morrison, you probably want something unimpeachably masculine. I’d go Hemingway or Steinbeck–in fact, I’d go Grapes of Wrath. It’s literary yet readable, it’s compassionate, it’s populist, it’s Oprah-friendly. Don’t worry–nobody’s really going to read it just because you recommended it. This is America.

They might rent the movie though.

I was outed in The New York Times over the weekend. In the crossword, in fact.

As 52-across, I was (along with 41-across, DONNYOSMOND) part of a mini-theme about famous Mormons. So, yeah, everyone knew I was Mormon anyway (even if everyone didn’t assume that a dorky-looking white guy with a Utah address was Mormon, I mentioned it a couple times on Jeopardy!), but still. My religion is weird enough that it can make me a New York Times crossword theme. Is yours? Nyaah.

For a long time, I sort of felt like Mormons were assimilating pretty well into the fabric of American life. It was hard to get a grasp on this, living overseas and then in Utah, but that was how I saw it, judging from media treatment and private conversations. Being LDS made you a minority and a conversation-starter at dinner, maybe, but it wasn’t going to curl any lips in disgust. It was an interesting oddity, like being a vegan or a hockey fan or something.

But that’s changing. Maybe it’s just the general rudeness of the Internet age, but it seems like knowing sneers and pot-shots at Mormonism are actually becoming a currency of cool now. Did Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, which puzzlingly portrays the mild-mannered Mormon West as a seething American underbelly of violence and fundamentalism, start this off? Was it the South Park episode? (That’s Mormon founder Joseph Smith at left in the picture above.) Or Big Love?

Mitt Romney’s run for president sure isn’t helping. If Romney somehow gets the nomination, we’ll probably start to see more of this anti-Mormon bigotry from the evangelical right, but right now, Mitt’s taking most of his op-ed heat from the left. But the bashing isn’t generally politically motivated–Mormon political or social views aren’t getting picked at much (which would be fair enough). I guess you did get The New Republic raising the laughable JFK-era boogeyman of a Presidential pawn taking his orders straight from Rome Salt Lake City. (If that’s the concern, hasn’t anyone noticed that the top-ranking Democrat in Washington, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, is a devout Mormon?)

But substantive political argument in these hit pieces is rare. Instead, otherwise rational people have straight-facedly taken the position that LDS theology itself is too outlandish to deserve any respect whatsoever. Religious discrimination is wrong, sure, and people should be allowed to believe what they want. Unless you’re Mormon, of course. Eww. They’re just weird.

Take Jacob Weisberg or alcoholic gadfly Christoper Hitchens in Slate, for example. Or this Boston Globe op-ed. Andrew Sullivan declared “Mormon week” on The Daily Dish a few months ago and spent days guffawing over those dopey Mormons.

Look, I don’t expect opinion writers to write about the LDS church, or any religion not their own, from a believer’s point of view. That wouldn’t make sense. But you don’t get any class points in my book for turning somebody’s sacred beliefs into punchlines just to jazz up your prose. I’m sure we’re going to see more of these things until the Mitt-ster drops out of the race, so here are a few points of advice to the would-be bashers.

1. After you get off a particularly good zinger at those gullible Mormons, try recasting your sentence so it refers to “those gullible Jews” or “…Catholics” or “…Muslims.” If, Wonkette, you think Mormon temple garments should be called “magic underwear” throughout your post, try substituting “magic beanie” for “yarmulke” or “magic Nilla wafer” for “Communion host” in a similar context and considering whether that’s journalism, or whether that’s even funny anymore. If you’re horrified by the result, it’s because bigotry is bigotry, no matter the target. Mormons are no strangers to religious discrimination–after all, Missouri had its 1838 extermination order against Mormons on the books until 1976. Discrimination against Mormons isn’t any more of a laughing matter than anti-Semitism, anti-Islamic feeling, or any other religious prejudice.
2. Realize that pretty much all religious belief is fundamentally irrational. Weisberg write that the founding myth of the LDS church–unschooled 19th-century farm boy claims that an angel led him to buried metal plates, which he then translated through miraculous means into a book of scripture–is so a priori stupid that he should be allowed his pot-shots. Sure, he allows, this is no weirder than what lies beneath any other religion–virgin birth, the parting of the Red Sea, Gabriel’s delivery of the Qur’an. “But a few eons makes a big difference,” he says, waving his hands. “The world’s greater religions have had time to splinter, moderate, and turn their myths into metaphor.” So a patina of age is what makes it okay to laugh at Mitt Romney about Joseph Smith, even though you’d never make Muhammad jokes to Keith Ellison? That’s just dopey. I don’t know how many churchgoing Americans Weisberg hangs out with, but let me assure him: most of them are just as sincere about their faiths’ improbable divine origins as Mormons are. Does he think modern Baptists and Catholics and Jews read scripture and think to themselves, “Wow, I’m sure glad my splintered, moderated religion doesn’t believe these nutty metaphorical miracles ever really happened”? I’ve always thought the modern American context of Mormonism’s story is what makes it special and uniquely fascinating. Weisberg et. al. just seem to think it makes it a better punchline.
3. Finally, do your @#$% research. Pieces like Weisberg’s and Hitchens’ seem to be based on a single viewing of that one South Park and perhaps dim memories of a 1976 undergraduate reading of Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History. So they feel no compunction about calling LDS church founder Joseph Smith a “charlatan” who whipped up Mormonism L. Ron Hubbard-style as a “racket” to gratify his own ego and sexual libertinism. There’s only one problem with this caricature: you’re not going to find too many scholars of Mormonism, believing or not, who buy it anymore. When it comes to Mormon history, Brodie is out; Richard Bushman’s considerably more nuanced Rough Stone Rolling is in. Smith is still an enigma, and you’ll find a broad spectrum of scholars willing to explain his remarkable life with varying shades of piety or cynicism (or, if you’re talking to a Mormon, as a genuine visionary). But it’s certainly not good enough anymore to assume in your very first graf that everyone knows Joseph Smith was just a con man and let’s take it from there. Again, try this out with “Buddha” or “Joan of Arc” or “Muhammad” and see how your piece sounds.

PBS has just aired a thoughtful four-hour Frontline doc on “The Mormons” (check local listings if you missed it; maybe it’ll re-air). Some LDS folks will probably blanch at the series’ straightforward look at polygamy, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and other historical controversies of Mormonism. Nonbelievers might blink at how seriously and respectfully many of the doc’s talking heads treat the LDS church’s surprising origins and evolution. They shouldn’t be surprised. Not every look at a major American religion has to be a clueless five-minute hit piece. Sometimes there’s more to see.