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.)

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

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 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.