If you enjoy my billet on this web log , you have A.J. Jacobs to give thanks . Yes , Mr. Know - it - All was the guy who recommended me to Will Pearson and Mangesh about a yr before we all started blogging here . In fact , A.J. was planning to do some more regular blogging back in the former day , too , and was on a lot of our former league calls as we plotted totake over of the blogosphere ! ! ! ! [ stick in maniac Austin Powers express joy ] ( Did you readJason ’s postlast week ? intelligibly we ’re well on our way now ! )
Anyway , A.J. is one of the few masses I know who really follows that Randian philosophy : " There is no competition among men;“ we should all be so altruistic and solid . We should all be so talented , too .
chance are , you already know a lot about A.J. and his amazing quest to read the entire encyclopedia , or live his life accord to all the commandment in the Bible . ( If you missed the latter , see out one ofA.J. ’s own postson this blog about the experience . )
Today , we ’re thrilled to help A.J. advertize his fantastic , new Word , The Guinea Pig Diaries : My life sentence as an Experiment " “ just out in stores now . Andtomorrow , we ’ll be pay away 5 brand new copiesof the book in a fun competition you ’re not break down to want to miss . But , as always , you ’ll better your chances in the competition if you read the whole Q&A below , and really get to know this unusually talented , uproarious oral fissure breather [ his word ! not mine ! ] .
DI : I have n’t read the whole volume yet , but I really have intercourse all the experiment I read , particularly the one where you get as your nanny-goat and picked up men online , and the one where you outsourced your integral spirit to Bangalore . I also dug the one where you had to obey your wife ’s every impulse and command ; that one was specially close to house for me . But for sure there must have been one or two experiment that got cut from the book . verbalize a little about them , and why they were left out .
AJ : Well , I get a mint of suggestion for experimentation from friends , family and reader . One referee suggested I do all the berth in the kama sutra . My married woman shot that one down pretty quickly . So not all of them make it out of the planning degree .
Check out this uproarious teaser for the new book !
DI : Which was your preferent experiment to take ?
AJ : One that I loved was the quest to become the most rational person alive . Sort of a " ˜What Would Spock Do . ' Because it made me realize just how irrational human demeanor is . And how many of our sprightliness decision are made based on inertia and indolence . Like something as simple as what toothpaste we use . I ’ve been using Colgate for 30 year . Why ? Because some guy wire at my sleepaway ingroup used Colgate , and he seemed cool , so I started using it and never break . But for this projection , I scrutinized every single determination , and I realized” ¦ .I HATE the taste of mint Colgate . It ’s medicinal . So I tried a whole bunch of unlike toothpaste . And it was a divine revelation ! I now practice Tom ’s of Maine orange / mango tree - flavored toothpaste . And it ’s yummy . It ’s like eating dessert . Those little decisions make a huge difference in quality of lifespan .
DI : If you were n’t wed , were n’t a well - get laid , well-thought-of author out there doing al-Qur’an tours and such , if you had no living family left on globe , what form of experimentation might you have set about ? Go ahead , unleash your inner - nerd , we wo n’t withstand these against you . We screw " ¦ these are just * hypothetical * experiment .
AJ : At one point , I wanted to do an experimentation where I interact with people exclusively through engineering science " “ Facebook , e-mail , IM , etc . My married woman nixed that one too . She said , you ’re NOT attend our niece ’s squash racquet mitzvah via Skype . You are depict up there in person .
I ’d also love to interpret the entire Wikipedia . I ’d consider that meter well spent . I feel a bit shamefaced saying that , since my first playscript was about reading the Encyclopedia Britannica . But I find the comprehensiveness of Wikipedia tempting . I pass hour a week Wikitunneling ( hopping from one wiki - link to another ) . I ’d never get to write a book about it since I ’d never finish .
DI : mass have called you a modern - Clarence Day George Plimpton . Even you refer to the master in your book . Okay , so Plimpton was a corking journalist . We all get it on that . And not such a regretful thespian . Right ? Right . But I ’ll still always remember him as the classy side of Mattel ’s Intellivision , which I have ( still own ! ) and worshipped , cradle , slept with , dusted vigrously " ¦ What about you ? We ’re about the same years ; were you an Atari cat ? Intellivision ? What was your favorite game ? What cartridge did you wear out first ?
AJ : I bonk an Atari game foretell Adventure . You ever see that one ? You had to get the chalice and kill the dragons and pin the bat . It was particularly exciting because it contained a hush-hush way " “ accord to Wikipedia , it ’s the first video recording game Easter Egg in history . Players had to beak up an invisible gray window pane and bring it below the golden rook , where it would open a way that had the words " Created by Warren Robinett . “ And then the grey-headed point would have sex with a prostitute . Or maybe I ’m misremembering that last part .
DI : There will probably come a day when you ’ve put yourself through every test there is , and written adroitly about it — or maybe when you grow bored with this wonderful niche you ’re produce . Have you given any thought to what you ’ll write about then ? Do you have any aspirations to pen a novel ?
AJ : I do n’t reckon novels are in my futurity . I love non - fiction too much . Plus I do n’t think novels come naturally to me . Though I do recollect that there should be a novel about Belle Boyd . Hers was an amazing story I learned about in the cyclopedia . She was a beautiful female undercover agent for the confederacy during the US civic war – who terminate up falling in love with a Union soldier and eloping . A real Romeo and Juliet story . A novel expect to be written .
DI : Besides Plimpton , what other author do you like ?
AJ : I sleep together Bill Bryson . And Mark Twain . I love Victorian non - fiction , like confession of an Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincey . And also David Israel , even though he ’s not strait-laced . [ DI note : AJ , can I apply that as a endorsement on the back of my next book ? ]
DI : Talk a little workshop for a mo . What ’s your operation like ? I get it on in one of the chapter you talk about write 2 60 minutes each 24-hour interval , in the morn . But is that your average ?
AJ : I actually write a lot from 10 postmortem till 2 a.m. It ’s the quietest time of the day for me . I ’ve got three young kidskin , so the mornings are category five storms .
DI : Do you ever get author ’s block ? How do you deal ?
AJ : I once did some research on writer ’s block . If I retrieve correctly , Nabakov compose stand up . Ben Franklin wrote in the bath . And the German philosopher Friedrich Schiller used the feeling of rotten apples to get him in the written material modality . So that ’s what I want to essay : Standing up in a bath filled with rotten apple . Instead , I usually start up write sentences about any old thing " “ about my socks , about a methamphetamine hydrochloride of orange juice . I know I ’m going to delete these passages , but it ’s a way to get warmed up .
DI : Many writers say they incur the composition process more rewarding than the actualpublishing process . What about you ? What ’s the respectable part for you ?
AJ : I actually love the research process best . I bonk dive in and reading all the literature . And I have a go at it interviewing people and hanging out with scientists and professors and George Washington impersonators and so on . When I was explore The Year of Living Biblically , I think I became the first person to out - Bible talking a Jehovah ’s looker . He come over to my house and after three 60 minutes he looked at his ticker and pronounce , " ˜I have to go ! '
DI : What ’s the best thing about being A.J. Jacobs ?
AJ : I recently get an iPhone and I now listen to Podcasts on double - pep pill . So I can ingest an minute of Fresh Air in just half an hour !
DI : What ’s the regretful thing about being A.J. Jacobs ?
AJ : Well , I have trouble emit through my nose , so I ’m a bit of a mouth schnorchel . sass breathers get a bad knock , you know ?
DI : If you could go back in time and exist your animation as an experimentation with a historical shape , how would that go ?
AJ : One theme : I ’d necessitate to be Goethe ’s apprentice . He was an eighteenth century German writer ( Faust ) , but he was more than that . He was the most well - rounded man in story . He was a master key of all trades . He was , among other things : a lawyer , a painter , field manager , botanist , statesman , alchemist , biologer , soldier , astrologist , novelist , songrwiter , mine inspector , vesture intriguer and irrigation supervisor . I ’d love to attempt to be mini - Goethe .
DI : You talk about your three boys a lot in the newfangled book . If one of the come to you one twenty-four hours and says , " Dad , I want to be a journalist,“ what advice would you give him ?
AJ : Have genuine and rich curiousity . mark the detail " “ how mass utter , what space sound like , what they reek like . And do n’t misspell the name " ˜Wayne Gretzky , ' because his fan will write you furious missive .
DI : Lastly , what ’s on deck for you ?
AJ : My next undertaking is the final part of my self - improvement serial . I ’ve worked on the mind ( The Know - it - All ) . I ’ve worked on the spirit ( The Year of Living Biblically ) . Now I ’m fit to work on the body . I ’m prove to become the healthy person alive . No more junk intellectual nourishment , not even Graham Crackers " “ which genial dental floss readers might know were originally design as health nutrient in the nineteenth hundred by a buggy diet guru named Sylvester Graham who hoped the firecracker would , among other things , discourage ego - pleasuring .
