Scatter Brained

John:
 “Th
  e mark of the beast!”
Neely:
 “I know. Crazy, right?”
John:
 “You know, 666 is believed to be a reference to Nero, 
Introduction
iv

---

and Nero is a perfect anagram of Reno, the city where Maggie 
dumped me.”
Neely:
 “It’s been two years, dude. You gotta let it go.”
It’s a fascinating talent, to be sure. But no one ever thought 
much of it until one day a while back when we were brain-
storming ideas for books. Jokingly, someone said, “We could 
have John write a book about the connections between his 
ex-girlfriend and Teddy Roosevelt.”
Th
  is book, you’ll be pleased to learn, is not about that con-
nection.* But we fi gured, hey, if John can connect everything 
to Maggie, perhaps it’s possible to connect everything to ev-
erything else. Perhaps we could build a single chain, hundreds 
of pages long, wherein each topic is connected in some strange 
and unexpected way to the next.
And so we did. With the help of talented writers, expert 
fact-checkers, and a few tortured transitions, each subject, 
from kissing to kung fu, leads to the next. We like to think of 
Scatterbrained
 as one of those eight-foot-long submarine 
sandwiches, except ours has Knowledge as the meat and 
Dumb Jokes as the main condiment.
We hope you enjoy the book—but in a way, our main ob-
jective has already been achieved: When he realized the in-
terconnectedness of 
all
 knowledge while working on this 
book, John fi nally saw the silliness of his endless Maggie ref-
erences. He is now living happily ever after with a woman 
named Janet, who—he’ll be happy to inform you—was Phi 
Beta Kappa at Harvard (just like Teddy Roosevelt) and whose 
favorite novel is Stendhal’s 
Th
  e Red and the Black
 (the colors of 
a roulette wheel).
I N T R O D U C T I O N
*  Although if you’re interested, the connection is that they both 
practiced judo.
v

---

---

from