Photo courtesy of Bjørn Giesenbauer

In my home office, where I keep a lot of things I should probably throw away, I have a desk drawer dedicated to game manuals. The last time I opened it was shortly after I moved to my new apartment, back in June, and even then, it was only to retrieve the power strips and miscellaneous cables that I’d temporarily stored in there. If I held these poor little booklets to the same standard that I held my wardrobe—throw away anything you haven’t used in a year—they would be long gone. As it is, things aren’t looking good for them. We just got a puppy, and his growing file of doggy paperwork needs a permanent home that isn’t my nightstand.

And these manuals are useless in every sense of the word. I haven’t played most of the games that they came with, such as Neverwinter Nights or Starfleet Command 3, in six or seven years now. But even when I did, I don’t think I ever consulted these books for the nuts and bolts of installation and game mechanics.

For me, the draw was always the flavor text — that collection of mental jetsam that has no impact on gameplay itself, but for some reason makes some of them feel more worthwhile and, I don’t know, heftier than others. Did anyone find the black-and-white, blown-up-and-highly-pixilated sprites from Command and Conquer or Civilization III useful at all? Did anyone but me care about the model numbers of Starcraft’s Wraith fighters? (It’s the CF/A-17, with the “G” variant able to cloak, thank you very much.) Probably not. But for me, these things mattered.

In part, I think this is due to the same sort of traumatic bonding that, say, leads hostages to identify with their captors. I started playing games in the early ‘90s, in a world without Starforce or Steam or any such copy protection software that would run in the background. Instead, this generation of game designers added the occasional challenge or question that would send me scurrying to my manuals to look up one thing or another.

At its simplest, I’d just look up a serial number or a specific phrase in the text of the manual. But for the two games I played the most, the copy protection scheme not only unlocked the game in a literal sense. They also unlocked something more metaphorical; made me feel just a little bit more immersed in the world of the game.

One of my two favorites, Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat, had me look up statistics about the same fighter planes I was virtually flying — the maximum speed of a P-51, for example, or the climb rate of a MiG-15. This being the era of Top Gun, I could pretend that by looking up these facts and figures I too was a student at flight school, whose success or failure depended on knowing my planes inside and out.

My other favorite was called Darklands, and it was a role-playing game set in medieval Germany, where you could (among many other things) brew potions. Its copy protection scheme tasked me with matching a certain symbol to its alchemical meaning; the symbols were distributed across the massive brick of a manual that came with it. Often times, the symbols would be set opposite a beautiful woodcut or an interesting historical tidbit, and on the way to solving the copy protection challenge I’d sometimes get sidetracked for twenty minutes in the world of medieval Germany. A lot of it was extraneous, of course; but this simply made it much easier to imagine my way into the heads of my characters, where such arcane knowledge would live anyway. For a ten year old with an overactive imagination, the manuals were no small part in making me love these games.

For me, the apotheosis of manuals came not long after that. First there was Warcraft: Orcs and Humans’ faux-parchment-covered, runed-and-illustrated ambigram of a manual, which dedicated far more space to transmitting backstory than it did to describing the nuts and bolts of software. Dramatic illustrations of knights fighting demons, paragraphs of text about why Orcish buildings were rounded instead of squared off, a whole short story about the kingdom of Azeroth — these things, not the crude graphics and MIDI music, made me understand the stakes of the game and immersed me completely in its world.

Where Warcraft made me feel like a warrior-king charged with saving (or overthrowing) the world of men, the book for Master of Orion II seemed perfectly suitable — in terms of binding, in terms of tone, and in terms of sheer heft — to a godlike technocrat whose only goal was to raise an alien race to galactic dominance. The gruff, medievalesque storytelling gave way to clinical technobabble that would be as dry as a bone if it weren’t describing things like lasers and cloning centers. At about three hundred pages, it was something that demanded your attention, and rewarded it lavishly. If not with gameplay tips, then at least with the smug knowledge that you understood exactly what you were unleashing when you exterminated the population of some random planet with the Death Spores biological weapon. Much more satisfying, to me anyway, than only being told that your new technology made your randomly-generated dice roll more likely to beat the computer’s.

Obviously, I don’t want to return to the days of obtrusive, game-breaking copy protection, either, even if it is cleverly managed. And in terms of “user experience,” most games I play nowadays don’t need much more than a twenty-minute tutorial to get you from the moment you’ve finished downloading your file from Steam to your first real in-game hours. I recently bought the new game XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which is a reboot of a franchise that released its first game in 1994. I marveled at how easy it was to pick it up and play — much easier than its original version, which was basically unplayable without having the manual open next to you (I would know: my original copy shipped without one, so I struggled for two weeks while my replacement came from MicroProse).

At the same time, though, I do feel like I’ve lost one of the most direct ways to connect, emotionally anyway, with a game — at least, now that manuals and story guides are becoming digitized, wikified, and/or treated as mostly superfluous. (At least, superfluous when it comes to being included in a game’s supporting material. Don’t get me started on game or game-related novelizations, which you may have attempted to read before, and if you haven’t, then good for you.)

Maybe it was out of necessity that there was more to games back when computers were less capable. Nowadays, we have actual voice acting and recorded sounds instead of tinny PC speaker garble; we have million-polygon, three-dimensional objects instead of rudimentary, eighteen-pixel-tall stacks of boxes; we have everything we need on the monitor and in the speakers. We don’t need the multimedia experience of manuals and code wheels and real maps to translate what was in the designer’s head to what you experience in-game. You don’t need to make any imaginative leaps to play video games anymore — in fact, if you do need to make any, it’s considered a fault rather than a virtue. Maybe I’m just outmoded or out of touch, but this ruthless efficiency in forcing everything into the virtual world has, perhaps, stripped something vital and creative (on the gamer’s part, anyway) out of the gaming experience.

Take XCOM, for instance. It is addictive and adrenaline-pumping, more so than any other game I’ve played in a long time. Yet I felt like there was still some mental barrier keeping me from getting fully invested in it for a long time. It wasn’t until I decided to visit the “memorial” room in headquarters, where the game keeps a list of all your squad members who have died in the entire game, that that barrier came down.

Here at least was something non-essential, a part of the game that had no bearing on the rest of it. It does not make you or your squad kill aliens any faster or better. It is something you can go an entire game without visiting once, and not have it affect you adversely.

Yet the memorial treats the characters in the game as more than just chess pieces with plasma weapons — it pretends, for the few seconds you’re in there, anyway — that they are real human beings who occasionally need to remember their fallen comrades.

In other words, it is a single concession to a lost age of sentimentality and imagination; a nod to the old philosophy of game design that, once upon a time, drove game creators to make the kinds of manuals that I collect.

Photo by yoppy

All my life, I’ve gravitated towards trivia games. In middle school, it was the age of the bee. Competitions in spelling, geography, even mathematics: you name it, I competed in it. And lost at it, too. My ability to reel off words like “pharaoh” and “largesse” led me to victory at the county level, but on the big stage — in this case, a literal mainstage at the Oregon State Fair — the doubled consonants and French roots of “reconnaissance” and “embarrassment” were my undoing.

Likewise, I could remember the names of all six Yugoslav successor states and the apparently geographical fact that the point at which condensation forms is called the “dew point” — a stumper that got me into the state finals. But the fourth largest lake in the world? I could only do one through three, and that meant an unhappy exit from the state geography bee, with nothing but a cheap atlas and a verbal pat on the back to show for it.

High school was the age of quiz bowl. Yes, I was one of those nerds who would sacrifice two lunches a month to decamp for the school library to answer thousands upon thousands of multiple choice questions. There, I learned one key lesson about answering by committee: that the person who is the loudest, the quickest, or the most confident will usually get their way, even if their answer is not exactly right. In other words, whenever you know that George Eliot is a woman and Evelyn Waugh is a man, or that the moon Titan orbits the planet Saturn and not Jupiter, you have to say it loud and say it first, or else you’ll regret it for a long time.

And then, inevitably, came pub trivia nights, which in the words of Stuff White People Like creator Christian Lander “enabled white people to establish the intelligence hierarchy in their group of friends while also proving the full value of a liberal arts education.” To me, if the strained undercurrent of passive-aggression didn’t annoy me, then the trivia categories that ranged from the age-inappropriate (I wasn’t born yet when The Cosby Show and Golden Girls premiered, to my eternal, trivial regret) to the lazy (the category “mass nouns for animals” — a murder of crows, a pride of lions — once came up twice in the space of a month) certainly did.

By that point, I’d been bruised from a lifetime of minor victories and major disappointments. I still loved to exercise my trivia muscle — any of my officemates can tell you that I’m always ready with some random bit of useless knowledge — but spending time around other people who shared these interests was a bit much. You have to remember that these spelling bee champions and mathletes are the sort of people who grow up to fact-check The Simpsons and edit Wikipedia 8 hours a day. After a while, you begin to wonder whether the 13-year-olds playing Halo online might make for better company. So where else could I turn?

There is only so much studying you can do during your senior spring of college, even during finals week. There is also, sadly, a limit to how much mindless recreation — Mario Kart and 24 being prime contenders for my unthinking time — I could put in before I wanted to do something a little more challenging.

It was one of these post-Xbox, pre-sunrise nights when my roommate Josh, ever the resourceful time-waster, flipped open his laptop and started typing away. I knew he wasn’t doing anything constructive when he started asking me questions about countries that I hadn’t thought of since the seventh grade: Belarus, Cape Verde, and Micronesia — those sorts of ones that just manage to slip the mind.

He explained that he was on a site called Sporcle, which was basically a repository of random quizzes. It looked pretty bare-bones: a low-res map of the world, a ticking timer, and a text box. No flashy animations, no twitch-based shooting activities, just him and a bunch of blank countries that he had fifteen minutes to fill.

I couldn’t stand feeling like I had a second-rate knowledge of the countries of the world. So of course, an hour later I pretended like I was feeling tired and headed into my room, where I went to Sporcle and started playing myself.

The Countries of the World quiz was the first step down the rabbit hole. At first it was just the standard stuff: countries, capitals, presidents. The occasional foray into this-day-in-history quizzes or past Billboard Top 40 lists. After all, I’d built up quite the store of useless knowledge in the course of my college career. No need to stuff my brain even more.

The interesting thing about Sporcle is that after every quiz, you get a breakdown of your score against the curve. Not just what percentile you ranked in based on your number correct: you can also see the percentage of people who got the answer to a specific question right, to see if you got the low-hanging fruit or if you were, in fact, smarter than the average Sporcler.

Over time, though, I started to enjoy the more esoteric aspects of Sporcling as well: trying to remember the modern names of ancient Roman cities, for example (which one is Eboracum, again? Lugidunum?); teasing out which countries produce the largest tonnage of beans, or spices, or chickens; trying to remember the Modern Library’s Top 100 books. Suddenly, Sporcle became not just an excuse to regurgitate stuff from my mental repository — it became a way to reinforce my hoard of trivia, and to train myself to deduce certain things that I didn’t know about to begin with. For example, you can guess most of the words to any given lyric or passage if you just start typing in random articles and pronouns. And if you pay attention to the produce stickers at your local grocery store you can probably do pretty well on most of the economic quizzes.

Seven years later, I’m well on my way to the thousand-quiz mark. On a good day, I can get through four quizzes of moderate length — and even on an average week I get through no fewer than fifteen. And I’m happy to say that I’m still comfortably ahead of the curve on ones like Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader and state capitals. Call it revenge for that failed geography bee.

So this is what I’ve been looking for all this time. To beat the curve in under five minutes. To keep playing the countries of the world until you can get all 200-some, even South Sudan and Timor-Leste. To know that “Kyrgyzstan” will be an answer on probably one out of every three quizzes I’ll ever play. To know that I can get my daily dose of mental exercise without having to deal with the over-serious trivia player in the next booth or the sniffly test-taker several desks over. To me, the happy solitude of Sporcle is the true Platonic ideal of inquiry.

If it’s in Wired, it’s official, and so I’m proud to admit that all the time I spend hunting for YouTube clips at work is making me about 9% more productive. Finding videos on YouTube is a skill that I hone in my spare time, and I try to bring it into the office as often as possible — at least, within the bounds of professional propriety (I wouldn’t want to juice my productivity with too much video-watching; that would be unfair). This isn’t just following the latest memes or viral videos that pop up on my Twitter feed. This means going out and doing research; knowing how to game the YouTube search engine to find what I want; and figuring out when it’s time to go farther afield, to the lesser-known but also lesser-policed corners of the online video world. In happier days, I would use a certain c-word to describe what I was doing, and be able to mean it without any trace of irony or pre-emptive definition.

But in any case, my year in productivity-destroying videos took me from pirated TV clips to freely released documentaries, from historical curios to slick, modern-day advertising. Some of it felt like the online equivalent of dumpster-diving, when I found treasures that meant a lot to me but were viewed by only a few hundred others. These included days’ worth of concert recordings from several European jazz festivals that were aired on a German arts channel and a rip of the opening sequence from one of my favorite childhood games, Darklands by Microprose. Some of it was the re-discovery of videos I’d long forgotten about, such as the 1980s Dating Montage or Sara Carlson’s bizarre, bird-inspired choreography from the opening credits of the Italian variety show Al Paradise. And some of it was, indeed, viral video-watching: Phil Davison’s speech to the Republican Party of Stark County, OH; Nicole Lang and Chrisophile Konstas’s “Pimento Cheese, Please!”, as seen on The Hairpin; the Pronunciation Manual’s not-so-subtle subversion of the Pronunciation Book project.

Maybe the one thing that I re-watched the most, though, was of Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch’s 67-yard touchdown run against the Saints back in last January’s NFC Wild Card Game. It’s not even that I watched one specific clip over and over. I watched versions of the same video with the TV commentary replaced by Steve Raible and Warren Moon’s radio call, and with all commentary replaced by just the crowd noise (many of them, of course, have been taken down due to copyright claims). I watched amateur videos filmed from right on the field and high in the stands. I watched videos of people watching the play on TV and on their computer, and one clip of Marshawn Lynch himself watching the play in the NFL Films archive. I’ve probably seen that same minute or so of football at least 200 times by now — another 20 just while writing this paragraph.

In past years, I would have spent more time looking at great football runs, or maybe even great sports plays, in general; now, though, I put my much effort into looking for as many camera angles, reaction shots, and commentary overdubs as I can for a smaller subset of moments. It’s not just for Marshawn Lynch that I’m doing this, either. I’m finding that my favorites list tends to have fewer of the web’s 100 funniest viral videos or whatever, and more videos that hew to my specific interests: food-related adventures, old PC games, recordings of live music, and yes, plenty of Seattle Seahawks videos. I rely less and less on the “similar videos” column and more on users with similar interests and the various search engine tricks I’ve picked up over the years. So my favorites list is as rich and growing as ever, but I suspect that it won’t do much for anyone but me.

This was emblematic of my year in web consumption in general. I pruned my Twitter feeds to only those that were truly of value to me rather than the trendiest or most popular ones (goodbye Anthony Bourdain and Alton Brown; hello, Gurgling Cod, The Old Foodie, and a ton of local restaurants). I dropped about half of the blog feeds from my Google Reader — older webcomics that had finally caught on but that I hadn’t laughed at in a while, music blogs whose recommendations I’d stopped paying attention to in a year or so.

So this was the year that my internet horizons shrank drastically, that I became less concerned with cool and cutting-edge and more concerned in cultivating a little patch of cyberspace (do people still use that term? do I still care if they do or not?) where my interests alone lived and thrived. After all, it’s easier than ever to retreat into your own little bubble — the virtual equivalent of your own headspace — thanks not only to the rise of limited-interest blogs, Tumblrs, Twitter feeds, and YouTube user channels, but also to the well-intentioned yet slightly sinister algorithms behind most of the web. How easy it is to have the web go from a vast and scary cultural smorgasbord to a comfortable and cozy retreat, where the stream of food-related factoids is never-ending and Marshawn Lynch scores touchdowns ad infinitum…

If there’s a food show on TV, I’ve probably watched it. From the classic such as The Galloping Gourmet and In Julia’s Kitchen to modern-day shows like Cupcake Wars and (ugh) Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee, food-related programming has provided me with some combination of entertainment, background noise, and nothing-else-is-on fallback viewing for years.

Given the thousands of hours of food and cooking shows I’ve watched, you’d think that quite a bit would have rubbed off on me. Now, I’m no slouch in the kitchen. But some things—for instance, making a pie crust or tempering chocolate—don’t stick and maybe never will, no matter how many times I watch someone demonstrate them on TV. What’s going on here?

To quote Erica Gruen, the former exec of Food Network: “people don’t watch television to learn things.” Is she right? Well, I’ve seen plenty of Julia and Jacques and Giada, but I didn’t learn much from them (or at least, their shows). For me, techniques, tips, and dishes leap off of the screen and into my brain only when there is an accompanying spectacle. When I cut up a whole chicken, I don’t see the practiced, manicured hands of Martha Stewart but the flying cleaver of Iron Chef Chen Kenichi doing it. I know the flavor of ancho chiles off the top of my head because of Bobby Flay’s constant reminders that they taste “like a spicy raisin.” And I have the confidence to flambé something because I’ve seen it done dozens of times from a variety of camera angles.

In other words, my ability to recall the actual skills-and-recipes part of food TV pales in comparison to my ability to recall all the food-related showboating, excesses, and grotesqueries that regularly appear on my television. No wonder I glaze over, or change the channel, when we get to the judging portions of Top Chef or Chopped — although I stay tuned for Jeffrey Steingarten’s corpulent crankiness on Iron Chef America, the exception that proves the rule.

My personal highlight reel begins with the kinds of things that test your constitution: the perpetually smarmy Andrew Zimmern choking his way through some of the grossest-sounding stuff in southeastern Asia: fermented rice and fish, rats, and durian (a fruit that, as I later discovered, does not taste all that bad); Sandra Lee’s talent for making gross meat products ; the fact that every McRib commercial features people smearing sauce all over their faces and/or chewing with their mouths open.

From grossness to plain gluttony: the episode of No Reservations where Anthony Bourdain and David Chang eat their way through most of Momofuku Ssam Bar’s menu, and then get inspired to reminisce about their guilty pleasures (Bourdain’s is the “nuclear orange” mac and cheese from KFC; Chang’s is chicken nuggets with sweet and sour dipping sauce); The midpoint of every final challenge of every Man vs. Food, when a sweating, overstuffed Adam Richman has to psych himself up to eat the rest of his multiple-pound entrée du jour. If the mind doesn’t boggle, at least the stomach churns.

But the most enduring memory of televised food I may ever have came on Super Bowl Sunday, 2007. I was stuck in a hotel room in northern Indiana in the middle of a blizzard — temperatures had dipped to 30 below with wind chill, such that it was physically dangerous to go outside for more than 15 minutes. It was hours before the Super Bowl would begin (and the Bears would lose in an unspectacular fashion). So all I could do was watch TV.

Tired of the endless pre-game shows, I flipped over to ESPN2, which was showing basically the anti-Super Bowl: the Competitive Eating Championships. Four or five guys had to eat their way through consecutive dish-based rounds, each served on a gigantic platter: spaghetti bolognese, cheese fries, chicken wings, and the final “combo” round (featuring several different kinds of fried appetizers all at once). The contestants had to devour as much food (by weight) as they could without choking or suffering what was euphemistically called a “reversal of fortune” — i.e. throwing up. Fascinated, I watched all the way through the third round. But there are only so many times you can watch someone else throwing up — especially in a close-up shot against a black background — before you start to feel queasy yourself.

No, it hasn’t been all bad. One episode of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives inspired me to check out a ‘50s-style diner that was right on my very doorstep, but that I would never have noticed otherwise. And I learned about the Breton pastry called the kouign amann by way of Pat and Gina Neely’s raves about it on The Best Thing I Ever Ate .

In most cases, though, my ability to remember a piece of food-related programming seems to depend on its ability to engage my gag reflex rather than my cerebral cortex. I can’t contend with five-pound hamburgers, twenty-course meals, and cooking shows where exotic ingredients and bursts of technical showmanship are the norm rather than the exception; I’m cheap, lazy, and easily awed.

And I have to say that it’s pretty sobering, realizing that you are constantly proving a television executive right.

I. The Risks of Plagiarism

A group of four roommates each took the same course, an introduction to marine biology, in four consecutive years. It was taught by an old professor who was nearing retirement, and was known campus-wide for being what we called a “gut class” — in other words, an easy pass. Not only was the professor an easy grader, he also never changed his syllabus, the required textbooks, or even the assignment prompts. Cheap, unchallenging, and easily gamed: what more could anyone ask for?

The first of the roommates took the course their freshman year. He attended class faithfully (and even remained awake for most of them), did decently on exams, and wrote a final paper at the last minute that earned him a B in the class.

The next year, the second roommate took the same class. He skipped a few classes, borrowed the books to study, and, when it came time to do the final paper, simply copied his roommate’s old paper wholesale, with one minor change: he added a cover sheet. He earned a B+ in the class.

Their junior year, the third roommate took the class. He only showed up to the first and last classes and on exam days, he read his roommate’s notes but didn’t bother with the books at all. He submitted the exact same paper as his previous two roommates had done — except this time, he added a picture of a whale to the front cover. He got an A in the class.

The last roommate, figuring that he couldn’t argue with three years of success, and having been afflicted with a particularly bad case of senioritis, took the class, at least on paper: despite being on the official enrollment, he never showed up, never bothered with the reading, and memorized the answers from past exams without learning any of the concepts. But he balked at the prospect of turning in the same final paper for the fourth year in a row. Surely, he figured, if the writing didn’t tip off the professor, the cover sheet would. So he went back to the original: no picture, no title page.

But when the last roommate got his paper back, he was shocked — he’d received an F on the paper, and consequently an F in the class. The professor had left him only one comment:

“Still a good paper, but what happened to the whale?”

II. Don’t Believe Everything You Hear

During dinner one evening, one of my friends started to tell us about a recent class he’d taken on genetic diversity in plants, and its consequences for agriculture — specifically, the plight of the modern banana. Wild bananas are full of hard, inedible seeds, so in order to make bananas palatable, commercial banana growers have developed cultivars that have no seeds. This makes the bananas sterile, so in order to produce more banana trees, farmers cut part of the banana’s underground stem and transplant it in a new location.

However, this also means that most bananas are genetically identical to each other, and are susceptible to the same diseases. And recently, a mutation of Panama disease has started attacking the poor Cavendish, which, like the Gros Michel, has little genetic diversity and can’t stand up to this new, improved blight. We may be on the verge of another great banana shortage.

Now, all of this is true: you can find out about it on Wikipedia, or in the pages of Popular Science, or The New York Times. And because our friend was both a reliable source of science news and not given to hyperbole, bathos, or absurdity in any form, we of course took him at his word.

But then he said, in complete seriousness, “The professor said that’s why NASA is going to try to save bananas by launching them into space.”

III. Rules of Thumb

Life lessons are abundant at the beginning and the end of the year, and a lot of them are pretty much the same. For instance, remember that if a school newspaper interviews you, always ask to double-check your quotes before they go to print. Remember that they are students like you, and their budding sense of journalistic integrity has to compete with things like alcohol, laziness, and sloppy note-taking. Sometimes, it makes for harmless nonsense. Other times, you can find yourself with an undeserved reputation for libertarian nutjobbery or promiscuity.Other, pithier advice:

• It is possible to create an ersatz lava lamp with a glass of water, some olive oil, and a few shakes of table salt.
• For one week only, you may take a seat next to a totally random person in the dining hall, talk about the committees you were on in high school, or share your SAT scores. After that, most people will mistake your eager freshman solicitousness for smug nosiness, and will also probably be right.
• If a lot of your peers are going on to Wall Street, it probably means the market is probably on the verge of a major correction.
• Liquor before beer, you’re in the clear. Beer before liquor, also great.

Photo by Kevin Dooley

In August of 1998, to celebrate my thirteenth birthday, my parents bought a TV for my bedroom. It was a used color TV from the mid ‘80s, complete with fake woodgrain sides and a first-generation remote control, and it was a conduit for a cultural awakening. I considered it my solemn duty to stay up until two in the morning so I could watch reruns of Keeping Up Appearances and M*A*S*H. I continued that ritual for three weeks straight, until the night my dad burst into my room in the middle of an episode of Mama’s Family, and whispered, “Come quick, there’s a UFO outside!”

As far as I was concerned, this was entirely plausible. First, Dad said he’d seen an unusual formation of lights moving erratically and soundlessly in the night sky; what little air traffic we got from our small local airport consisted entirely of private planes and commercial helicopters, and pretty much stopped after sundown. Second, we lived in the kind of place that you’d expect UFO sightings to happen: on a five-acre stretch of hillside about ten miles from the nearest town, in between a horse pasture, a cherry orchard, and a quarry. Third, we were right by the town of McMinnville, Oregon, home to the Trent UFO Sighting of 1950, and, consequently, the second-largest annual UFO Festival in the country, after Roswell’s, of course. And finally, I was a newly-minted teenager with an overactive imagination who’d been exposed to a few too many alien abduction stories.

So Dad and I scrambled outside in our pajamas (Mom had elected to stay in bed), with binoculars and camera at the ready. And sure enough, there was a triangular formation of lights off to the southeast. Except that it wasn’t moving erratically. Or all that soundlessly; we could just barely hear the distant but familiar hum of rotor blades. We looked at it through the binoculars and saw nothing more than a large cargo helicopter that was flying unusually low and unusually late at night.

“Well, I guess it wasn’t a UFO,” Dad said. An awkward pause. “Sorry to get you out here for nothing.”

In typical adolescent fashion, I muttered something about not caring that much, trying to project casual indifference. But truthfully, in those few moments, I’d experienced about as wide a range of emotions as I ever had (especially as my first kiss was still some months away): discovery, disappointment, and embarrassment, all because I still believed that yes, there really could be something unexplained out there.

Before I got my own bedroom set, my parents would only let me watch TV with them until 9 p.m. On most weeknights, we’d watch Seinfeld together; on Fridays, we’d watch Unsolved Mysteries.

It’s probably hard to imagine now, but in 1990, about sixteen million people tuned in every week to watch Robert Stack stalk around the screen in a trench coat and talk about murders, ghosts, demons, and aliens. (Here’s a representative example.) For contrast, nowadays a basic cable show about paranormal investigators is considered a surprise hit when it gets only two million viewers, and the major networks won’t even touch anything that takes the occult seriously.

And the show took it quite seriously. Stories about crop circles were presented alongside ones about true crime. Clairvoyants appeared with con men; ghosts with gold miners.

More so than Stack’s gravelly narration, the Gothic backdrops, or even the melodramatic re-enactments, this implied equivalence between reality and the paranormal kept me glued to the screen while the show was on — and thinking about it long after. The show paraded an endless supply of witnesses, experts, and authorities that wore down at my sense of skepticism over the show’s decade-long run on NBC. It was easy to attribute the Nazca Lines and pictographs of Ancient Astronauts to the crazy beliefs of prehistoric people, and to ignore the hokey animated flying saucers as low-budget sexing-up of an unreliable story. But what about the respectable Joe and Jane Six-Packs who claimed, for instance, that they were abducted and tortured in the wilderness of Pennsylvania, or that they suffered debilitating radiation exposure at the hands of a UFO? What about the footage of lights doing mysterious things in the skies over major cities? And what about the real-live physicists and NASA analysts — armed with tape-fed supercomputers and image enhancement software! [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2lPrgHT0y4] — who could make something as farfetched as the Face on Mars seem legitimate? Who was I to argue against all this?

For years, watching Unsolved Mysteries was the last real activity I did before bed on Friday nights. And so, while I was brushing my teeth or taking a shower, I’d actually replay the segments from the show — at least, all the ones that weren’t true crime stories — in my head. Aliens populated more than a few of my dreams, and lurked around the edges of my consciousness as I was falling asleep, too: I’d often startle awake when a twig would snap outside or the headlights of a passing car would shine into my room in the middle of the night, thinking that by the time I opened my eyes I’d find a pair of blob-headed humanoids standing over me.

In time, aliens became a waking interest of mine, too. During summer vacations, I would make my way through the occult section at the local library; to this day, I can still remember the standard taxonomy of aliens, from Greys and reptilians to Men in Black and energy beings. My bedroom bookshelf featured not just pristine editions of Robinson Crusoe and The Giver but also books like My Teacher is an Alien and A Wrinkle in Time that were full of extraterrestrials. And yes, I have to admit it, I faithfully watched the last few seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (And played the collectible card game, and built starship models…)

But by 1998, I’d glutted myself on all things alien-related, and I was ready to move on. Incidentally, so was Unsolved Mysteries: Robert Stack now shared hosting duties on Unsolved Mysteries with the telegenic Virginia Madsen, and the show now focused more on crime than the paranormal anyway. I quickly got into the habit of drowning out what little dread and fascination that alien abduction stories still inspired with the glut of mediocre syndicated sitcoms that aired after 11 p.m. — goodbye E.T., hello Al Bundy.

Dad’s fake UFO sighting was the last, failed test of my extraterrestrial interest. Of course I was disappointed that we weren’t going to make some kind of first contact, but even more so I was disappointed that I’d let myself believe that it was, in fact, a possibility. My sense of skepticism had been battered into submission by culture and circumstance, but it was time to worry about grownup things like girls, grades, and cars and give my hyperactive, hypersensitive imagination a rest. I got back in bed and resolved never to get spooked by things that go bump in the night again.

Faith is all-or-nothing proposition. As Don Draper put it, “You already know about Jesus; either he lives in your heart, or doesn’t.” And allowing your faith to lapse is not nearly the same thing as disavowing it altogether, whether you believe in God or nature spirits or the existence of extraterrestrial invaders; it can come back at any time, as if you’ve never stopped believing at all.

In August of 2002, the movie Signs came out, and about a dozen of my high school friends and I went to watch it in theaters. It was a sort of valedictory gathering for us: the next morning, I’d be off to my parents’ new place in Ohio before starting college on the East Coast. I felt like I was on the cusp of true, bittersweet adulthood, about to experience not just the highs of starting a new life in college, but also the lows of leaving a past one behind.

For all its faults, the movie unearthed the neuroses that had lain dormant for four years. It’s true that there were plenty of jump-scares, when weird humanoid arms appeared out of nowhere along with a jolt of orchestral noise. But I also saw some of my worst fears — isolation, powerlessness, abduction by malevolent aliens — writ large across the face of Mel Gibson and his family. Even the corny, nonsensical ending didn’t change the fact that I was starting to feel my preteen anxieties start to creep back into my psyche.

If culture conjured up my old psychological demons, then circumstance made them stick around. It just so happened that my parents’ new place was a one-story house in the middle of a cornfield in a nondescript Midwestern town — the kind of place where you might find crop circles and the occasional terrifying alien on the roof. And once again, I found myself bolting upright whenever I heard a little too much rustling outside, or when a car’s headlights shone into my room. UFOs became just as plausible a fear as if I was twelve, all over again. Real adulthood, it seemed, was still a ways away.

Photo by Heather Durdil

Every profession has its own peculiar jargon, but the language of book reviewers probably comes under more scrutiny than that of any other group (except politicians). If you’ve read more than four book reviews in your life, then you’re familiar with their hyperventilated style. A good book can be a “tour-de-force,” “poignant,” “lyrical,” “un-put-downable,” “pitch-perfect”; a bad book can be “woefully inadequate” or “staggeringly bad,” with characters that are “cookie-cutter” and settings that are “derivative.” Ones that don’t quite fit in one genre or another are described like a mashup: “Nicholas Sparks meets Thomas Pynchon” or some other such formulation. The list goes on.

So it comes as no surprise that there are plenty of specific complaints about the reviewer’s argot. My own favorite is from Dwight Garner, by way of Twitter: “To call a nonfiction book ‘magisterial’ is to get an intellectual hall pass; you no longer have to discuss the book in any meaningful way.”

But out of sympathy for the beleaguered book reviewers out there, and in the spirit of offering solutions instead of merely pointing out problems, I’d like to offer them some suggestions as substitutes for the hoarier chestnuts in their arsenal.

Move the goalposts

Instead of prattling on about things like plot and characters, imagine some new criteria by which to judge books and their authors. Any book without a sex scene in the first 20 pages (5 pages for a romance novel), for example, should be described as “arid.” Young adult novels deal out plenty of life lessons about relationships, but where are the ones that provide sufficient personal finance advice? And perhaps we ought to consider how well writers of transgressive literature describe food handling and preparation.

Commit to hyperbole

If you’re going to lie and say you’ve thrown a book across the room, you may as well take such expressions to their logical extreme. A possible replacement: “I put down the book, scratched a curse in Hermes’s name against the author on a sheet of lead, and nailed it to the wall of the local temple, in the manner of a Roman defixio.” Better to be outrageous than predictable.

Use eponyms instead of synonyms

This neatly sidesteps the “elongated yellow fruit” problem. An author whose prose might be called “achingly beautiful” instead becomes “the Delacroix of literature”; a “darkly funny” book is now a “Rabelaisian comedy.” If fine artists aren’t your thing, then maybe American presidents might be a better comparison: “Taft-like excess,” “Cleveland-esque genre-bending” or “Clintonian eroticism.”

Mix highbrow and lowbrow diction

And I mean really go for it.: “Polylogic epistolary novels are the new intradiegetic-homodiegetic narratives.” “Not your father’s textual communities.” “Epizeuxis much?”

Borrow buzzwords from other industries

For example, turn bestsellers into “results-driven novels,” and debut authors into “entrepreneurial writers.” Take a line from restaurant critics and remark on how “toothsome,” “decadent,” or “chocolatey” someone’s writing is. Obviously, “well-crafted sentences” should become “artisanal sentences.”

With any luck, these will all get their own squares in the game of Book Review Bingo sooner rather than later.

Photo by risa-i

Photo by Michael Bussell

After 1 a.m., the world’s culinary horizons contract sharply. At 4, they extend no farther than your front door: to the phone, where you can order delivery from restaurants of last resort, or to the kitchen, where your last week’s worth of meal choices stare back at you from condensation-covered Tupperware and greaseproofed cardboard take-out boxes. The first is not an option. The second is generally not much better. Insomniacs, despair.

Consider the havoc that the refrigerator wreaks on your leftovers. Pasta, once perfectly toothsome, devolves into a gummy tangle; elegant sauces separate into water and everything else, as if centrifuged. What was pleasingly, shatteringly, crisp — bacon, for instance, or fried chicken — generally retains a certain robust chewiness, which can be depressing if you were hoping for some semblance of the original. Foams and infusions, and most things that come from the rarified world of molecular gastronomy, wilt under prolonged cold storage. Best to eat your highly engineered mac and cheese the day of.

There is no time to overthink things; the cold, unforgiving reality of daytime approaches all too quickly. So begin with dessert first: a soft, gently sweetened panna cotta, a last surviving mini cannolo that may as well have been airlifted from Sicily itself. A slice of lemon meringue pie, the meringue a delicate cloud, the lemon curd unctuous and bright. This will satisfy your initial craving for something, anything, but only just.

Fortunately, the night is young, and your fridge is full. Of the slices of jamon serrano that were the only highlight from Tuesday’s mediocre Spanish restaurant. Of half a loaf of cornbread whose best feature is its ability to absorb vast quantities of butter and honey. Of the cubes of safety-vest-orange Pasteurized Cheese Product, refreshingly unpretentious after a day of restaurant food with too much aspiration and not enough consistency.

Rely next on those classic American staples: large quantities of red meat and potatoes, whether baked, boiled, or fried. Leave them cold, warm them up, dress them with lashings of hot sauce or ranch dressing (spare the gravy glop, though), but eat them, eat them! Marvel at how the combination of starch, salt, and fat keeps the night’s chill, real or imagined, at bay.

And yes, Virginia, some things do in fact improve with cold storage. A bowl of fiery pozole takes on a pleasing brininess when eaten straight out of the Tupperware. The ruins of a lump crab tower, freed from the tyranny of its clichéd, circle-molded existence on a restaurant plate, tastes better as a mouthful with a uniformly citrusy flavor profile. These are truths that you feel in your gut, though you may never be able to express them as part of your day job.

At this point, your stomach may be protesting, your blood sugar levels rocketing, your eyelids drooping once again. Do not give in to biological imperatives. Move along to the cereal shelf—you do have your 2% handy, don’t you? Revel in the first great triumph of American food science, the manhandling of pulverized grain into all manner of shapes, sizes, and colors, their deceptive branding (“Whole grain! Great source of vitamins and minerals!”) making it easy to justify the jolts of sugary sweetness being delivered to your head (and heart, and pancreas) in bowl-sized doses.

The takeaway here? That three in the morning — or four, if your kitchen raids take as long as mine generally do — is no time for heroics. Yes, stored foods may lose their textural appeal, or end up further toward the shirt-cardboard-and-sawdust end of the flavor spectrum; yes, you may have to do quite a bit of scrounging and shoveling before your reptilian complex (the part that controls hunger, natch) quiets down.

But it is surely better to face the onrushing dawn, and the vast, alienating world of restaurant criticism, fortified by the remnants of meals past. Fret not, for in the wee small hours of the morning, your reputation as a Serious Food Professional can never be sullied, no matter how many clover-shaped marshmallows or tins of potted, preserved meat you consume. These are the assumptions on which one’s thin veneer of sanity often rests.