Ask A Genius 913: Junior High Enemies and Don Draper
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/04/12
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: So, this is just to clarify that Tom Hanks is not a dick who outbids people for the contents of storage lockers. Actors and other celebs often think it is fun to play themselves as dicks. There was a show you probably have not heard of called Jury Duty, where one guy got picked for jury duty. He shows up for trial, gets sequestered, and everybody else is an actor. The whole thing is fake; it is a giant four-week prank on the guy, and another member of the jury is the actor James Marsden playing himself as a complete douchebag. Marsden got Emmy nominated for playing an asshole version of himself; it is funny. So, no, Tom Hanks is not a dick; he thinks it’s funny to play one.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Who is your favourite television character?
Rosner: I don’t know. It’s somebody off of an excellent show, somebody as cool as I wish I were in real life, probably. Don Draper who was a douchebag but a cool guy. I don’t know if I have favourite TV characters as much as I have favourite TV shows. Right now, it might be Girls5eva from the same production team that did 30 Rock with Tina Fey, created and written by Meredith Scardino. It’s just a joke for a minute. Breaking Bad was pretty good, but it was a long haul and way too murder-y. What’s your favourite TV character?
Right now, there’s a show called Sugar, I think, with Colin Farrell, who plays a very cool private detective. I wish I were as cool as he is.
Jacobsen: Okay. I like that one show called Hell on Wheels. It was a realistic representation of the negative and the positive of everyone during the building of the railroad across North America.
Rosner: Oh, I saw some episodes of that. Yeah, everybody was like a dangerous asshole.
Jacobsen: Yeah, but people were also honourably represented.
Rosner: Okay, I didn’t see any honourable peoplee. Suppose we’re going with Canadian shows. Since you’re from Canada, my wife and I like Working Moms.
Jacobsen: What’s Working Moms about?
Rosner: It’s Catherine Reitman, and it’s just 30-ish moms often in the workplace who are kind of a-holes. It’s very funny, and I like the way Catherine Reitman looks a lot. She’s got lips that are so big that they’re misshapen; they turn into dewlaps, which I like.
Jacobsen: Are you a lip guy?
Rosner: Apparently, yeah.
Jacobsen: Tell me about that.
Rosner: I’ve got giant lips myself. I was made fun of them, made fun of for having giant lips in the era of blonde, lipless, assless people dominated the media. I would need to work on the rest of my face to make the rest of my face as delicious as my lips. Lips are so big that they’re always a little bit chapped; it’s just a lot of surface area to keep them unchapped.
Jacobsen: What advice do you have for younger people now?
Rosner: Talk to more girls, do sports even though you might hate them and be terrible at them because you learn to be with people by being on a sports team. Start working out and getting strong earlier. Don’t constantly play makeup like there’s a time when being solid and sporty is essential, and it is High school and Junior High. After that, if you’re not a scholarship athlete and you’re still way into sports, it’s not going to help get you laid, but the high school might help. It would have given me better social skills earlier. I worried less about getting a girlfriend in Junior High and High School because at the time and place I was in Junior High and High School, most people were not hooking up to any extent. Everybody does eventually, but my friends and I were unaware of that and desperate, which doesn’t make you famous.
Jacobsen: What would you consider some of your regrets if you’re in the 30 years of life?
Rosner: I have yet to get a book published with an actual publisher. We’ve done a ton of Amazon books, and they’re fine for what they are, but some of my favourite writers crank out two or three books a year, and that’s not me. My wife has cranked out the first draft of a book in just a few months. So, I regret being so lazy when getting educated in physics. I know a ton of physics, but I really should be able to do more of the math behind, like quantum mechanics. I keep thinking about wishing; I still wish that I would somehow end up back in Junior High knowing everything I know now, both for investing purposes and purposes of beating up my Junior High enemies or at least terrorizing them.
Jacobsen: Who were your Junior High enemies?
Rosner: Oh, just the guys who like to bully nerdy kids. They didn’t dislike me in a specific way. One kid did it just because he saw the way I was, and I was a little bit Asperger-y, and he was offended by that. I did get in a fight with him, and while he was punching me, I was taking his jacket, which he cherished, and just ripping it, making it, not such a good jacket because I could take his little freaking Junior High punches, but I was doing permanent damage to his stuff. And then I was smart enough that when we were broken up and whatever Junior High vice principal was talking to us, whatever the kid was saying, I was saying, I think it’s both our faults. That automatically makes the other guy the asshole. So, even though I was Asperger-y, I knew a couple of things, but given what I know now, I would know to grab his hand like a paddle swinging around over my head and then back to him and then wrench it up behind his back, which is like a pain submission move. You want a move that will cause the other person pain but won’t leave marks, and that’s one of them. Even if I misexecuted it, it would have been fun to try.
There’s another one; grab the guy’s arm, and you bend the wrist forward; you grab the wrist with one hand and, I guess, the forearm with another hand and just bend the wrist forward as far as it’ll go. It causes a lot of pain, but it’s tough to injure the guy. the guy is amazed about you causing him pain because he’s hitting you. After all, that’s all Junior High kids in Colorado would know how to do. I mean, the TV would have been miserable. I’ve already read any books that were any good in 1974. I would have needed to go to work at bars.
Jacobsen: What age did you start reading?
Rosner: Three and three-quarters, which isn’t that early in modern terms because parents are trying to make their kids all gifted now, but that was not the case in 1964. But yeah, once I started reading, I read all the time because I was terrible at recess and interacting with other people. I preferred to read all the time.
[Recording End]
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