Trivia Master Makes People Think About Unusual

It doesn’t make sense to say this, but I’m interested in interesting things. -- Scot Morris

Expelled air from a sneeze travels at about 100 miles an hour. -- “The Book of Strange Facts

and Useless Information,”

by Scot Morris

Scot Morris is (a) an accomplished magazine writer with a doctorate in clinical psychology; (b) an eccentric bachelor who juggles while he jogs; (c) probably the only person in Del Mar who knows why there’s more ice at the South Pole than at the North Pole.

The correct answer is: all of the above. But these things only begin to describe the unusual career of the 45-year-old writer and Del Mar resident.

If you read Omni or Penthouse magazines, you’ve probably seen Morris’ monthly Games columns, which include everything from trivia quizzes and brain-teasing problems to profiles of inventors and their inventions.

Or you may have seen Morris during one of his six appearances on “The Tonight Show.” You may even have read one of Morris’ books--perhaps “The Book of Strange Facts and Useless Information,” which documents, among other things, that Henry David Thoreau is credited with inventing raisin bread.

Investigating weird phenomena and obscure facts is more or less a way of life for Morris, but he happens to get paid for it, too.

“It’s a one-of-a-kind job,” he observed recently while sitting on a couch in his spacious living room. In a corner behind him, a chrome bird was suspended by wires from the ceiling. Driven by an electric motor, it flapped its wings slowly and silently as he talked.

“I have always been interested in unusual things,” said Morris, who obtained a doctorate in clinical psychology from Southern Illinois University in 1970. After looking around for a teaching job, he got a tryout as an assistant editor with the magazine Psychology Today, which then was published in Del Mar.

Morris made good on the opportunity and was soon “taking stuffy, jargon-laden articles” written by psychologists and rewriting them for the pages of Psychology Today, “as if I was trying to explain them to my mother,” he said.

Over the next few years, Morris also wrote several free-lance articles for Playboy. And he became a collector of obscure information, tidbits that he eventually published en masse in “The Book of Strange Facts and Useless Information” in 1979.

Nutritious Grasshoppers

In one chapter of the book, Morris pointed out that “pound for pound, grasshoppers are about three times as nutritious as steak.” In another chapter he observed, “If they are swirled in a pail or kept on board a rolling ship, fish can get seasick.”

The book is filled with such trivia, “things I thought were interesting and not well-known,” Morris said. “They’re the kinds of things that make you say, ‘I’ll be darned. Where did he find that?’ ”

Many of them are also rooted in problems of physics, psychology and other sciences. In “Strange Facts,” Morris notes that the “crack” of a bullwhip is actually a small sonic boom. He also documents attempts by spiritualists to contact Harry Houdini after he died.

“I consider myself a science journalist with a specialty in science-oriented diversions,” he said. In particular, “my interest in psychology (has been) paralleled by my interest in perception, illusions . . anything that tells you about how the mind works.” That includes magic tricks.

When Omni magazine was founded in October, 1978, Morris landed a job as a senior editor and moved to New York City to work at the magazine’s offices. The managing editor suggested that, among other duties, Morris should write a column “on some of those weird things you investigate,” and the Games column began.

One hundred and eight columns later, Morris is still at it (he left Omni and returned to Del Mar a year ago and is now writing the column on contract). Not bad for a guy who says bluntly: “I’m not that interested in games. I’m not extremely competitive. I was never into team sports, and I don’t like to play chess or bridge.”

But that’s OK, because the Games column is really only about games a couple of months each year. The rest of the time it’s about odd natural phenomena, inventors and offbeat scientific experiments--the same types of things that fill many of the pages in “Strange Facts.”

Morris conceded that his column is so eclectic it could almost be characterized as “whatever Scot happens to be interested in this month.”

“But I’m interested in interesting things.”

It’s hard to argue with that. One of Morris’ recent columns discussed experiments performed with toys on the space shuttle. The experiments were designed partly to provide topics for schoolteachers and their students to discuss in class.

“I created a quiz around (the experiments) for my column, asking questions like, ‘Can you make a yo-yo “sleep” in space?’ ” Morris said. “The answer is no. You can’t get a yo-yo to sleep because there’s no (gravitational) force to keep it out at the end of the string. It comes back to your hand.”

The World’s Safest Plane

In another recent column, Morris wrote about the world’s safest airplane.

“It’s called the Paraplane, and it’s basically a powered parachute. If you should lose both engines, you’re still (wearing) a steerable parachute.”

The Penthouse version of Games, which Morris has been writing for 4 1/2 years, deals more with gambling and sports than science and the future. Nevertheless, Morris works in what science he can, writing about computers that have been used to cheat roulette wheels and the physics of high jumping, among other things.

Sometimes, ideas for his columns come from readers or friends. But the mathematical riddles and word puzzles that Morris uses--the true games--come from his extensive library of puzzle and game books.

“I rarely come up with a brand new idea, but since I’ve got such a huge collection (of books about them), I can put together four or five puzzles that have a similar theme that have never been put together before. That’s my creative contribution,” he said.

“I intimidate some people (who read the column) because they frequently get the (answers) wrong. But my ideal puzzle is one that you look at and think, ‘This is much too hard for me.’ And then you sneak a peak at the answer page, and say, ‘I could have gotten that.’

“I hope people can fail my puzzles and not feel bad.”

Mild Humor Adds to Appeal

To pique readers’ interest, Morris also usually injects gentle humor and modern images into the classic mathematical riddles and word problems he uses.

One problem that appeared in the column read, “Ten senators, all wearing top hats as they were walking to the President’s inauguration, were hit by a barrage of snowballs from a heckling crowd, and all their hats were knocked off. A helpful young page retrieved them and, without asking which hat belonged to whom, gave each senator a hat. What is the probability that exactly nine senators received their own hats?” (Answer below.)

Such problems are tantalizing because “they’re sort of recreational and sort of intellectual,” Morris noted. “They challenge the mind, and they’re not terribly serious. They’re diversions.”

But he personally finds many of them tedious.

“If you ask me to let X equal something,” he wrote in the introduction to a collection of his columns titled “Omni Games,” ’I’ll suggest we let it equal a pizza with no anchovies, and order out.

“One of my objectives is to keep every column as different as possible from the preceding column. If it was just puzzles, puzzles, puzzles every month, I’d have quit years ago.”

Morris said he sometimes collects information about a subject for years before writing about it in a column, although the actual writing may take only a few days.

And he makes it a point to contact people who are experts in whatever field he is writing about, “so that I can become an authority on that subject. To just write a story about it isn’t enough. If I’m going to write about a thing, I’ve got to really study it so I understand it. And then I can write it in a way that the average Joe can understand.

“A lot of what I do, I view as teaching. I don’t view myself as a writer, I view myself as a reporter and a teacher . . . someone who explains things in a nice, clear way.”

That’s one reason for the success of the Games column, which Omni assistant editor Kevin McKinney said is one of the magazine’s most popular features.

“I think it does” take a unique person to write a monthly column on games, McKinney said. “It has to be someone very interested in logic and perception.

“Scot enjoys finding new games and puzzles, and (tracking down) unusual things. When he worked in the office here, his office was like a toy room, an adult playroom.

“My storehouse of useless information is expanding greatly from having worked with Scot,” McKinney added with a chuckle.

Sometimes, to better understand what he’s writing about, Morris will personally test things, too. He flew the Paraplane before deciding it really was the world’s safest airplane, and to write a column on juggling, he learned how to juggle.

That in turn led to his current interest in the sport of “joggling.” Joggling is juggling while jogging, Morris explained.

“In the course of doing my article, I attended a juggling convention, and I found out these guys compete with each other to see who can run the fastest mile, or the fastest 5K-run, while juggling. It turns out that the one-mile record is four minutes, 43 seconds,” he said.

“Can you imagine running a five-minute mile--which is really pumpin’ along--and then have some guy pass you while he’s juggling ?”

Plans to Continue Writing

Morris said he plans to continue writing the Games column for Omni indefinitely but will soon cease writing the similar column for Penthouse. As someone with a scientific background, he prefers researching scientific questions, he said.

Besides, investigating trivia for a living “does get wearing at times, to the point that I don’t want to be considered just Mr. Trivia. That’s one reason I try to find a way to tie (these games, odd facts and inventions) to something bigger, something that makes it a real story,” such as a subject’s history or its most colorful proponents.

But doing that and still meeting deadlines for two national magazines every month “is a lot of work,” Morris said. “And I’m in a position now where I make enough not to have to do it.”

Jogging With ‘Exerballs’

In his spare time, Morris now joggles regularly on Del Mar’s beaches for exercise, using heavyweight juggling balls called “Exerballs” that he invented to give jogglers an upper-body workout while they run. He is also extremely fond of playing Frisbee, and says he is working on inventing a beach game, too.

But his principal hobby is also his job, which basically consists of learning, Morris said. “When I was in college and graduate school, I always liked to write term papers. It meant that I’d have to find out everything I could about a subject, get it all written down, and then move on to the next thing,” he said.

That’s exactly what his job consists of now. “I pick a topic, research the heck out of it, and then put it down on paper by a specific deadline and never do anything with it again.”

To be candid, there’s really not much else you can do with, say, the fact that there is more ice at the South Pole than at the North Pole. (Antarctica is a continent, and land can’t retain heat as well as the water that underlies the Arctic ice cap; thus, ice melts more slowly at the South Pole than at the North).

(In the “Senators’ Hats” problem above, the odds of exactly nine senators getting the right hat are zero; the tenth one would also have his own topper.)

But you can’t really call information like that useless, because Scot Morris has found a use for it. “In a way,” he said, “I’ve carved out a job that allows me to be a student for the rest of my life.”