I rarely watch "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" — I doubt I've seen an episode in its entirety — but Max posed an interesting question (really, he was a meme machine on email before blogging popularized the term): Who would your three lifelines be?.

My answer:

• Brad Rutter is the best player in the history of Jeopardy!, the gold standard of all quiz shows. I met him in college, became friends while hanging out with a mutual friend since (my roommate, his fraternity brother) and never knew he had such a knack for trivia. He's smart, no doubt, but you wouldn't think, "Hey, this guy has a photographic memory" or anything like that. Anyhow, it goes without saying that his breadth of knowledge is unreal; but the social sciences are his forté.
• Bob Lessick, on the other hand, spouted trivia like Peter North spouted ejaculate: profusely and widely. When we worked together on the Johns Hopkins News-Letter, once minute, he would be explaining to me why it's not that bizarre that closely related species (like chimps and humans) have different numbers of chromosomes and then turn around and pound out an in-depth article on figure skating. I'd draft him for his science knowledge — he was a biology post-doctoral researcher when we met — and just knowing random shit.
• Lance Wahlert Last, but not least, is the smartest non-science guy I've ever met. I'm a good writer; I'd knock out papers at JHU the night before, get an A- and then throw the shit out. Lance was a brilliant writer; he could composed essays so sublime that, on at least one occasion, the professor asked him if he could get leather-bound copies printed up. No, seriously. Lance gets the nod for humanities: from Irish poetry to queer cinema to Dolly Parton.

So yeah, that's my dream team. Oddly enough, all three are from college, though I met many smart people before that and I've met many smart folks since.

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