Asimov and Hawai’i
By popular request (well, one reader requested it), I’ll tell the story of how Asimov won me a trip to Hawai’i.
It all began back in high school. I was what you might call a geek (I know, shocking); I was skinny, wore glasses, read a lot of sci-fi. And if you read sci-fi, you’ve just GOT to read Asimov. Chances are you’ll read him regardless, because the man wrote over 300 books. I know this, because after every 100 books, he released an anthology called Opus x00, where x in {1,2,3}. I have a copy of Opus 300 over there on the shelf.
Anyway, Asimov wrote a lot, and he wrote on just about every subject imaginable—not just science fiction, and not just science non-fiction. Of course, he did write quite a bit about science and the history thereof, and he knew what he was talking about; he had a PhD in bio-chemistry, after all. But he wrote about other things, such as history and religion. For example, I also have on the shelf Asimov’s Guide to the Bible. You get the idea.
A few years ago, I was a contestant on a certain TV quiz show. I didn’t do so hot, although I managed to answer a lot of physics questions, which kept me in the hunt for second place (first place was hopeless; the leader had more than doubled my score). The category going into the final round was “At the Library.”
“Oh great,” I thought. The other contestant, with whom I was battling for second place, was a library science graduate student. “I guess I better learn to love Rice-a-Roni.”
But then, when the final clue was revealed, I started grinning:
This author and bio-chemist has published a book in each of the ten major Dewey Decimal categories.
Well, as you’ve no doubt figured out (or knew already), it was indeed Isaac Asimov. I squeaked into second place, and instead of a year’s supply of Lee Press-On Nails, I walked away with a 6-night stay on a live-aboard dive-boat off the the Kona coast of Hawai’i. Of course, neither the wife nor I knew how to SCUBA dive, but that’s another story.
April 13th, 2004 at 8:04 am
So, is it true what my tax instructor told me about game shows? That an IRS agent is on staff to take tax payments following each episode?
April 13th, 2004 at 8:18 am
It wasn’t at this one. However, I did have to pay tax on the prize before I could go on the trip.
April 13th, 2004 at 12:54 pm
Great story! I was a huge Asimov fan growing up as well, and got to meet him at a book street fair in New York in the early 80s. While I knew him from the Foundation series (and he signed a copy of a book of mystery stories for me), I now do some work with the local Shakespeare Festival, which regularly uses “Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare.”
April 13th, 2004 at 3:47 pm
I saw that episode. Thib was the first man in history to utter the phrase, “Screw you, Trebek!”