How'd Ya Do?

Yokosuka E14Y 'Glen'

I always appreciated Jeopardy’s tag line asking for ‘quick recall of specific fact’ from its contestants. Not only was it cleverly and succinctly indicative of its objective, it was a delicious marketing ploy as well. Quick recall of specific fact.

There are without question thousands of people who have this gift. Many have never spent a single day on a college campus. Stuff simply sticks. I would like to think that to qualify for this lofty position one must be a voracious reader, podcast listener or news junkie, but those, while helpful, aren’t prerequisites. It is like IQ or your SAT scores, both having more to do with DNA than time spent in the library.

It is with this as backstory that I unwittingly waltzed into yesterday. The research is well under way for the latest project and as I sat and played with various plot devices to tell my story, words, ideas, dialogues and interactions started popping up like heated kernels of dried corn. There was flow and I was in it.

Until I reached a point where i wanted to expand the depth of one of my main characters in order to better convey both the historical implication and my characters response to it. To do so I needed…..quick recall of specific fact. Because I wanted to stay in the joyful, powerful and productive creative flow.

The facts that I deemed necessary to accomplish this were simply not available. In searching all I found was a 404 error. The information you are looking for does not exist at this site at this time so please try again later. BUT I NEED IT NOW.

I will provide, as a game show might, a couple of the questions to which I sought detail and fact later, but first I would like to briefly mention the insight that came along on the ride sitting shotgun.

Research is important. Vital. Unless you have the mind of Einstein, Joyce, Robbins or Morrison, and are hence able to write verbatim for hours without referring to a dictionary or thesaurus, somewhere along the story-line you are going to have to do the diligence of thorough research. And the more, the deeper, the cleaner and the truer, the better. Research is where it is at. When at equals quality.

Before we get to the quiz, let me say that yesterday, in this process I was invited to visit the University of Oregon archives, the Seattle Public Library and Portland, OR to research some of the details on the subject matter. Even two hours wielding the Google tool only got me as far as the glaringly obvious. I did make some headway and always careful to not enter the wrong rabbit hole, ordered two books, a DVD documentary and made a trip to my local library. Progress.

And now the quiz. (play open theme)

1) The Samurai sword is also known as this.
2) How many months separated Peal Harbor from Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
3) Who is known as the American Prometheus?
4) What were the Doolittle Raids?
5) What is the code of the Samurai called?
6) How long had the Japanese been planning Pearl Harbor prior to Dec. 7, 1941?
7) What was the Yokosuka E14Y code-named by the Allies?

How’d ya do? (play closing theme)