@morganfriedman but heed the warn­ing in my Twit­ter bio: I know a ton about a tiny num­ber of top­ics; noth­ing about any­thing else. Each of my ob­ser­va­tions here is ob­vi­ous, triv­ial, or wrong.

Span­ish Et­y­mol­o­gy: Span­ish for Nerds. I am ob­sessed with un­der­stand­ing where words come from, in many languages–and con­nect­ing the dots. My pas­sion since I was 8 years old. For fun, I turned my decades of notes in­to a blog, with tens of thou­sands of sub­scribers. Get the book, as well.

Pro­cen­tris. Pro­cen­tris’ of On­line Mar­ket­ing Ser­vices, man­ag­ing the on­line mar­ket­ing for its US SEO & SEM clients. In Bom­bay. Man­ag­ing dozens of SEOs & SEMs while in In­dia = Pre­ma­ture White Hairs. I tried, and not for me!

Buy the book, Over­heard in New York. I’ve writ­ten two books–both Top 10 best-sell­ers on Ama­zon, and both pub­lished by Pen­guin. And buy the se­quel, Over­heard in the Of­fice.

Over­heard in New York. Found­ed a hu­mor em­pire with my (suc­cess­ful!) mis­sion to get 10 mil­lion peo­ple to laugh at my jokes. Time Mag­a­zine’s Coolest Blog­ger of the Year. End­less Me­dia At­ten­tion: my 15 min­utes of fame. (And our sis­ter sites, in­cl. Over­heard in the Of­fice).

Word­counter. Found­ed the first & lead­ing site to count the num­ber of words in a doc­u­ment. Sold and ex­it­ed, thank you very much!

In­fla­tion Cal­cu­la­tor. Be­gan the first & most vis­it­ed site to cal­cu­late the US in­fla­tion rate.

Cliche Find­er. Be­gan the first & most pop­u­lar search­able data­base of clich­es. I don’t hide my love of clich­es.

Child­hood pi­ano freak.

In mid­dle school, I read John & Abi­gail Adams’ col­lect­ed let­ters and loved their epis­to­lary style. So I found lots of pen-pals and wrote to them like this. I did this for years un­til I be­came quite good. Then I spent a decade do­ing the same but for oth­er lots of oth­er peo­ple’s styles.

Start­ing when I was ap­prox­i­mate­ly 8 years old un­til late high school, I’d spend 2 hours every morn­ing mem­o­riz­ing the dic­tio­nary (and its et­y­molo­gies), be­fore the school bus came. The trusty, un­pre­ten­tious World Book Dic­tio­nary, of course.

Don’t re­mem­ber it well. But my dad looks great in this pho­to with me, tak­en gen­er­al­ly around that time.

The en­tire ex­tend­ed family—everyone, very poor—all came to my great-aun­t’s house for din­ner every Sun­day night, for decades. The week­ly lux­u­ry. When she was in her 90s, she laid down her head while cook­ing the din­ner, and died. The whole fam­i­ly ar­rived over the next hours, as sched­uled. They ate the din­ner. It’s what she would have want­ed.

Five poor broth­ers em­i­grat­ed from Min­sk, Be­larus to NY. The great de­pres­sion was so bad for them that four of them re­turned to Be­larus. Those four were mur­dered (you know, that is­sue with Ger­many). The one who stayed in NY was my great-grand­fa­ther. Thanks for not mov­ing back to East­ern Eu­rope on the eve of Hitler and Stal­in, G‑Gramps!

My great-grand­fa­ther em­i­grat­ed from “Min­sk Gu­ber­nia” to NY. Saved mon­ey, sent enough back to send for his wife… and the ship ar­rived, and his wife’s sis­ter stepped off. Wife died and she took her place. She end­ed up be­ing my great-grand­ma! Love those tra­di­tions.

23andme tells me I’m 100% Ashke­nazi via Minsk/Belarus, sup­port­ing ev­i­dence for the fam­i­ly lore that we were rab­bis for gen­er­a­tions. 23andme has not been able to con­firm the oth­er fam­i­ly lore, that be­fore that we were pos­si­bly plain­ly pur­ple-lov­ing Phoeni­cian peas­ants.

My sto­ry be­gins with my first known an­ces­tor, for the hu­man part of my DNA, was Y Chro­mo­so­mal Adam. He’s the first “anatom­i­cal­ly mod­ern hu­man,” as the evo­lu­tion­ary-bi­ol­o­gists call them: the one man whom sci­ence has taught us that I’m de­scend­ed from. And all oth­er mod­ern hu­mans, too.

They say, in our fam­i­ly lore, that 1,165,000 years ago our fam­i­ly’s dis­tant an­ces­tors were rep­tiles and thus we still have some trace of rep­til­ian DNA in us. 23andme con­firmed I do have some non-hu­man Ne­an­derthal DNA in me, at least. Who knows if the rep­til­ian story–a bubbe-meise, as my grand­ma called them–is true or not. If I had to bet, I’d guess the chance that this is ac­cu­rate would be about 0.00298347%.