You have much to say about Mensa in this chapter. Is it all true?
Yes. There really are numerous special interest subgroups in this High-IQ society, even a target-shooting group.There really is a Young M subgroup of twentysomething geniuses. And most ridiculously, there really is a Super High-IQ Society that requires a minimum IQ of 172 to join. They advertise every month in the national Mensa magazine.

Ira certainly is...interesting. Is he based on anyone you know?
Mercifully, no. He's a product of my troubled mind.

Is it really a myth that one of out two American marriages end in divorce? (p. 55)
The divorce rate could very well be 50%. Or even higher. No one really knows. What is known is that all of the research behind the 50% figure has been based on faulty mathematical reasoning or wide-spanning projections. Sadly, the figure has been repeated so many times, from so many different sources, that we just take it as the gospel. For more information on the divorce rate myth, check out truthorfiction.com.

Is it true what you wrote about the National Research Group and the silly way they predict Hollywood box office grosses? (p. 58)
It's true. At first, their system of polling 400 people at random was simply designed to gauge audience awareness of upcoming movies. But as Scott says, the desperate film studios soon began using those phone survey results to predict box office figures, a practice even the NRG didn't endorse.

Alas, "logic" and "Hollywood" rarely go hand-in-hand. I don't even think they're on speaking terms.

Do programs like Move My Cheese really exist?
I'd be amazed if someone wasn't developing something somewhere, but I haven't personally heard of any revolutionary breakthroughs in that field (not that I'm looking too hard). All I know is that it's extremely difficult to break the behavior of millions of individuals down into a series of mathematical formulas. But in lieu of predictive algorithms, the Hollywood Stock Exchange relies on the virtual investments of hundreds of thousands of movie lovers, and does a fairly good job gauging audience interest in upcoming films.

Why is Ira's software called Move My Cheese? I really want to know.
Sigh. There's this paper-thin book by Spencer Johnson called Who Moved My Cheese? It was a treacly, mouse-filled parable about dealing with change. By 2001, it was a best-selling phenomenon, for reasons that escape most thinking people. I can only imagine that Ira would be so incensed by the popularity of this brain-rotting soul candy that he'd name his own product after it, probably in the hopes that Spencer Johnson would sue.

Keith Ullman mentions something to Scott about "the upcoming strikes." What is he talking about?
In early 2001, there was much talk about the Writers Guild and the Actors Guild staging concurrent strikes in the summer. Performers were saving up their money and studios were hoarding scripts like it was the end of the world. Fortunately for everyone, both strikes were averted by last-minute deal-wrangling.

You take great pains to establish Scott as a clever and cautious fellow. Would he really agree to take a PR job without knowing the details?
Scott only agreed to attend a kickoff meeting. And he was intensely intrigued by the urgency and secrecy of the assignment. Plus, he trusted Keith's wife, who Scott worked side-by-side with for four years at Tate & Associates (a fictional firm, by the way).