When I asked Google how to tie a man’s tie, I had a good feeling that at the end of reading through the results, I would know with some degree of certainty how to tie a man’s tie. When learning an activity that pre-dates your interest by oh, millennia (Fun story: the very first version of a necktie was discovered, bizarrely, around the fake necks of life-sized soldier replicas buried with Chinese Emperor Shih Huang Ti. Before his burial in 210 BC, the ridiculously superstitious Huang Ti wanted to slaughter an entire army to bring to his tomb, so that he’d have some backup when he met Death. Luckily for the horrified army of choice, his advisors eventually talked him down to the soldier replicas instead.), it seems safe to assume that there will be a wealth of practical information out there. Through trial and error, the art of the tie was perfected and as a result, I learned in minutes.

But what happens when our questions concern a topic that, while still concerning something from long ago, is still up for debate? I figure that if you’re going to go controversial, it’s best to go big.  Birth-of-Jesus big. A quick disclaimer: my question is clearly based on the assumption that Jesus was born. This is not meant to support or decry any religious beliefs, but instead is meant to convey how we ask questions and seek to answer them. More often than not, when we set out to find the answer to a specific question, we go in with certain assumptions about an overarching topic. For example, a person asking “When was the first moon landing” goes in to their search assuming that a moon landing actually occurred, despite the often loud heckling from anti-NASA conspiracy theorists. With that said, time to Google – When was Jesus born?

My top listing was from Wiki-answers, an online question/answer forum where users can submit any old question into the ether and other users can respond. By definition, Wiki-related questions can be posed, answered, or edited by anyone. How can this be trusted as a valid source? Sure, a top Religious Studies professor at Yale could be on the other end…but so could my frat house neighbors who seem to think that horseshoes is a game that requires “shirts and skins” style teams. Yet we consistently rely on these sources to give us well researched and accurate information. Against all odds, the information is often not bad, albeit a bit all over the place. To impose some sort of order to this chaos, Wiki sites are often monitored so that the most popular and prevalent answers are displayed at the top of the page.  Of the dozens of anonymous contributors that took a stab at my question, this was chosen as the top cheese:

“Jesus was born on or before 4BCE, because Herod died 4BCE. Jesus was born on or before 6CE because Cyrenius became governor of Syria in 6CE. In other words, nobody knows.”

So what do we think happened here? Did someone attempt a worthy, Biblically-based answer to this question and then give up? “Herod was…but if you take Cyrenius…and carry the Wise Men…to the second power of Judas… the hell with it, nobody knows!” More likely, the Biblical math got crazy and this particular person decided that the real answer was no answer. Why you would post a non-answer on Wiki’s “Answers.com” is beyond my comprehension. It would be like looking in a book about the beginning stages of evolution and, instead of finding Darwin’s theory, seeing a page that said “All life is composed of atoms, including humans and bananas. Monkeys eat bananas, and my Uncle Filbert looks like a Monkey. In other words, nobody knows.” Just as you get interested, the investigation abruptly ends with mystery. I enjoy the unknown. Just not on Answers.com.

While this initial response is indeed disappointing, the contributor responses that follow are not. The array of dates (both general and specific) served up for consideration is staggering: December 25th, April 6th, 2BC, 4BC, 7BC, AD1, somewhere between 4BC to 4AD…the list goes on. One very confident man claims that Jesus was born on September 29, 5BC. Now why didn’t the website lead off with this answer? Maybe only a crazy person would suggest something so specific. And we don’t want crazy at the top.

Reading all of these contradicting answers, many posted without any research or scholarly investigation, is making my eyes glaze over. I’m not sure what information to trust in this forum. If someone pure of heart comes here looking for answers, they’ll be knocked in the face with a pattern of guesstimates that offer very little in the way of cohesion. I find myself trying to scan the webpage quickly and somehow form a definite answer from this jumble. According to this site, Jesus was probably, maybe, sort of born between 6 and 4BC.  Rather than feel interested or in any way enlightened, I find that this informational overload is more tiring than anything else. At least in a Biblical history book I would’ve had a linear argument to follow. Here, information jumps from one theory to the next so quickly that I don’t even have the time or energy to process the words or feel smarter. Next site.

I assumed that some church or religious affiliate would pop up near the top of the search results list and here I find myself satisfied – the 2nd result is The Church of the Great God website. I am suddenly picturing God in a Thor costume. Clicking the link leads me to an article by John O. Reid. While the article opens with some cutesy narrative about Christmas and commercialism, the first thing I notice is the bold subheading halfway down the page – “The Clues in Luke’s Gospel.” John you little sleuth, you! Channeling Sherlock, John points to events recorded by Luke which, when added together and analyzed, lead to a final birth date of September 16-29th, 4BC. His full exegesis supports the end date, but no need for me to ramble on about that here. It has a lot to do with calculating births and when certain rulers ruled. Instead let’s concentrate on the way Reid chose to end his article:

“The Christmas season promotes a lie concerning the date of the birth of Jesus Christ. We need to do more than reject the world’s explanation; we need to know, prove and follow what is true.”

It appears that that the cutesy opening paragraph about Christmas and commercialism wasn’t so cutesy after all. This article isn’t merely meant to provide a framework for finding out when Jesus was born…it’s meant to condemn the Christmas holiday, on both religious and secular levels. The bulk of this criticism is easily refuted, since December 25th was chosen as the day to celebrate the birth of Jesus not to throw an accurate birthday party, but because the date was already on everybody’s calendar as a pagan holiday celebrating the sun. Sun, “Son,” tomato, tomahto – the church took over the day and a new festival was born. Come now John, the early church can’t help it if, centuries later, people got a little confused and started making manger scenes in the snow.

Or starting singing songs proclaiming that Jesus was born on Christmas, like that little-known songstress Mariah Carey. While a variety of Christmas carols mention the birth of Jesus in connection with the December holiday, Mariah Carey’s rendition of “Jesus Born On This Day” appeared numerous times in my results pages. I forgot that a Google search is a popularity contest – the results are often based on how many hits a particular website (or in this case, voluptuous celebrity) receives. If anyone, the original song writer should be reprimanded for spreading false information, but his or her name is nowhere to be seen. This being the case, the Ultimate Smackdown features Reid v. Carey. Hopefully, the man likes hitting his high notes.

While other Christmas related sites (both Christian and musical by nature) litter the top of the list, there are some theories about the birth date of Jesus that fall outside the norm. One Digital Journal article boasts that Jesus was born in June – and a group of astronomers can prove it. Australian astronomer Dave Reneke and his star-struck cohorts did the math and found that a “bright sky phenomenon” caused by the close proximity of the planet Venus to the planet Jupiter occurred around 2BC, creating a “beacon of light” in the sky. According to some very techy computer program, this high beam in the sky appeared in the constellation Leo on June 17, 2BC. The astronomers posit that this light was none other than the guiding star that led the Wise Men to the manger. (For a coloring book style print out of this phenomenon try http://www.supercoloring.com/pages/jesus-born/, search result #181).

On a much less scientific note, one question forum contributor named Gina claims that Jesus was born just before October. Why? Because she once heard Drew Carey tell a joke about October being the month when the shepherds stop abiding in the fields with their sheep (the actual punch line is left to our imaginations). We all know that if Drew Carey says it, it must be true. Or the price must be right. A little more clicking around the forum revealed that this theory is actually valid – one very wordy and seemingly learned poster claimed that “as shepherds had not yet brought home their flocks” when Jesus was born “it is a presumptive argument that October had not yet commenced.” Well what do you know?

Apparently, I still “know” very little – I’m starting to think that the initial “nobody knows” answer was, in fact, the most accurate. I’ve started to rifle through the results pages and in doing so, am falling victim to the rabbit-hole phenomenon that occurs when searching for anything on the web. Since Google gives you an intriguing one to two sentences from each result page, it is easy to get distracted. Like when you read that Jesus was born in a cave! At least, according to ArcaMax Publishing:

“Jesus Christ, son of Mary, was born in a cave, not in a wooden stable. Caves were used to keep animals in because of the intense heat. A large church is now built over the cave, and people can go down inside the cave. The carpenters of Jesus’ day were really stone cutters. Wood was not used as widely as it is today. So whenever you see a Christmas nativity scene with a wooden stable — that’s the “American” version, not the Biblical one.”

I know that we Americans have a way of making things our own (like the once brilliant plots of French and Japanese films – for shame), but I always thought that the stable/manger thing was pretty solid. Not according to the early church and Constantine the Great. In 330 CE, Constantine built the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to honor the birthplace of Jesus – a cave located directly beneath the church, “right under the high altar by a hole in the 14 point star.” In support of this theory, many Byzantine and Renaissance paintings depicting the birth of Jesus include a cave-like structure – like (thank you Google Images) Nativity by Lorenzo Monaco (1413) http://www.vakras.com/pythia-and-sfinx-pics/jesus-caveItalian009.jpg and this beautiful mosaic found in the Palentine Chapel in Palermo (12^th century) http://www.vakras.com/pythia-and-sfinx-pics/jesus-cave-talian-work.jpg. The mosaic takes the notion of the cave further, positioning the birth of Jesus inside the earth, in what the Greeks called “the polar void” – I imagine that it was quite cold. I wonder what the polar void was in Greek mythology…I wonder where the concept of the word “void” as we know it originated…I wonder if a void can ever, by definition, be truly filled…

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It turns out that many, many questions stem from a single query typed into Google. And I just asked about 326 of them. That’s right – asked, past tense. It seemed like a good idea at the time, to click my way from one topic to the next. But now I find myself 3 hours from when I started this blog entry looking up recipes and wondering where the hell to buy grape leaves. Google, you tricky bastard. What was my question again? Something to do with a birthday?

The necktie has long been a symbol of what I’ll call “formal masculinity.” Are you a man who wants to make the sale, woo the ladies, and, most of all, stay classy? If you answered with a baritone “Yes,” then the necktie is surely your most trusted ally. The google search only supports this symbolism. One website assures readers that learning to tie a necktie will make you “a better man in 30 days!” Another top-listed website goes so far as to claim that learning to tie a necktie is a pre-requisite to “reviving the lost art of manliness.”  This particular website, aptly named “artofmanliness.com,” seems to equate manliness with being a gentleman. While this is a welcome association, I can’t say that it seems entirely accurate when pitted against our current cultural stereotypes. Maybe it’s just me, but when I think “manliness,” I think of a muscular, “I wear my musk like a pricey cologne” man who can outrun a panther and survive for 60 days in the wilderness with nothing but a pocketknife and his uncanny tracking skills. In this stereotypical scenario, men wear steel-toed boots, not neckties.

That is, unless manliness correlates with monetary power and influence. Throughout recent history, we’ve lived in a world bought, sold, and dominated by the cast of Mad Men. While my jungle man certainly conforms to one version of stereotypical strength and virility, the necktie and all who wear it are this nation’s (and really, many nations’) utmost symbol of power. There’s a reason that you never see the president wearing KISS tee shirts – the suit and tie combo go hand in hand with his status as a world leader.

Consequently, the necktie is kind of a big deal. We live in a world where success often depends upon presentation, and being able to properly tie a tie (if you’re a man) is vital. I purposely worded my search using “man’s tie” to keep hair ties and shoe laces off of my results page. However, I was still surprised to find that in the first 10 pages of results, only one website referred to women tying ties –  and it was definitely sending mixed signals. I expected to find some article about equality and instead saw photos of women wearing nothing but a man’s dress shirt and an admittedly well tied necktie. Then, as if to defend the photos as legitimate, the article ended with:

“If you are headed for a power-meeting with one of those groups of boring and dull investment bankers or lawyers, increase your power-factor by dressing like them. Just close all your buttons like men do and walk into any conference room with confidence.”

Apparently, this technique is only recommended when encountering boring men. I don’t want to know what she recommends if, against all odds, the men are interesting. The website’s overall message? If you’re a woman, neckties are for both business and pleasure. Not a bad deal once you go to some “be a man” site and learn how to tie one.

Now I thought that since all ties look the same to me, there must be one basic way to tie a necktie. Not so, friends. There are so many knots that, out of context, you would think that I was searching for instructions on how to sail. You have your basic Windsor knot, the half-Windsor knot, the Four in Hand knot (um, what?), The Shelby knot (which is actually named for news anchor Don Shelby, who must’ve been pretty hot stuff back in the 70s), The Pratt knot…the mind boggles. As if that isn’t enough, one search result brought me to a book titled The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie: The Science and Aesthetics of Tie Knots. Authors Thomas Fink and Yong Mao, both physicists who clearly had some down time, contend that mathematically, there are 85 ways to tie a tie. They go on to prove this by showing you all 85 variations using the overly simplistic sounding “knot theory.” I am officially terrified. And wondering how the world of physics has reached this point. Did someone come into the lab with a crooked tie one day…and then things got crazy?

Honestly, even the “everyday” tie knot list seems overwhelming – which knot is the “normal” knot? The instructions for each knot are several steps long and often include a visual of some random man performing each step. Am I supposed to mimic him somehow, tying the tie on someone else’s neck, or am I meant to follow the directions while putting the tie on my own neck? Just when I considered forgetting this whole thing out of semi-laziness, I read an encouraging note from Casper Isemer, tie-extraordinnaire:

“Starting out, tying ties may seem like rocket science to you. It certainly did to me. But you know, remember the first time you were tying your shoelaces or riding a bike? That, too, seemed like the biggest challenge until that one moment when it finally “clicked”. So, heads up!”

Poor, befuddled Casper. As I do not even equate the difficulty of tying a tie to a medium-level multiplication problem, this little note was confidence boosting. Time to get classy.

After searching my husband’s closet for what I consider the ugliest and therefore most expendable tie, I started with the Four in Hand knot (also called the “schoolboy” knot), since every website said it would be the easiest. The Art of Manliness site hooked me in with their witty article titles (such as “The James Bond Shower: a Shot of Cold Water for Health and Vitality”), so I decided to follow their instructional video. Complete success.  My tie looked exactly like the video. Clearly, this meant that I would have no problems with the other knots.

Except that I did. When I moved on to the Half-Windsor – this time only following the written instructions – I ended up with a knot that looked like a pentagon. While this might be the start of something new in terms of men’s fashion, it lacked the style and charisma of the triangular knot that I was promised. Back to the instructional video. Happily, after two minutes, I had a perfectly tied Half-Windsor. Kudos to my well-mannered instructor. The Half-Windsor certainly seems preferable to the now somewhat childish looking Four in Hand. Leave that to the school boys. With the Half-Windsor, I feel powerful and ready to meet with clients. Or have a cocktail.

For the full Windsor knot, I decided to try www.tieanecktie.com, which shows you step by step diagrams along with instructions. The result of following said instructions was a lopsided knot that I could not untie. I am literally sitting with the tie still around my neck as I write this, wondering why the hell I even went for the full Windsor when the half Windsor felt so right. Apparently, while not comparable to rocket science, the necktie requires finesse and in my case, step by step video instruction.

It occurs to me that while learning how to tie a tie, Google prevailed in a way that a normal book could not. Looking at pictures that walked me through the tying process was not enough for me to fully grasp the concept. When attempting to learn a process that is normally visual by nature (tying your own tie, cooking a pot roast, assembling certain devious pieces of IKEA furniture), video instruction trumps all. Not only does it provide active rather than static assistance, but it reminds you that hey, you’re not alone in doing what you’re doing. You have to love that kind of instant comradery: “Tying a tie, friend? What do you know… me too! Let’s do this together!” Even if you fail at first, there’s nothing to fear. Right in front of you there is proof that you can succeed, which is all you really need to undo your pentagon-shaped knot and try again. Add to that the fact that watching someone perform a task while following along helps you to remember the process (once more through the Half-Windsor video and I had it down pat), and you’ve got a solid case for the internet as a worthy contender against traditional sources.

Though the entire process, despite the video, did seem somewhat distant. My husband learned to tie a necktie (using what he calls a Double Windsor, though in practice this is the same as the Windsor that tied me in knots) from his father and grandfather. His grandfather owned a men’s clothing store, so a properly tied necktie wasn’t a mandatory lesson in manhood, but rather an art form passed down from generation to generation. While I might’ve learned to tie a Half-Windsor in 2 minutes, my husband has this nice little story of  connection and familial bonding. I didn’t even know my tie guy’s name. I feel so…cheated.

But hot damn – for a girl in a tie, I look good.

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Dying to know what I know? Here are those fab instructional videos: http://artofmanliness.com/2009/06/05/how-to-tie-a-tie/

Fast forward to one week ago. I was watching the third season of Dexter and the neighborhood vigilante was putting on a tie for his wedding. He recited some little story about a rabbit hoping around a log and poof! Tied. No one ever taught me how to tie a man’s tie (apparently my mother trusted me to marry a man who could handle this himself), so I turned to my husband and said “I’ll have to Google that!” In my house, this is a common phrase. Rather than sit in wonder about something and then go to the library to research, I simply type entire questions into Google and wait for the all-knowing search engine to respond. This is what has become of my own personal quest for knowledge. Learning how to tie a tie may seem somewhat mundane and unimportant, but what about the days when I type “What was Issac Newton like?” or “Who won World War I?” These questions are not only far more general, but they are also open to interpretation. When our pre-internet researchers would read books to answer questions that plagued them, they would be answered by a handful of authors, at most. When I ask Google’s opinion, I get an often unending array of replies…some more logical than others.

We tech-savvy internet users like to believe that information is at our fingertips, that knowledge is not something we earn but instead, something that we summon and dismiss in the time it takes to type “If Billy Joel didn’t start the fire, then who did?” But does Google really answer our questions accurately? Has all of our progress actually brought us closer to true knowledge? Let’s find out. Every few days, I’ll post a new question typed into Google and a summary of what I’ve learned. Then I’ll see how this information stacks up to what I already know, what I’ve experienced, and what old-fashioned books can convey. Consider it an experiment in learning, 21st century style.

Google, teach me how to tie a man’s tie.