Most of Strong Bad’s e-mails, and the entire dialogue to “The Interview” However, I can’t seem to remember to do my Bio homework 
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Topaz, my friend Eric would love you for memorizing most of Strong Bad’s emails. 
As for me:
certain people’s old student numbers from high school. (Adrienne Lane’s was 10119, mine was 10252, Jeff Nelson’s was 90210…)
an ex-friend’s name and address (probably because I remember things better if I write them down a few times, but I wish this information would scrub itself from my head)
some friends’ old phone numbers (I even dialed Minli’s old number early last week, and it’s been TWO YEARS since she’s moved from there!)
going with the video game theme: if someone is playing a one-player game in Mega Man for the NES, and you “play along” on the other controller… the player can jump higher and do all kinds of things faster than normal (my brother and I found this out quite by accident… he was playing, I was kinda playing along… heh)
I’m sure there’s lots of other stuff, but I can’t think of it right now.
F_X
You asked for it:
“These are the amazing Lee Press On Nails; they press on in seconds. No glue, no mess! Simply press on Lee Super-stick Tabs, then press on Lee Press On Nails. That’s all! Easy on, easy off; they just won’t break or split! Polish, and they’re nearly impossible to chip. So press on! Lee Press On Nails!”
Nearly 20 years and that damn commercial still haunts my mind.
Me too. Sang it in all state choir last year.
Also, the four-page piece of french horn music, that I only played once. Roughly 10 minutes of playing translated from the page to playing time.
“There was a man who lived in Leeds,
Who filled his garden full of seeds,
And when the seeds began to grow
It was like a garden filled with snow,
And when the snow began to melt
It was like a ship without a belt,
And when the ship began to sail. . .”
Some people say that poem means nothing. Others are not so sure. . .
sum es est sumus estus sunt
I do not now, nor ever have, taken Latin.
wendyrules, I don’t find ROY G BIV to be useless, as I arrange the clothes in my closet in the order of the rainbow. Actually white, pink, ROYGBIV, brown, grey, black.
I also know some poems and more song lyrics than you can shake a stick at, even of songs I despise. I’m really good with lyrics. Also, I remember some acting warm-up exercises from 10th grade (11 benevolent elephants met Lily and Lucy in Philadelphia and went to see “Camelot” in unique New York, with guns and drums and drums and guns which they kept in a bodega bodega bodega…)
In general, I find most stuff I memorize not to be completely useless, as it sometimes impresses people. Strangely enough, I know there are more useless things, but ironically I cannot remember them.
Ich nicht bin ein bloomevase.
I am not a flower vase.
Il piato es su la tabulata.
The plate is under the table.
Vot nye maya dom; vot dom moi brat.
This is not my house; it is my brother’s house.
Enpitsu nga nain des; anata no o kudasai?
I do not have a pencil; may I borrow yours, please?
[sub]Non-English languages spelled phonetically[/sub]
Ligaments connect muscle to muscle. (like)
Tendons connect muscle to bone.
You want useless?
CAUTION: Basket will stop spinning after lid is raised. Do not remove or add clothes until basket stops.
This was on the door of our washing machine growing up. It was in the bathroom so I saw it quite often.
That was a good twenty-five years ago.
I’m just a first year Italian student, but “Il piatto è su la tabella” means "The plate is on the table.
Also, I’m not fluent in German, but I think the correct grammatical structure of the first sentence is “Ich bin ein Blumevase nicht” or “Ich bin nicht ein Blumevase.”
More useless tedium:
The address of the house I lived in until I was 7
all my teachers from preschool on, and my schedule from almost every semester since 6th grade
Shel Silverstein’s The Perfect High ~or~ The Quest Of Gimmesome Roy.
Thanks, Lisa-go-Blind, that German Gramatical Gaffe was bothering me…
Distal and proximal insertions for all skeletal muscles.
In med school there’s a mnemonic for memorizing the wrist bones that goes something like: Never Lower Tillie’s Pants, Father Might Come Home,
Hmm. But then I googled on wrist bones, and besides the radius and ulna, there’s the navicular lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, greater multangular, multangular cuniform and hammate.
So, I must have scrambled the mnemonic.
Quadratic equation
Number of games in MLB, NFL, and NHL seasons
This one password that someone had for a shell account I gave him. I use it for a bunch of stuff to this day, which means he could probably own a significant portion of my world if he wanted to and ran into some of my online accounts and such.
I can rattle off tons of useless hockey trivia and drug information.
ROYGBIV.
SOHCAHTOA (sine = opposite/adjacent, cosine = adjacent/hypotenuse, tangent = opposite/adjacent). This is apparently a math trick they teach children in California, because when I got here (from Maryland) I was the only kid who didn’t know it by heart.
I could probably name all MLB, NFL and NBA cities, team names, and at least one current player from each team if I tried.
My Biology teacher, btw, taught us a more “interesting” mnemonic for “Kingdom, Phyllum, Genus…”. It was something about King Phillip chasing young Girl Scouts. Don’t remember the whole thing, though.
That T, G, A and C are the different codes. My Biology teacher tried to teach us that by telling us that his father taught AT Grossmont College. I remembered T&A (yes, in that way). Although apparently I remembered the Grossmont College thing, too, I guess.
The Scout Law (a scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent).
Most of the Scout Oath (on my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight; to help other people at all times…forgot the rest.)
The easy part of Smoke on the Water, on guitar: 0 3 5 0 4 65 0 3 5 43 00
The entire keyboard layouts for both QWERTY and Dvorak. I stopped using Dvorak for almost a year and then started again and remembered every single key (more of a muscle memory thing–I couldn’t tell you what the actual order is).
My best friend once memorized the colors of each scrunchie worn by all the players on the 1999 United States women’s national soccer team that won the World Cup. Same friend has several Britney Spears and N’Sync dances memorized.
The Nightmare Song, from Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe (it’s probably the longest and most difficult of their patter songs - great for enunciation practice).
The lyrics to Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner.”
The Greek alphabet.
The numbers from 1-100 in Welsh.
Much more useless than the mnemonic itself, I remember my Bio teacher’s face when she revealed the furitive “domain” category of classification and made up, on the spot,
Dirty King Phillip Came Over For Good Sex
There were rumors, at one part, that she was dealing pot in the bathroom.
I remember the way she threatened to kill me (as a memory excercise) on the first day of class (she’d had me two years ago and knew I’d laugh, though). (Machine Gun)
I remember the way she threatened to kill me when the girl sitting in exactly the middle of the room (who I never knew the name of in the first place) asked for something that would help her remember the Krebs Cycle. (Beat me with a desk)
I remember the way she threatened to kill me when I snickered at the mention of nictitating membranes. (Put a plastic bag over my head)
I remember her writing me letter of recommendation that refused to burn, no matter what I did to it.
How I loved that woman.
The highest points on each of the continents.
The first paragraph of the constitution in 8th grade
The presidents, their times in office, their birthplace, and major events in their time in office. My entire 5th grade class had to memorize it, then they ditched the program the next year. Go figure
My high school locker combination was 4-17-12. I don’t know why we kept the same locker for four years, but we did, and that was the number. My high school still stands and still has the same numbers, and I’d bet anything that locker B-192 could still be opened with that combo.
Not as cool as Buffy or X-Files, but I can identify Law & Order episodes within 15 seconds, usually much sooner. This isn’t entirely useless, as it allows me to determine rather quickly if the TNT rerun is worth watching, but it’s not a marketable skill.
I know every lyric to every song represented by an mp3 on my system. According to iTunes, my library is composed of 2,912 songs, probably 2,700 of them have lyrics. I don’t know that I know them, if you asked I wouldn’t necessarily be able to identify each song by its lyrics or tell you the lyrics to each song if requested by title, but as they play, I can sing along without missing a word. Unless someone decides at this late stage in my life to make me a singing star who sings a lot of covers, this is a fairly meaningless appropriation of memory and brain power. (Especially those two Celine Dion songs. :p)
The Lord’s Prayer (Our Father) in Spanish, French and Italian. I speak none of these languages with anything approaching fluency, Spanish is the closest but I’m not nearly as gifted with the language as my casual ability to recite that prayer would indicate. It’s not useless, per se, as much as confusing to me why this remains lodged in my brain after many years without any formal language instruction.
The formal name for the Southern Catalpa tree is Catalpa bignoniodes, the American Holly is ilex opaca and the common flowering Dogwood is cornus florida. These are the last lingering scraps of freshman Botany.
As has been noted, it was Middle English, but that goes for me too. It’s been nearly 30 :eek: years, but it’s still lodged in my gray matter. Ech, I got a shiver just thinking about it.
Antiochus, your bones of the wrist mnemonic was the subject of a memorable scene in an episode of ER. John Carter knew your Tillie’s pants tool, Anna DelAmico knew another tool which was completely different and it came down to Carter knowing the names of the bones as would correspond to Tillie’s pants and Anna knowing the names which you listed. Apparently the names were changed and which names a doctor might know and use depend largely on where they went to school and/or who taught them basic anatomy. Weird.