As mentioned in another thread I recently utilized my work day drive time to memorize the Presidents of the U. S. in order. I can now recite them like I recite the alphabet.
Then I considered what else is worth memorizing. I settled on Oscar Best Picture winners and so far have the years 1950-present down pat.
I should mention that I play weekly bar trivia so some of this will inevitably come in handy.
I expect it will take me another 2-4 weeks to be comfortable with the Oscars list. What should I go to next?
What knowledge, trivial or vital, have you memorized?
mmm
The colors of a rainbow in order.
Or to be more precise, the optical spectrum of colors in visible light as determined by Sir Isaac Newton. In order, they are:
Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Indigo
Violet
I learned it as Roy G Biv. when I took SCUBA lessons many, many years ago. (1989)
Starting with red, it’s the order that the colors will seem to disappear as you descend in sea water. IIRC, blood will appear bright green, at a depth of ~ 30’!
As a collector of books, I memorized how many big publishing houses denoted their First Editions and also the famous points of collectible books - e.g., Steinbeck’s Cannery Row’s First was bound in a buff cloth until they ran out and switched to yellow - so the buff ones have more value.
As a guitar geek, I wouldn’t want to guess the trivially useless crap I have up in my brain. Makes, models, production runs, feature changes, components used, etc. knowing who Tadeo Gomez and Abigail Ybarra are in Fender Land* is just silly, but there you go.
*Gomez did the final checks on Fender necks in the 50’s; he signed and dated them in pencil. Ybarra wound Fender pickups from the 50’s until recently - she got so culty-famous that in her last years, Ybarra-wound pickups were a Custom Shop option :rolleyes:
I have memorized the alphabet backwards while bored in class in high school. That’s even more useless than the presidents or Oscar trivia or all the states.
When I was a sorority pledge, we had to say the Greek alphabet three times on a match.
(This would now be considered hazing, as would many of the things we had to do, but I had a hell of a lot of fun, and I was never asked to do anything that made me feel uncomfortable or unsafe.)
My pledge sisters and I coached each other until we were all able to do it, and some of us got up to nine or 10 times on a match. As a consequence, I have the Greek alphabet burned into my brain.
What does “on a match” mean? When I was taking ancient Greek, I learned the alphabet, and, well, it’s an alphabet. Once you know it, you can say it as many times as you like.
That can be really useful if you like to drink and drive. Saying the alphabet backwards is a sobriety test cop sometimes use. Hardly anyone ever gets it right even stone sober so that skill just might be the edge you need someday.
I know the generic and brand names of a lot of drugs, especially psychoactive ones, even though I have never done illegal drugs myself. I also know the full names of the active ingredients in many drugs. Lots of people can tell you the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana is THC for example. Not many people can tell you what that stands for off the top of their head like I can however.
I would assume that blood has other pigments than red in it. Normally the red pigments greatly overpower the other colors and that’s all you see. When there is an absence of red light however the other pigments would become visible. That’s my WAG anyways XD.
In junior high I had to learn that stupid song “Fifty Nifty United States” Dumb song, but part of the lyrics are the fifty states in alphabetical order. I still have them memorized and it comes in handy sometimes.
I can do the kings and queens things, and also name their spouses. For an American this is truly useless.
Are you a baseball fan? How about all of the World Series winners, beginning with the 1903 World Series? Or all of the Super Bowl winners or Stanley Cup winners.
