What strange, obscure or useless thing are you really good at?
Me, I’m really, really good at cards. Pretty well any game - bridge, uno, crazy eights, gin, gin rummy, crib, hearts, cheat, asshole, etc. You name it, I’m good at it. Everyone always wants to partner up with me because I probably win between 75 - 85% of the time.
Of course, this doesn’t extend to poker, where I could actually make some money. I suppose that’s because I don’t really have any skill in betting, gambling, faking out the other players. I’m just good at the card strategy and that part is kind of limited in poker.
Musical spoons, of course. I’ve played with a number of well-known, and not-so-well-known musicians in my day. Selected experiences include playing with the Barra MacNeils in St. Johns, Newfoundland; with John Allan Cameron in Uxbridge, Ontario; with the Irish Descendants in Lethbridge, Alberta; and with pub jam groups at Fionn McCool’s in Calgary, Alberta and at the Auld Triangle Pub in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Admittedly, in most of these cases, the band heard me playing in the audience, and invited me on stage to play with them, but I even had my own solo spot as part of a music and comedy revue in Edmonton, Alberta; and for a few years, before I left Ontario, I was always asked to play on St. Patrick’s Day at a pub in Sudbury, Ontario. Certainly, a number of Ontario musicians have heard me and asked me to play with them when I am in Ontario.
Who knew a pair of spoons from the kitchen drawer could make music and be so much fun?
I disagree somewhat. If you understand poker strategy and figure out how to calculate pot odds, the betting aspect is a lot simpler and you can make some money. Maybe not get rich, but come out ahead more times than not…
I am very good at retaining trivia. If it’s a factoid that doesn’t matter whatsoever, it will become locked into my tiny brain forever. I haven’t lost a lot at Trivial Pursuit as a consequence, unless it came down to getting a science question right (stupid information that people can actually use!)
I am awesome at making HTML tables in plain text editors.
While it is useful being that my job is to make stuff with HTML 1) There are plenty of non-plain-text editors out there to help and 2) it’s gauche to use tables anymore so while I personally design with them all the time, the designs I am given never use them.
I am thoroughly convinced that they are out of fashion because they are hard to make, not because of SEO concerns. People have an easier time positioning divs (I know!) than writing clean table HTML, so they just avoid tables altogether.
Tongue-twisters. In any language, as long as they’ve just said the tongue-twister to me. The trick is to think of the word, not the sentence, not the word following it, not anything else, just one word: She. Sells. Sea. Shells. By. The. Sea. Shore. (etc).
I’m pretty good at jury-rigging mechanical things to work. I’m an oddly good driver in that I can get you from A-to B quickly, w/o accident. Yes, I CAN both find & lose a tail. I’m an oddly good shot (better than I have any right to expect, at both long & short arms. I’m pretty good at foreseeing probable events. I’m creative in my writing and can find inspiration & ideas in, of all things, clouds. NOT ONE of these things are marketable skills in the current economy. (…Who am I Kidding? Any Economy.)
If I couldn’t make people laugh, it’d be depressing to be such a failure…
Cawing like a raven. I’m good enough at it that they’ll turn and fly towards me and talk back. The trick is a big pool of saliva in the back of your throat.
I’m pretty good at trapping feral cats. For some reason, I seem to be able to place a trap where they’ll go into it. Of course, proper smelly bait helps…
Sufficient tactile sensitivity in my fingertips to be able to locate and squish fleas on a cat without having locate them visually. A Hunter in the Dark, I was. This skill was slightly more useful before I moved to a climate which does not support the house flea lifecycle.
I suppose if I ever go blind, I should have a good chance at picking up Braille.
I can remember useless information about animals. Just about animals. Obscure variants on Maori names of rare New Zealand birds, check! Odd, or just plain facts, yep, if I hear it once, it will stick- so long as it’s about animals.
Oh, and I have an unusual level of muscle control in odd muscles- like, I can move my little toes sideways and up/down independently, I can control what look like random facial spasms, that sort of thing… Utterly useless, for everything but getting everyone else to take their shoes off.
This and this puzzle. I can do them pretty much as fast as I can move my hands. Thing is, it’s not that I can do them fast because I have them memorized, it’s that I understand how they work. I could do it even faster when I realized they both work exactly the same…even faster when I learned binary in school and figured out they basically counting in binary.
This is probably about how fast I can do the Spin Out. This is exactly how fast I can do the other one right down to having to slow down every few seconds to figure out where I am (the stupid thing is identical all the way around and it’s easy to lose your place, other then one peg that goes back and forth between each move).
On both of these puzzles, it’s really easy to get turned around and accidentally end up back where you started.
