The lines for each of Shakespeares 37 plays in their entirety. It started with Hamlet and then became a passion.
In my early 20s, enchanted with the metric system and annoyed with the non-metric time system of hours and minutes and seconds (not to mention AM and PM), I created my own metric time system (unaware of any already in existence), dividing the 24 hour day into 1000 millidays. I then charted the equivalent of every milliday in hours:minutes:seconds.tenths, and inversely the equivalent in millidays.decimals of every second.
Every ten millidays is a centiday, of course, and a centiday is 14 minutes 24 seconds long. I memorized the hours/minutes/seconds equivalent of every centiday in the day so that I could glance at a regular clock and quickly calculate the time in centidays (and estimate the millidays based on loose approximation of a minute and a half per milliday).
And I suppose you people were going to parties and stuff instead!
Well, maybe not so significant as some other dopers, but in the tabletop game Warhammer 40,000 I’ve memorized the statistics for several armies that I play. So in the event that I am missing the codex for that army, or even the rulebook, I could wing it without any problem.
So you say your Space Marine is firing his plasma rifle at my Talos? Well then, you’d need to roll a 3+ on a D6 to hit me, and a 4+ to cause a wound. Since the plasma rifle has an armor piercing value of 2, I can’t make my armor saves.
350 digits of pi…guess I was more bored then the rest of you. Today I can still rattle off the first 150 without blinking, though the rest I’d have to refresh my memory. Some others:
All 50 states and capitals, and all world countries (c. 2000) thanks to those two Animaniacs songs.
e^1 up to 36 digits.
Every constant covered in my college physics course up to 8 decimal places.
Entire Greek alphabet (another dull day in high school)
Hmmm…guess I have a knack for numbers.
“Jabberwocky”
Also a rant by Malvolio, from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
That’s about it.
…Whan smale fowles maken melodye
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages,
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seke straunge strondes
And ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes,
And specialy from every shires ende
Of Engelonde, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
Bifel that in that seson on a day
In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay,
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage…and this is where it starts breaking up…
Oh, and I know forty or so lines from the Miller’s Tale (the climactic scene, for those of you who know it), which I memorized for a presentation as an undergrad. I think I still know it…
And tons and tons of Shakespeare, though no entire plays. (Though I can rattle off long stretches from Richard II – deposition scene, anyone?) Not to mention lots of Gilbert and Sullivan songs, of course…
Oddly enough, I wrote my MA thesis on Volpone and yet have almost none of it committed to memory.
I’ve never learned to read music, so any time I’ve been involved with a show, chorus, choir, etc. I’ve had to listen to all of my songs and memorize them by ear. The most I ever had to do was back in 1990 when I was working with a musical dinner theater group. We would have one show playing and two others in rehearsal at any one time. We did “light” versions of things like South Pacific, Oklahoma, Grease and stuff like that.
I had a couple of leading roles and, like most of the rest of the troupe, spent a lot of time as understudy, in the chorus, etc.
During the middle of that season, I had roughly 100 songs fully memorized and ready to belt out at a moment’s notice.
Nowadays, I memorize FCC rules and regs, tower structural specs and transmitter power calibration parameters.
sigh - my old life was way more fun 
Having acted quite a bit I have memorized chunks of or whole plays. I can actually recite evetyone’s lines rom act 2 scene 1 of The Tempest not only accuratly, but in the same way the actors I did it with said the lines. When you go over one scene as much as we did that one, it gets to the point where anyone can play anyone else’s part.
Song lyrics tend to snake their way into my memory. After hearing a new song a few times I know it. Drove my folks crazy as a kid, singing songs from their era and mine
Languages also tend to stick in my head. I’d love to be fluent in as many languages as I could, but only know bits-n-bobs of Russian, French, Japanese, and Romani. Spanish is the only language of fluency.
Done a couple plays in my younger days. Nothing Earth-shatteringly important, though. Played Roo in 3rd grade and Santa in 6th grade. Santa was responsible for over an hour of dialogue. Loved it!
Have memorised Beauty and the Beast - movie and all its songs. Know about 95% or so of Dances With Wolves, including Sioux.
Nothing important. Just stuff…
I, too, have memorized the entire “Monty Python and the holy grail”.
I also have unitentionally memorized all the dialogue in “The Empire strikes back”. Drives my friends crazy when I talk along with the movie.
I hope you can help with with a very short one which includes the line “Hourly, I cry…”
??
tia
Aha! Another Robert W. Service fan. I memorized McGee, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, “A bunch of the boys were whooping in up in the Malamute Saloon, …” and The Ballad of the Ice Worm Cocktail, “To Dawson town came Percy Brown from London on the Thames, A pane of glass was in his eye and stockings on his stems, …”
Last spring I was in a musical called the Scarlet Pimpernel in addition to being in two competing choirs. For Pimpernel, there were about 24 songs, many of which had six separate harmony parts. I had managed to memorize every part for every song by opening night in addition to all four harmony parts for at least six or seven songs for the choirs. There’s a reason why I wasn’t on top of all the lyrics to the songs that were coming out during the ten weeks of production… but I managed to get the songs I had to know stuck in my non-performing boyfriend’s head. He didn’t mind all that much, though. He became a Pimpernel fanatic after seeing the show on closing night.
I have a tendency to memorize the layout of a room or a place I’ve only been to once or twice most of the time. It’s kind of weird when people ask me how I’d gotten there and I tell them I’ve only been in the area once before. I just have a natural ability to mentally map out places I guess. ::shrugs shoulders::
My greatest achievements are probably my 12 general orders (and Code of Conduct), all of the presidents in order (which I had to learn in 8th grade), and my 52 digit numerical password.
I have trouble memorizing anything other than misc. scraps of information.
My daughter, on the other hand has an incredible memory.
She recently memorized 50+ birthday cards that she found in a box at her Grandmother’s house one night while staying there. Word for word and some of them had a paragraph or more. Weeks later she can still recall them. She does the same thing with some of her books.
One night at dinner she sat at the table and memorized the name and order of everybook in the bible while eating.
…And she is only 6 years old. Disgusting :-).
You’ve just added a whole new level of complexity to Spike Jones’ Liebestraum for me with that one. Thanks, David.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Now that’s a tough one.
Up until about ten years ago I had a phonographic memory. If you said something to me, or in front of me, I could repeat it back to you verbatim anytime in the next few years. Really interesting things, I would remember for decades.
I got hit in the head pretty hard, twice, about ten years ago, and now I can’t do it worth a damn. It really pisses me off, too. You have no idea how easy it is to intimidate officious assholes by quoting their exact words to them after the fact.
In high school I memorized a thousand lines of poetry. I can still remember a lot of that. But I can’t remember the multiplication table to a hundred, or the primes to a thousand, which I once knew.
When I went to school, everyone had to memorize the states and capitals, so it was no big deal. I wish there had been Anamaniacs when I was in eighth grade. Man, that would have blown Mrs. Dalrymple away!
Tris
Now days, I can’t even remember where I put the ginko biloba.
I could memorize every Playboy Playmate back to the year 1976, her height, where she came from, who became Playmate of the Year, who appeared on Star Search as spokesmodel, what television show or movie they appeared in. Who had died etc etc etc…