Sports. (I’m a guy with a brain, thanks. No way to convince me golfers need “strategy”.)
You don’t want to know. It’s as if the loser sports dweebs decided that they weren’t quite nerdy enough, so they invented a way to become as geeky as humanly possible while discussing sports.
I’d put fantasy sports conversations at the top of the list. This is notable because I’m a big fan of fantasy football. Too big a fan. I desperately try not to talk about it, but sometimes I just can’t help it. It truly is a shameful compulsion.
Seriously, when I find myself talking about my fantasy team or league with anybody who is not actually a member of said league, I feel like the Mayor of Losertown, and inside my head my brain is screaming at my tongue to SHUT THE FUCK UP, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!
sigh
A very close second for me would be fashion. Dear god please let me never hear the word “strappy” ever again for the rest of my life. Or capris, tankini, Ugg, or any of that crap. I can feel my brain cells commiting mass suicide…it’s as if an intelligence vaccuum is sucking the smart right out of me whenever people start talking about clothes, shoes, hair, makeup, accessories, or jewelry.
Now, I don’t like sports talk myself, but you’re wrong here. Of course golfers need strategy. It’s sort of like a big game of pool…you have to hit it right, to get it into the hole in the least amount of time.
Besides, one thing I’ve learned about sports - all sports can be fun if you’re with a bunch of people who don’t take it too seriously and are just there to have a good time. 
It’s the die-hards that are to be avoided!
Now I’m really curious. Wait… is it something like this: Each participant picks a number of sportsmen and then they get points based on how well those people do in a cup or league or a tournament, and the participant with the most point wins? Kinda like a slightly less morbid Celebrity Death Pool?
Yes, exactly. You do a fantasy draft, where each person gets to pick one player at a time, in order, until everyone’s rosters are filled up. (Usually a dozen players or less to fill a roster.) Then you get arbitrary point values for when the guys on your roster do stuff. You can also trade players with each other, sign undrafted guys, etc…
It’s geektastic!
Ladies and Gentlemen, you have not danced with the devil in the pale moonlight until you have sat through the pure evil that is a table full of scrapbookers and talking about how many pages they got done on their weekend away 'scraping and how many pages they are behind to get caught up (while in the same breath talk about the book they are starting for the grandma or something.)
It.is.a.farking.cult.lemmetellyou.
When the Scrapbooking Convo comes out, I scramble my mental fighter planes, grab my knitting needles and get busy knittin’ entering my mental happy place where zombies kill scrapbookers and the pope shits on their books.
If I don’t have my needles with me, I grab one of the magazines or books I’ve brought with me and proceed to ignore them. (never go anywhere without a diversion if your friends are involved in this cult.) Not rebuffed in the slightest by my rudeness, they all sit together and discuss their page layout stategies and I am like a potted plant at the table.
[hijack]
We are standing in line for something at DisneyWorld and this woman is behind us with her two children and her husband. And she is scrapbooking in line. Not like she has the scissors out, but she is planning the vacation around what the scrapbook will look like!
“Tomorrow I want everyone to wear their blue shirts. Then we will come back here and if we take a picture of the kids right over there, and another one over by the Buzz Lightyear ride and a few in front of our hotel, that will make a great layout with the blue striped paper I have. But after we finish doing this we should head over to Epcot and get some pictures in front of Japan, because everyone has their red on today.”
My ears started bleeding and I was just overhearing it.
[/hijack]
Back in my early days of programming when I was still coding in assembler language; we would frequently go out for beers with spouses, significant others, etc. Of course we would start talking about work and before long the glazed look of the non programmers would start. We developed a code word for them to interject to basically say “hey, you’re boring the shit out of us”. That code was “control 10”. In IBM system 360-ese a control 10 is a dump that occurred from an endless loop.
usage when lots of boring techno babble is occurring…
non techie: “That sounds interesting, you know I took a control 10 yesterday”.
It usually worked pretty well.