I love learning. But sometimes, I get a little down with thoughts of “this is so useless, why am I wasting my time?”
So inspire me. I want to hear a story of a time when some little nugget of (what you thought was) Thoroughly Useless Information (which you probably got from reading the Dope!) helped you out in a significant way.
I don’t even know what that means. I know they call bars “pubs” in some strange lands but I never really thought of them as the quizzing type of place.
As a child, I was fascinated by killer whales (still am, but not to anywhere near the same degree) - I read everything I could about them and constantly pestered my parents to go to the aquarium to see the whales. Fast forward to about 6 months ago, as a special event at work we all got to go whale watching, followed by dinner. At dinner, they had us do a quiz about killer whales, with the table that got the most correct answers winning a prize. With my help, my table won. Oh, and did I mention that I had wound up sitting at the same table as the company president?
So I’d say that that was a good application of otherwise useless knowledge.
In my dreams.
Although my command of knowledge of miniscule details about antique furniture and rare books has helped me make some good purchases over the years.
My command and pedantry of Throroughly Useless Information about modern physics, game theory, film history, and evolutionary zoology has helped me utterly bore and ward off attractive women for decades.
Wait a minute, that’s not how it’s supposed to work…
Something I read in Ripley’s Believe it Or Not when I was a kid came through for me at work last year. I work in a museum, and sometimes we’ll find strange and unusual artifacts in storage or abandoned on our doorstep in the morning by anonymous sources.
I came into work one day, and my co-workers were puzzling over an item sitting on the desk, speculating as to what it might be. “It’s a battery” I said, as I passed to go hang up my coat. Instantly, they surrounded me. How did I know that? What kind of battery?
I explained that you put grape juice into the container, and the little metal prongs on the cap generate a weak electrical current when they come in contact with the acidic juice. I may have blushed a little when I told them that I had first seen this as a kid in Ripley’s Believe it Or Not (The “Baghdad Battery.”) And later on, I had seen a similar thing that was used in medical quackery during the Victorian era. They stared at me like I was a genius.
Well, I have a reputation for having an answer to any question anyone asks, which is mostly due to my command of thoroughly useless knowledge. Not that I nessecarily know the right answer, but I can come up with a plausible substitute on the spot every time. For example: Why did that door just move? Why, there’s another door just past that one, creating a pocket of air between them, and when a door to the outside of the building is opened, the pressure difference in the building (which is deliberately kept high through fans, for some demented reason) caused the air pocket to expand, rattling the door. See? I have no clue if it’s right, but it’s believeable. Now, if I could only learn to lie plausibly…
I write science fiction. In the story I’m working on now:
I take a sideline from the Siege of Lucknow in the Sepoy Mutiny. During the seige, they were running very low on food. When almost to the point of starvation, the did another inventory of their stocks. Turned out they had miscounted and there were plenty of food for several more weeks.
The entire story is based on an incident in the Grand Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia in the 1930s.
In other instances:
I based an entire story on the fact that Vlad Tepes (the original Dracula) and Leonardo da Vinci were contemporaries (or close enough – Vlad died when Leonardo was young, but they fit in perfectly for what I wanted to do), and another on the fact that Shakespeare and Cervantes were contemporaries, also.
I based a third on the fact that Leon Trotsky appeared in one silent film while exiled in New York before the Russian Revolution, and in another set a plot point around the fact that in the movie LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring, a dead soldier can be seen to move.
I’ve written an entire novel based on trivia about the tallest buildings in the world, and had as a major plot point the fact that there are two Empire State Buildings in New York City, that the Great Pyramid of Giza is missing its capstone, that Casey Stengel was manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1934 (as well as the street location of Ebbetts Field), that, in ancient Egyptian mythology, you had to produce a “negative confession” in order to get into heaven (and avoid having your heart eaten by a monster), and also used the date the movie “The Thin Man” opened in New York City (with Duke Ellington’s band performing at the premiere).
Stranger, if you can simply give the impression of having lots of the answers without seeming like you need to prove it all the time, it can work out. I have been in the company of someone who can’t herself hold on to the small stuff, but who appreciates having it available - when she asks for the info.
Among other things, she’s asked “Where does the sun go when it sets?” I was able to gently remind her that the sun doesn’t really go anywhere (without getting too nitpicky), and she accepted the explanation with thanks. Most recently, she asked how to say “Merry Christmas” in Spanish, and once again, I had the answer. No, I don’t know where the questions come from - nor can she say - but I’m glad I can be there for her, even when it’s only trivially.