But fun and completely useless, right?
I can see my own ego, so I am never bored.
I catch flies bare handed.
Not only can I tie cherry stems, I can do it in less than a minute.
I can drive by most houses and tell you how many squares +/- less than one it will take to roof it.
I am a certified scrutineer for ballroom competition. Nowadays it’s all done by computers, so I am totally obsolete. But I can accurately transcribe a column of numbers that someone is reading me into checkmarks on a page, while someone else reads a different column of numbers over a microphone. Sometimes I can even catch errors in the microphone voice while transcribing the other one.
My lung capacity is something like 3-5 standard deviations higher than normal (I forget exactly). I did a spirometry type test once at a medical office.
[quote=“kopek, post:9, topic:731193”]
But can you do this?
[/QUOTE]I’m still training.
I have or had until the last decade or so the ability to control individual muscles in most any part of my body independently. It would look really weird. All my friends like to see me make my stomach muscles roll and dance.
Photo darkroom expertise?
Want an enlarger? I got 3 to get rid of.
And I can wiggle my ears. It’s a scalp muscle that, for some reason, I can voluntarily flex.
Freaks people out when I do it.
I can guess the year a car was made by looking at it-- usually right 90% of the time.
I can take the month, date and year you give me and within a few seconds, at most, tell you the day of week. With something like 95% accuracy on the first try. I’ve done it on “stage” 7 times. My highest audience rating, 100% was actually with the stage being friends at my nearest McDonalds.
Since I intend to try to use the skill for fundraising in November, maybe it’s not a Completely Useless Skill.
Maybe I’ll start a thread: “Ask the bargain-basement mathemagician”
I can multiply on an abacus. I can also wiggle my ears. Haven’t tried both at once, though.
I used to be able to identify any Sherlock Holmes story by reading a single sentence, from anywhere in the text.
Completely useless, and I don’t even think I can do it anymore.
Damn, now what am I going to do with my life…
I can do this one as well! Fascinates my nieces no end!
I can write mirror-writing, quickly and easily.
This is going to come in hugely useful if I’m ever in a Dan Brown novel trying to outwit the world’s most gobsmackingly incompetent cryptologist.
Backing up a double trailer is an amazing skill. I was pretty good at one; I’ve never tried two. In my experience most peoples troubles begin right off the bat, because they don’t pull up enough to begin with. My old boss at the oil trucking company I worked at was missing an eye; and could back a semi with a trailer up to a dock within six or so inches of the dock. Amazed the crap out of me.
Maybe you should because I have questions! 
Is this a skill that can be taught, or is it some type of savant thing? A random guess has what, about a 15% chance of being right?
I can say the alphabet backwards as fast as I can say it forwards…heard a friend’s grandfather perform this trick when I was a lad and learned it shortly thereafter. Never had the opportunity (or need) to recite during a roadside sobriety test, but I’m confident I could do it falling-down drunk.
I can do the arms thing (learned with index fingers extended) - once you visualize that you’re drawing the “sides” of a circle simultaneously and meeting at the bottom & the top, it’s much easier. Just tried the hands-on-table trick and was able to do that as well, being a piano player and the left/right brain separation that comes with practice.
Before I ruined my wrist, I used to be able to out-type the computer. When typing straight copy, the computer would suddenly start typing like this: xxynhdf heujdn hhudehgnt, etc. When I stopped typing, it would go back and correct it.
A person who actually witnessed this was possibly drop jawed. She told me that she never would have believed that was even humanly possible.
I replied but forgot to add my useless skill.
I’m a master at flipping pencils into the ceiling and making them stick. Sitting, standing, doesn’t matter. Excellent accuracy as well.
I had an idea for a ‘target’ ceiling tile for just such an occasion.
I can spin record album jackets on my fingertips, when I can find record album jackets.
Here’s how it works: first, suppose you know the day of the week for every day of every month in 2015. (Or some other year, or even some set of dates from different years scattered across the calendar year whose day of the week you know by heart. But we’ll use 2015.)
Then, take the (number of years) + (number of leap days) between then and the same date in 2015. Divide that number by 7, toss the quotient, but keep the remainder. Go back that number of days through the week from the day of the week in 2015.
Example: suppose you want to know what day of the week November 20, 1933 was. 2015 - 1933 = 82; there are 20 leap days in there, so 82 + 20 = 102. 102 = 14*7 + 4. November 20, 2015 is on a Friday. Go back 4 days from Friday; that’s Monday. November 20, 1933 was on a Monday.
Took a lot longer to type that than to work it out.