IF I WERE A SUPERHERO my power would be to quickly alienate people with the worst icebreaker ever – weird and unwanted trivia. I can’t help it. Its pull is irresistible, this acquisition of useless trivia.
IN ALL HONESTY I don’t do it consciously. I hear things on TV while I putter about the house or read something in passing while sitting in a waiting room and somehow it just sticks without me realizing it. Next thing you know I’m at a party and someone mentions something about cucumbers. Before I even know it the words “Did you know the sea cucumber ejects its internal organs when its life is in jeopardy? Dumbest defense mechanism ever. Am I right?” come tumbling out of my mouth.
The only way I could get any nerdier is if I rocked taped together glasses, a pocket protector and snorted when I laugh.
(okay…so sometimes I do snort when I laugh, but in my defense it is extremely rare…don’t judge me…we’ve all done it.)
THE PROS? I throw out answers at the pub’s quiz night like a ninja wields throwing stars. My brain is a Rolodex of facts from the mundane to the miraculous.
THE CONS? It annoys the ever-loving shit out of pretty much everyone and is guaranteed to alienate 99% of strangers when busted out at parties. What can I say…some people drink or smoke to calm their nerves and feel more at ease in social situations…I get my nerd on. And now so can you.
You’re welcome.
20 Completely Useless Facts
1. Barry Manilow didn’t write his hit song “I Write The Songs…”
2. …But he did play piano for Bette Midler.
3. Alice Cooper and Micky Dolenz (yes, that Mickey Dolenz) were golfing buddies. Talk about an odd couple.
4. The sea cucumber really and truly does eject its internal organs when in danger. Stupid but true.
5. The box jellyfish has 24 eyes. All the better to see you with, my dear.
6. The first ballet ever to be performed was The Ballet Comique de la Reine on October 15, 1581 for the court of Catherine de’ Medici in the Great Hall of the Petit-Bourbon in Paris. It was 5 hours long.
7. The film with the longest running time is 2011’s Modern Times Forever (Stora Enso Building, Helsinki). Its length? 240 hours. That’s a whopping 10 days. Do think there’s an intermission?
8. Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov, a Russian scientist, performed head transplants on dogs in the 1950’s. The result? Two headed dogs, obviously. As you can tell from the lack of two headed dogs wandering the streets, the experiments met with limited success. (yes there are videos of this, but you’ll have to look them up yourself…personally I find them to disturbing to share.)
9. This one’s a real crowd pleaser: In many ancient cultures the entrails of dead and dying sacrificial victims were used to foresee the future in a practice known as anthropomancy. I strongly suggest not busting this one out during a dinner party.
10. Want a more socially acceptable form of divination to entertain your friends? Give tasseomancy a try. Tasseomancy, the reading of tea leaves, developed in the sixteenth century shortly after tea was introduced to Europe.
11. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century it was widely believed that the eyes held the last image seen by the dying and that the image could be retrieved from the retina as an optogram. Believe it or not successful optograms were retrieved from the eyes of rabbits in 1878 but the same results were never achieved with a human subject.
12. People who create the sound effects for films (like that funny splat-bloosh sound when someone gets punched in the face) are called foley artists. Now you know.
13. My totem animal is the raccoon. (that’s about as trivial as it gets, yo.)
14. Less than .2% of the human population is born with a vestigial tale. (That’s around 12 million people.)
15. Willie Nelson was born on April 29, 1933 in Abbott, Texas.
16. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) was founded in March of 1980.
17. Near dawn on April 4, 1561, residents of Nuremburg, Germany, reported hundreds of UFOs. Large oddly shaped objects (cylinders, spheres, crosses, discs and others) engaged in battle in the early morning sky. It was documented in this woodcutting created by Hanns Glaser.
18. Less than 5% of the world population is naturally redheaded.
19. It is rumored that Sir Winston Churchill had six toes on one foot…as do the ancestors of Ernest Hemmingway’s cats, most of which still live at his former home in the Florida Keys.
20. The universe is beige. Yup. Beige. Which means God must love The Gap and Land’s End. What a disappointment.
Kisses & Chaos,
Alli Woods Frederick
images :: nerdy girl :: trivial pursuit pieces – matt mutt :: source unknown :: source unknown :: via wikipedia :: via ernest hemmingway home & museum ::
