The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information: If You Thought You Knew All the Things You Didn't Need to Know - Think Again PDF
Preview The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information: If You Thought You Knew All the Things You Didn't Need to Know - Think Again
The Book of Useless Information The Book of Useless Information The Book of Useless Information The Book of Useless Information By Botham, Noel INTRODUCTION OH, but just how useless is useless? There, as Shakespeare observes in Act III, Scene I, of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, is the rub. For instance, the news that flamingos can only eat with their heads upside down, while of more than passing interest to a female flamingo teaching her fledglings to eat up their shrimp, is of little use to a human being trained to sit up at a table and employ a knife and fork. Yet suppose someone made one a present of a flamingo, and it persisted in eating with its head upside down. You could spend a fortune on vet bills before learning that, in flamingo circles, that is the way it is done. So we have to tread carefully. There have to be checks and balances. At our Useless Information Society summit meetings, we have these in the form of our formidable resident beadle, the distinguished jazz musician Kennie Clayton. If Mr. Beadle Clayton judges that an item may be put to use in the community, he solemnly bangs his ceremonial staff and it is ruled out of order. There is no appeal, although barracking and cries of “Rubbish!” are permitted. An exception is sometimes made of material that may be of use to a biographer. Thus, when I learned from a newspaper cutting that Marilyn Monroe had six toes, I eagerly produced this nugget at the next Useless Information soirée in the confident belief that, with so many Marilyn biographers still trawling, it would get under the net. So it proved. What I hadn’t bargained for was that one of our more pedantic members—and we have a few—would seek to have the item barred on purely arithmetical grounds, on the basis that in total she must have had eleven toes at least. The only other transgression is that of being boring. At the society’s earliest meetings, a few members misunderstood the nature of uselessness and came up with such conversation-?stoppers as that the Mississippi is 1,171 miles long or, for those who prefer it, 1,884 kilometers. We useless information aficionados are not interested in the length of rivers, a fact that is traditionally conveyed to the offender with elaborate yawns and shouts of “Boring!” Tell us, however, that in the Nuuanu Valley of Honolulu there is a river that flows upward, and our eyes light up. Mr. Gradgrind, in the same volume as the Bard’s “There’s the rub” gag, observes, “Facts alone are wanted in life.” That is the policy of The Useless Information Society. It could be our motto. But there are facts and facts. Useless information, as may be judged from this modest volume, is not in the same category as trivia, as in Trivial Pursuit. We do not care about any of that Guinness World Records kind of stuff. All our information has to pass the “Not a Lot of People Know That” test, preceded by gasps of surprise and, in extreme cases, followed by wild applause. If we can send our fellow members home with their heads reeling under the weight of a cornucopia of entirely useless and out-?of-?the-?way facts, then our deliberations will not have been in vain. Keith Waterhouse THE USELESS INFORMATION MASCOT It is estimated that millions of trees are planted by forgetful squirrels. Squirrels can climb trees faster than they can run on the ground. Squirrels may live fifteen or twenty years in captivity, but their life span in the wild is often only about one year. They fall prey to disease, malnutrition, predators, cars, and humans. A squirrel cannot contract or carry the rabies virus. THE BOOK OF
The list of books you might like
