You don't need to know this....

Here’s a list of useless stuff I knew this morning:

The Sea of Tranquility is on the moon
The body’s largest organ is the skin
The dominant metal in the Eiffel Tower is iron
Pearl Harbor used 700 sticks of TNT and 4000 gallons of gas in the explosions
The flow rate of a glacier is 80 years
The last word in the Bible is “Amen.”
Sleeping Beauty slept for 100 years
The name of the Volkswagen in the old Disney movies is Herbie
“Ooh, I wanna take you to Bermuda, Bahama, Come on, pretty mama” finishes the line, “Aruba, Jamaica…”.
Penguins mate once a year.

With my husband’s help, I was also able to come up with the number of squares on a standard chessboard (64), the residents of 39 Stone Canyon Way (The Flintstones), the last word in the Bible (Amen), and Elvis Presley’s middle name (Aron).

Some people refer to useless knowledge as “trivia” which is also apropos, I guess. My synonym would be “stuff that occupies the brain space that I could be using for grocery lists, quotes I really like, and talks from General Authorities, all of which I can never remember because the capital of Nepal (Katmandu) stole that spot.” But since that’s kind of a long synonym, we’ll go with trivia.

I am obsessed with it. When I was in labor last November for over twenty four hours (thank you, second child, and you so owe me) and too scared to get the epidural (have you seen the needle?), I made my sister distract me by reading me Trivial Pursuit cards. I have a poster of Alex Trebek in my bedroom (totally not true) and back in the day (late nineties, y’all) I spent every night punching answers madly into my telephone keypad, trying to get on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. I told my grandfather that if I made it on, I was bringing him as my guest to New York. Bless his heart, he was so convinced of my genius and capacity to remember crap no one else needs to know that he stressed himself out for months trying to figure out who would watch his dogs while he was in the Big Apple, and what he would wear to meet Regis.

I have this fantasy where aliens invade earth, convinced humanity is a corrupt and irredeemable race (Battlestar Galactica, anyone?) and to prove it, they put us on trial (yep, totally stealing from Star Trek: TNG now). The test is how little we know about our own history and culture. But then I’m chosen as a representative of humanity (average housewife demographic) and because of all the useless information in my brain, I can answer their questions (number of players on a field hockey team: 11, father of pointillism: Seurat) and then I save humanity.

Okay, I made that up, too. But seriously, when else will I ever need to know the country with the greatest number of earthquakes per year? (Japan!)