Wonderfully Useless Info

My wife asked me to run by Walgreens on the way home from work to pick up some medication for her. On the way to the pharmacy department, I passed by that rack of small format books from Hallmark that are catchy, cute and hugely overpriced. You know the titles I am talking about: Dads; Friends to the End; Fifty Things Worth Knowing.... These books are enticing, long on photos and usually short on text. They are the impulse buys because for some reason one or more of them "grabs us" and against our better judgment we purchase them.

Tonight I bought one called Schott's Original Miscellany, by Ben Schott. It is an accumulation of many diverse and completely unrelated bits of information and knowledge, in no particular order. Most of the information has little or no usefulness for us in our daily lives. One short section lists the knights of King Arthur's round table. Another section illustrtates graphically how to put on a sari. Yet another section explains how the revolutionary government that overthrew King Louis XIV revised the calendar, renaming the months in characteristically Francophilic ways. The author of this compilation doesn't even bother to include an index or a table of contents. So if you are looking for any one thing in particular, there is no easy way to find it.

You might say to yourself that this is not a very useful book, nor are the contents of the Miscellany worth the $14.95 asking price. But I found the book to be charming and interesting and fascinating. Open the book to any page and I can find a really random and fascinating bit of knowledge, which I can enjoy just for the fun of it. Knowledge does not always have to useful or practical. Maybe it is enough that it is entertaining.

Okay! So this slim volume does not have the functionality of say the phone directory. But for me, it has the same appeal for me as the annual Almanacs. These collections of all sorts of lists and facts expand our horizons and deepen our cultural literacy. Being exposed to some of these "useless" bits of knowledge, such as a list of commonly used Latin phrases and their meanings, enable us to read the newpaper, magazines or a book and understand more fully what is being communicated. Even better, understanding the meanings of a list of Yiddish words, might even help us to get a good laugh out of the punchline of a Jewish joke. So in a way these random fragments of human culture might have a usefulness all of their own.

There is so much to know in the world today. I don't know exactly what I will discover as I explore my new book. But I suspect it is going to be a lot of fun and even enlightening as I make my way through this random assortment of ideas. All in all, I think it was a pretty good buy.