The lint roller in your head

Not too long ago, I was reading a memoir by a Jeopardy! contestant who opined that those who do well on the show aren't so much smarter than the average bear as they are people with minds like lint-rollers.  Things just stick to their brains, like debris in a dryer filter.  

That's certainly true of me.  Someone says "dingbat," and I don't think of Edith Bunker.  I think of the weird little pictures and symbols that appear in newspapers and magazines.  Today, we'd call them "emojis" and the like.  But originally, they were known as dingbats.  The best typesetting operations had mounds of them.


Then there's "nimrod."  Well, the oracle of our youth, Bugs Bunny, told us what that meant, right?  A nimrod was an idiot!


Except that it turned out we all missed the joke.  Nimrod, per Scripture, was one of Ham's children, and he was a king and "a mighty hunter before the Lord."  You know:  this guy:


The joke we missed was that Bugs was saying, "O, right, you're a hunter?  Don't make me laugh!"  It was like saying, "Gosh, thanks, Richie Rich!" to a guy offering you a nickel.

And how do people in the journalism game end an article?  Do they say, "the end?"  Do they say, "game over?"  Do they say, 



Nope, they write "-30-".  An old symbol from the early days of the Western Union telegraph.  

My brain is an enormous tangle of stuff like this.  Utterly useless trivia that says, "You're not knowledgeable, but you sure are easily distracted!"

So how about you?  What kind of useless information are you carrying around?

And, O, yeah:  



 AlextheKay is glad he doesn't have to think about this anymore. 

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