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May 21, 2004 Is there really a such thing as useless knowledge? We call useless facts trivia because their informative value is "trivial", but isn't it all just a matter of application? For instance, there are all kinds of useless facts that I've heard from The Font, which is what I call the friend that everybody has who's constantly spouting off obscure and often unverified facts. I also happen to be a The Font; we like to gather in gaggles in front of Barnes and Noble on Thursday nights. Did you see that movie, Seabiscuit? You know, the horse movie starring Spiderman and The Dude and the creepy dad from American Beauty? Yeah, same here (Notice how I am being vague about whether or not I've actually seen it? I feel so clever!). I once heard from the tour guide at the USS Constellation that Seabiscuit's father was named Hard Tack, which is what the sailors used to eat. The naming of horses is a serious matter. Or at least it used to be. I suppose it still is in the racing circles and to all the little girls who want to own a pony (I promise I'll feed her and comb her and take her out every day!). Alexander the Great named his horse Bucephalus, which meant "ox head" in some ancient language, possibly Macedonean since that's where he came from. If you've ever been into Tolkein, you've probably weathered through pages of horse lineages populated by great horse heroes, the fleet-footed princes of the plains. Gandalf's horse was Shadowfax which, apparently, was very important. *Yuk Alert* The name isn't so important if the horse happens to be dead. The horse itself can still be important. The Mongols had the great idea of launching plague-ridden horses over the walls of the cities that they were besieging. Of course, most people were way too smart to eat disease-ridden horse meat (even though they didn't know about germs, which were discovered by Louis Pasteur and a cadre of more obscure biologists in the second half of the nineteenth century). But the germs could get into the water and, more importantly, rats love to eat anything they can get their paws on, plague-ridden or not. So dead horses might be responsible for the Black Death. Once, a group of Greek philosophers, including some that I may have even heard of before, were discussing the number of teeth a horse had. They covered every issue imaginable from the horse's diet to the bone structure to the Platonic shapes but still could not arrive at an acceptable answer. Finally, a young and naive member of the group came up with the solution of going outside and counting a horse's teeth. Naturally, he was expelled on the spot. I could go on for quite a while more discussing these incredibly important horse facts. But in the end, it's all useless knowledge and I still know nothing about horses. ------------ About the author: Chris Robison is a neuroscience researcher, photo manipulator, and fiction writer. His humorous photomanipulations can be seen at http://www.bim-bim.net/SA/. He completed a science fiction novel for the NaNoWriMo (www.nanowrimo.org) '03 and is currently working on Project: Dragonslaughter, a fantasy comedy. Email: QuothAraignee@hotmail.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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