The Hindu : National : A bank of `useless' information

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Oct 21, 2004

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National

A bank of `useless' information

NEW DELHI, OCT. 20. It is difficult to believe that Mahatma Gandhi took dance and music lessons in his late teens or that Hitler had a soft spot for King Kong, the giant gorilla.

Such ``useless'' information, that will leave trivia junkies hungry for more, has been compiled in The Book of Useless Information by some British writers and journalists, such as Keith Waterhouse and Richard Littlejohn.

The book carpet-bombs the reader with nuggets of news. For example, every day there is more money printed for the game Monopoly than for the U.S. Treasury, or George Washington grew marijuana in his garden. Abraham Lincoln's mother died when the family dairy cow ate poisonous mushrooms and she drank the milk; the amount of potato crisps Americans eat each year weighs six times more than ``Titanic''; they spend more than $5.4 billions on their pets each year...

``Oh, just but how useless is useless? There, as Shakespeare observes in Act III Scene I of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, is the rub,'' says Mr. Waterhouse in the introduction to the book.

He says the information, while being useless to one, could prove a boon and blessing to somebody else. He cites the example of a flamingo: it can only eat with its head upside down. This piece of information is of little use to anyone except for the one who has a flamingo. He could spend a fortune on vet's bill before learning that. ``So we have to tread carefully. There have to be checks and balances,'' he says noting there are facts and facts. Like, there are more than 100 chemicals in a cup of coffee; 16850 bananas are eaten every day in the Boston University dining room; and the very first bomb dropped by the Allies during the Second World War killed only one elephant in the Berlin Zoo.

On statistics, the book says approximately 97.35618329 per cent of statistics are made up, yet it gives details like a car is stolen every 30 seconds in the U.S.; 22,000 cheques will be deducted from the wrong bank accounts in the next hour; 811,000 faulty rolls of 35 mm film will be purchased this year.

There are bits of information of interest to Indians too: we have the world's largest stock of privately hoarded gold; there are 30 million carved images of gods and goddesses on stone temples of Madurai, and 79 per cent of the people in Kolkata live in one-room houses.

``Useless information, as may be judged from the modest volume, is not in the same category as trivia. We [the members of the Useless Information Society] do not care about any of that Guinness Book of Records kind of stuff.'' — PTI

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