Useful or not.

I am one of those people who has a head full of basically useless information.  Now, that means I’m fairly good at Trivial Pursuit, especially if we’re playing in teams and you, yourself, are good at sports trivia.  We’d be fairly unbeatable—given ordinary luck with the dice and assuming it was a classic version of the game.  (I kind of lost interest in pop culture the last few years, so the more recent versions…I make no promises.)

I’d be fairly good at Jeopardy, too, except for the wagering and the Final Jeopardy question.  I always lose Final Jeopardy.

I’m not sure where this fascination with minutiae originated, except that my family does tend to acquire books like Why Do We Say It? and The Book of Lists.

So, imagine what a find a website is like the one I’m going to point you toward today!

Imagine, too, what a total time sink it is, and be warned.

Now, that you’ve been warned, check out The Straight Dope.

The Straight Dope is a syndicated newspaper column in which, as far as I can tell, readers write in to ask odd questions about anything and everything, and Cecil Adams, the columnist, answers them.

Some of the interesting things you can learn from perusing The Straight Dope are:

• Can a bullet fired into the air kill someone when it comes down?
• Do you burn more calories when you think hard? (We can only hope.)
• How does the Queen answer the telephone?
• What’s the likeliest doomsday scnario?

You can see that these are critical pieces of information.  I mean, when I call the Queen, I would want to be sure it really was Her Majesty on the other end of the line.

Other than that, it’s just interesting stuff and a way to kill a few hours.  I’m not even sure much of it would help you on Jeopardy, the show not usually having a category heading of “Doomsday” or caring too much about royal phone habits.

But it’s interesting stuff, and you never know.  You might just be the one to settle the argument about Fibonacci numbers at your next family gathering.