So I’m in the car and my two sons, Steve and Trey, are in the back seat.
“The Federated States of Micronesia are actually 607 small islands in the South Pacific,” I suddenly say. “Interestingly, while its total land mass is only 270 square miles, it occupies more than a million square miles in the Pacific Ocean. Population is 127,000 and the US embassy is located in the state of Pohnpei and not, as many people believe, on the island of Yap.”
Trey turns to his big brother.
“Make him stop,” he begs.
Steve looks at him calmly.
“If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed,” he says. “It’s not safe out here! It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross... but it’s not for the timid!”
Trey looked back and forth between us.
“What is happening,” he whispered to himself.
In that moment, I had that little swell of pride that a proper nerd parent feels when the nerd starts to really flourish in one of the younglings.
It’s all about useless knowledge, served up for no good reason. Nerds are, more often than not, walking buckets of it. We accumulate random information like a wet lollipop attracts lint. In the case above, I was quoting, for no particular reason, Martin Sheen in “Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics”, the 21st episode of the 1st season of The West Wing. Steve, picking up on my riff, was quoting John DeLancie in “Q Who?”, the 16th episode of the 2nd season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. A young teen at the time, he was beginning to learn how much fun it is to say random things spontaneously. Many if not most nerds have done it at least a few times.
Quoting movies and TV shows is just one slim branch of a nerd’s useless knowledge, but it is of course the most socially prominent: I am minded of the original run of the first Star Wars, when my buddy Wamp and I were taking in our 8th or 9th viewing at the local cinema with our fellow nerds Heidi and Susan. We get to the part where Luke says to Ben, “If they traced the robots here, they may have learned who they sold them to, and that would lead them back...”
…and Wamp and I moaned, echoing all of Luke’s distress, “...home!”
Heidi and Susan got up and sat somewhere else.
TV and movies are a great place to pick up fun quotes – my kid brother Dan is as fluent in Trek quotes as my son - but there are many other sources. My other kid brother Maxx is quite handy with the novels of Robert Heinlein; he can rattle off a quote from Jubal Harshaw or Lazarus Long with impressive facility.
There are, of course, many sources of random information. We’ve already considered the encyclopedia, and its modern analog (the Internet, and Wikipedia in particular), and that just scratches the surface. There are stacks and stacks of books at your local library that are just packed with useless knowledge for your young nerds to embrace! For instance,
The Guinness Book of World Records
An Incomplete Education
Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts
The Mysteries of History
The Secret Lives of US Presidents
The Book of Amazing Curiosities
The Great Big Book of Horrible Things
Cannabalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America
...and many more!3
But even better than providing source material for your young nerd’s useless info archive is to send them forth to discover it first-hand. When my older two, Steve and Sandy, were in grade school, we would offset their summertime boredom by giving them science questions to answer:
Why can a bird sit on an electrical wire?
Why is grass green?
Why are creek rocks round?
Why is inbreeding in the royal family of great concern?
This worked wonderfully! It offset their boredom, it bolstered their useless info archives, it strengthened their intellectual muscles, and it was a great treat listening to them wax eloquent at the Thanksgiving table on the unfortunate impact of homozygosity on facial symmetry in offspring.
For myself, the quest is never-ending. I have entire bookcases dedicated to useless knowledge, and just this past month I rolled some of it out at a dinner in Boston, with some distant family members who were caught completely off-guard:
“While the homicidal tendencies of the female praying mantis might seem to the casual observer to be the oddest of mating rituals in nature, the fact is that some are odder still: the hermaphroditic sea slug has a razor-sharp penis, and in the course of mating will stab their partner in the forehead and ejaculate into their cerebral ganglia.
“Who stabs who, of course, determines which sexual role each will play in the mating.”
Be sure to encourage impulses like this in your nerdlings – and for Odin’s sake, never stop stocking your own useless knowledge shelf! Spend 10 minutes a day with Wikipedia! Go to the library! Watch Star Trek!
EXERCISE
For the next month, say this Heinlein quote every time you’re in the SUV with your kids, until they can recite it themselves:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects!”
Bonus: Dare them to say it to their grandmother the next time she visits.
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