I vaguely remember a sachet of this stuff coming through the door but not this promotion. Gazing with wonder at a time (early 70s) when facts were collectable assets, the NFTs of the moment, Panini football stickers for the nerd community.

From an otherwise rather sensible article in The Spectator about the uselessness of CVs:

Charles said his own trick was to conduct interviews, normally amiable chats about nonsense, and then at the end ask the applicant to name the capital of Nicaragua. He marked their answers out of ten. Saying: ‘Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue… Santa something?’ got zero points. A laugh, followed by silence, got three points. Anyone who actually knew the answer (Managua) was eliminated on the grounds of being scary. The correct, ten-point answer was: ‘No, but I could look it up in a moment.’

Scary? Really? Well, that’s me screwed. 

(Also, remember that the current Foreign Secretary used to edit The Spectator.)

And in the space of a few days, I change my mind. Way back in the mists of last week, I mused over some people’s lack of curiosity when confronted by something they don’t know or don’t understand. But then, as part of my coursework, I read a piece by Adorno that made passing references to Karl Kraus and Paul Valéry and I was all at sea. In fact, I’d heard of both of them, although only vaguely: Kraus, I seemed to recall, had some connection with Frank Wedekind, the creator of Lulu (not the singer); Valéry I knew because Pierre Bayard had described his hilarious tribute to Anatole France, his predecessor at the Academie Francaise, which he delivered despite clearly not having read a word of France’s work. And if I hadn’t been aware of these molecules of fact, I could have Googled them, right?

But it’s not that straightforward. Adorno refers to “The strictures of Karl Kraus against freedom of the press”. What strictures? When? Where? Then: “If cultural criticism, even at its best with Valéry, sides with conservatism...” Well, that’s all very well, but could you give some examples, Theo? Of course, Adorno simply assumed his readers would know what he was talking about and in his time and place that was probably a valid assumption. There would have been a comfortable fuzz of connotations about Kraus and Valéry so that simply mentioning their names would have triggered the relevant context. And that’s not something that can be replicated by a mere search engine; not a search engine I've ever used, at least.

One thought though; if I’m expected to follow accurate MHRA-style reference guidelines when I’m writing about Adorno, wouldn’t it be nice if Adorno reciprocated?

A successful contestant on the game show Jeopardy is apparently getting attention because of his on-camera gurning but he also says something that rather chimes with my own thoughts about knowing stuff:

I like reading and consuming knowledge; it’s almost irrelevant to my education. If I don’t know something, it visibly perturbs me and I have to find out. Back in the day, that meant dropping everything and finding a newspaper to find out exactly what I was looking for. But now, we have supercomputers in our pockets, which confuses me when people don’t know something and they go, “Well, I guess I’ll never know!” I’m like, “You have a supercomputer in your pocket, you can know right now.” You have all of mankind’s knowledge in your pocket. If you don’t know something, why not find it out immediately and close that chapter? I don’t know, people are weird. They’re not curious.

PS: Vaguely connected: Quentin Letts (the theatre critic for the Daily Mail) has been annoying again, which is as good a reason as any to resuscitate the moment he referred to “the death of Banquo’s children” in Macbeth; and Will Gompertz (the arts editor for the BBC) announced on a recent episode of Pointless Celebrities that Vivaldi wrote La Traviata. Now, it’s always a bit awkward bringing up solecisms such as these in polite society because there’s no fixed cultural canon any more and you have no idea whether someone else may or may not see anything wrong. (For the record, it was Macduff’s children who were murdered; and Verdi wrote La Traviata.) But even if you don’t know (or care), surely you’d expect the theatre critic of a high-profile newspaper or the arts editor the national broadcasting organisation to be better informed. Wouldn’t you?

Like Nicholson Baker, I love Wikipedia. I know, I know, it's full of mistakes, but that's probably part of the attraction. Here are five things I've learned recently from that vast, sprawling Borg of fact. Unless they turn out not to be facts. Although, in that case, I've still learned them.

1. The Indian football team withdrew from the 1950 World Cup after FIFA insisted that all players must wear boots.

2. TV chef Clarissa Dickson Wright has the middle names Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda.

3. Among the indigenous people of south-east Queensland, the word 'daughter' refers to women of one's great-grandmother's generation.

4. French rugby league player Puig Aubert was nicknamed Pipette, because of his habit of smoking on the field during matches.

5. Zero is the only number that is both real and imaginary.

This could be a meme, if you're so inclined.

(And if you're not a Wiki-fan, you can always try one of its rivals; perhaps the extraordinary Conservapedia. Here's the entry on atheism. Utterly jawdropping.)