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11.08.2004

THE SHIT THAT STICKS IN MY HEAD

I've had at my disposal now, for most of my adult life at any rate, the ability to recall incredibly stupid shit.

Trivia doesn't even begin to cover it. We're talking about the trivia about the triva kinda stuff here. The type of meta data processing that google would kill for. And it amuses, and annoys me to no end.

Don't get me wrong, the look on the face of the guy who asks you, "What was the name of that movie about the video game....", and you cut him off with -

"The Last Starfighter"

And his jaw drops. Or he cracks up laughing. Or continues with the conversation, having seen you do this countless times before. All three of these responses have been witnessed by me in the last 6 months. With 3 different people, who to the best of my knowledgs have never met or spoken to each other.

Why do I remember the name of Alex Rogan? Why that bad movie, that I watched countless times on The Movie Channel, as a teen. I watched countless other bad films, none of which I can name right now, but were you to give me an ambiguously worded query, I might come up with what you are fishing for.

I've had people call me long distance to answer the most off handed questions. It's quite flattering to be known in circles for your parlor trickery and b grade Jeopardy database.

This isn't meant to be an ego trip, although, I think we made that turn a while ago, but the reality of it is I got to thinking about this in terms of mental function. Working with PCs almost all of my waking hours, gets me thinking in a very data processing kind of way, and to be truthful, I really want to know if I'm just some real high end Oracle type shit that Larry Ellison is just waiting to unleash on us. How do we get from the functional to the esoteric, from the concrete to the abstract? Can we ever hope to press that kind of thinking nonto silicon or any other artificial thinking machine?

I haven't a clue, but it would be cool to see, and then maybe I could focus on remembering something useful for a change instead of the words to a large number of jingles from the 70's


go and tell me all about it
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