You know how everybody has an elderly relative who, as time marches on and neurons turn to jelly, becomes obsessed with weird trivia? He or she asks things like, “So, how long did it take you to get here on Route 5?” and “Are those size ten shoes?” and “You reckon that squirrel there weighs, what, three and a half pounds? Yeah, that’s a three-and-a-half-pounder.”
Now, with the magic of the Internet, you can be that elderly relative!
For people obsessed with timely trivia, my government agency–the United States Bureau of the Census–delivers a daily blurb of superfluous information called Profile America; there’s even an RSS feed.
Once a day, you’ll read (or listen to) a new obscure fact about this great nation of ours, vaguely related to that date. The patent for the windshield wiper was issued in 1905! The first modern cell phone was introduced in 1983 in Chicago! September was National Rice Month!
You will be the toast of the nursing home:
“What route did you take to get here today, sonny?”
“I don’t know, Henry, but I know I followed part of America’s four million miles of roads, including 47,000 miles of interstate highway. None of it was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, opened in 1940 as the first superhighway. I probably passed a few of the estimated sixty thousand hookers buried along American’s freeways.”
[Henry bows in awe. Or falls asleep.]
