Trivia is dead!

That little chestnut of Neufish wisdom struck me as I was walking in the parking lot at lunch today. Seems like a brilliant little observation of mine. How privileged you must feel to be reading this blog. So of course I google the exact phrase "trivia is dead" and find no less than 1,390 hits online, of people making the same word for word observation a good deal sooner than I did. I think the first was Nietzsche...or wait, that was God. No, not God saying trivia is dead, Nietzsche saying God is dead. Or maybe trivia saying Nietzsche was dead. Anyway, I'm sure if I had a wordier phrase, such as "Google and Wikipedia have jointly forced the obsolescence of trivia as we know it", I could have googled it and found no hits, and laboured on for a few more precious seconds in the glorious yet much-mistaken appreciation and admiration of my own breathtaking genius and insight.

So, yes, there is no new thought under the sun, but that won't prevent me from jabbering on about this unoriginal insight. Google and Wikipedia have made trivia irrelevant and obsolete. A global body of knowledge is now shared and accessible, enormously dwarfing what any one man could know. Motorized transport changed walking and general manual transport from a necessary and normal facet of life into a recreational pastime, exercise, or sport, and even so now trivia is relegated to the Nerd-Squad units of high school academic teams (you can guess what I lettered in)(no, it wasn't football) and classic game shows that fewer and fewer people seem to watch as the attrition of life expectancy takes its toll on our elder generations.

The fastest runner in the world couldn't overtake me on a motorbike. Likewise, the walking brain vaults of trivia that haunt Alex Trebek's dreams could be handily defeated by a kid with a broadband connection, a laptop, and an even remotely passable ability to use search tools.

Don't forget to bring a towel!