Book Report: The Book Of Useless Information by Noah Botham and the Useless Information Society (2006)

Book coverThis book is a collection of trivia one-liners such as you’d see in text overlaying images on some listicle sites. As such, it’s probably as trustworthy as the Internet.

I mean, there probably aren’t deliberate falsehoods to detect copyright infringement like you find in the old trivia books. But there are some contradictary trivium like “The leg bones of a bat are so thin that no bat can walk” followed a couple lines later by “Disc winged bats of Latin America have adhesive discs on both wings and feet that enable them to live in unfurling banana leaves (or even to walk up a window pane!).” Sure, that last can be interpreted in a fashion that’s not completely contrary to the former, but they’re not written clearly enough to be completely clear.

So if I’m ever asked the only bat that can walk, and I wrongly answer “The disc-winged bat,” you’ll know why.

But the book is a good enough way to pass the time on an airplane or something like that; you can pick it up, read a few things and go “Huh,” and put it down when needed. And just maybe you’ll have the right answer for a trivia night sometime. Or at least an answer that might be right, which is sometimes the best you can hope for.

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