Alex is a curious kid. He gets that from his mother. I have always been curious about everything. I love knowing a little bit about a lot of things. I am full of useless information that I have collected over my life. I continue to learn useless information hoping that someday, after enough years, I will be able to connect all the useless data into something useful. I get it from my dad. He was a police officer and then a career fireman. He didn't stand out as particularly intelligent, until you sat down with him and played boggle, or yahtzee, or scrabble. And most impressive was his dominating any and everyone at Jeopardy. He watched it religiously, and it was very annoying...how did he KNOW all that STUFF??? He was always in some sort of school or another, up until the day he died. We grew up with a set of encyclopedias in our home. We moved so often that books didn't often make it with us, but those encyclopedias went everywhere with us. I loved reading, and from the time I started to read, those were the best option available. I read them cover to cover a few times. We had national geographics, and I discovered the world. I have always read the newspaper, and enjoyed non fiction over fiction. For a few years my mother in law got me reading non fiction, but I went back to my tried and true roots, facts about whatever.
All this leads me to Alex. Often he will just ask a question out of curiousity. We search the answer out together. He is a thinker. We all have discussions about various topics regularly, but Alex is usually the start of it. Today's topic, How many hot dogs do Americans eat in a month? apparently someone discovered the answer to be "enough to go around the earth 5 times"....so he started with the Earth's circumference and then calculated that number. The answer in real numbers is that Americans eat over One billion, five hundred seventy seven million, seven hundred sixty two thousand,two hundred and eight hots dogs each month. that number looks like 1,577,762,208....
Someday that little piece of information will be connected to some other piece of information and might make you answer a question right while watching Jeopardy with your dad ....
4 comments:
That is so cool. I love when a random thought leads to research and discovery.
I like people like that. I think most people do.
I'm perplexed when I watch Steve answer weird Jeopardy questions too.
Well, I remember that when we were first married Cal and I calculated how many McDonald's hamburgers had been sold would cover the state of Rhode Island (that was a loooonnnnggg time ago so I'm sure it is a much bigger land area by now). So I guess Alex just can't help it. It's in a lot of his DNA. Your dad was pretty amazing at all he knew.
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