“Well, let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.” **

You know when you hear a song and it gets struck in your head and you constantly sing it (or, at least the same couple of lines of it) over and over?  That's apparently called an ear worm.  Kind of a gross name.  It can be a bit annoying, but I've found that I can blast it out with another song.  Interestingly, the new song doesn't seem to get stuck.  Weird.

I've found that a similar thing happens to me with snippets of seemingly useless trivia.  My son told me the other day that the largest scrambled egg dish ever made weighed just over 3 tonnes.  I fact-checked this.  Partly because 3 tonnes is a LOT of eggs, and partly because he followed that little pearler with "The largest planet in our solar system is Venus"... (For those playing at home and you're not quite sure, the largest is Jupiter, and I assumed that he was heading towards a bum joke (Uranus), but alas, he had confused his planets.)  Anyway, the scrambled eggs are in there, and have been stored away for a time, possibly in the very distant future, when I will need to recall that particular fact on order to contribute to a team victory at a trivia night, or similar.  That is, unless the crew at Guinness are contacted by someone who is able to throw together even more scrambled eggs than the Columbian gentleman who currently holds that honour.

I really love trivia.  I'm not sure if I subconsciously equate the holding of this knowledge to "being intelligent" (and I will openly, unashamedly say that I would like to be intelligent), or if I'm just genuinely interested in random facts.  Possibly a little of Column A and a little of Column B...

As a kid I found Dad's old copy of The Guinness Book of Records and pored over that tome.  Dad also had a set of encyclopaedias, and for those of you who are young enough to be not quite sure about those, it's Google in actual physical books, and someone has fact-checked the information prior to publication.  (As a side note, I always spell it encyclopaedia using the British English spelling, and quite possibly if I could work out how to make my keyboard stick together an ‘a’ and an ‘e’ as the diphthong ‘ae’ I would more than likely use that.  And people wonder why I’m single…)  Back to the encyclopaedia, this set had an index volume, which was a little odd because I couldn't figure out by what logical sequence they decided to lay the information out, but you would look up a topic in the index and it would tell you which volume and page to go to in order to read about said topic.  (I think the encyclopaedias at school were ordered alphabetically by topic.)  These were treasured possessions of my childhood.

The paradox for me, especially as an early childhood professional is that a trivia quiz is essentially a standardised test, and I quite openly abhor those as a tool by which to evaluate a child's abilities/potential/value.  I quite enjoy getting the answers right, and I like to "do well" at trivia.  Rest assured the irony is not lost on me.  I don't "study".  Things just stick in my head because that kind of random stuff actually interests me, which I think supports my position that things gel when they are relevant, make sense and are interesting.  I do question whether the "ear worm of facts" theory explains why I get to the supermarket and can't remember what's on my shopping list (which is still stuck to the fridge at home)... my working memory is busy remembering the heavy scrambled eggs and forgotten the milk!  Actually, I wonder if I need to buy more eggs...

The human brain is quite incredible, and over the past week between training for my Play Therapy job and working on Certificate IV in Training and Assessment I have thought a lot about how we learn.  Attitude plays a huge part I believe.  Many times, I have encouraged people to come along to a quiz night and they have responded with something along the lines of "I'm not smart enough for trivia".  More often than not, if I can convince them to join in there are things they can answer confidently and we all end up having a great night, whether we "win" or not.  That said, I won't be lining up for a Mensa-style trivia night.  My competitive streak (or lack thereof) may be the topic for another entry – I am a conundrum.

Last week’s 52 Frames theme was Reflections, so it was the perfect opportunity to give a different technique a crack.  The “Framer” who inspired me to take on this challenge posted some images earlier in the year with a spoon reflecting an image from an iPad and they looked really cool.  I spent the week trying to think of an image (that I had taken previously) to reflect, and couldn’t find the “right” one to use.  Not having enough time to shoot anything else I chose a photo I took earlier this year as part of a tattoo photo essay.  I am reminded this week that the challenge is not really about taking the “best” image each week.  It’s about creating a habit, and taking an image each week.  So far I’ve managed that for 9 weeks, and I feel a sense of accomplishment at that, so I’m taking the win.

I’ll leave you with some random facts that may or may not get stuck in your head.

1. A baby puffin is called a puffling
2. Triskaidekaphobia is the fear of the number 13.
3. A raft of otters hold hands while they sleep in the water so they don’t float apart.  Awwww
4. Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham contains only 50 different words, and he wrote it as a bet.
5. The national flags of Dominica and Nicaragua are the only ones that have the colour purple on them.

It's been quite a party, ain't it

Purple Fairy

** from the acerbic tongue of Basil Fawlty in Episode 5 of Fawlty Towers (1975) when patrons cancelled a dinner reservation on “Gourmet Night” citing illness