Did you know: -That "the first...

Did you know:

-That "the first paved road was 7oe miles prolonged and 6 feet wide and was built in Egypt . . 4,600 years" ago.

-That "a typical human skeleton consists of 206 bone including 22 in the cranium 14 in the face, 1 in the throat (hyoid bone)"

-The Cracker Jack dog's name is Bingo.

More important, do you care? If in the way that head down to your local bookstore or library, where the shelves are bending from the weight of works packed with such fluffy lumps They include Why Do Men Have Nipples? through Mark Leyner and Billy Goldberg, MD; Vitamin Q: A fane of Trivia Lists and Curious Words, by dint of Roddy Lumsden; One Letter Words: A Dictionary through Craig Conley; Why? by Erin McHugh; Schott's Original Miscellany, by the agency of Ben Schott, and Do down in the mouth Bedsheets Bring Babies? by Thomas Craughwell (they don't).

There's unruffled a growing subgenre of volumes by people detailing their attempts to master trivia, so as The Know-It-All, by A.J. Jacobs; The Areas of My Expertise, by way of John Hodgman, and the September title Braniac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia made of buff [i]or[/i] buff-skins by Ken Jennings.

Scour these volumes and you'll be a hit when your cocktail party visitants need to know who's the patron saint of motorists (John the Baptist); Arabic for the craving of certain aliments during pregnancy (waham); the name of Popeye's father (Poopdeck Pappy) or the someone who invented the can opener (Ezra J Warner).

Trivia, of course, is not a 21st hundred phenomenon. No doubt passels of wise-apple cavemen bored their pals to tears with facts about stalactites and stalagmites. enclose up and pass the wolf's children please. In modern times, "Jeopardy!" has been in succession the on air with alone slight interruption since 1964 (Art Fleming was the first host); The work of Lists was a publishing phenomena in the 1970s; and The Guinness part of World Records, published in 1955 in connection with the Guinness Brewery, has become the same of the best- selling volumes of all time.

nevertheless of late, trivia books have become in such a manner plentiful that the Wall public way Journal has written about their growing importance to publishing's bottom line. And the of recent origin York Times ran a stretch piece tracking their emergence, with volume critic Janet Maslin cleverly dubbing them "So what?" works

After riffling between the sides of a dozen of these titles, I can understand Maslin's mystified shrug still I also think she's missing the cake for the frosting. Each tidbit or jump collection of factoids may be in the way that insignificant that calling it trivia is almost an honorific. However, this growing genre signals a skilled trend in America: The rise of shake Culture, which combines our search for information -- this is, after all, the Age of Information -- with our lust for immediate gratification.

shaking Culture can be seen in the thrust of contemporary magazines from Rolling Stone and populace to Maxim and Entertainment Weekly, which increasingly rely in succession pictures and short captions rather than longer stories. Newspapers are responding to the sweep through the heavier use of what's known as "alternative story forms" -- quick- hit information boxe that boil down the essential facts of any given story to a small in number easily digested tidbits. It is apparent in the rise of talking-head television, which substitutes passion for analysis, and in films that trade in jaw-dropping spectacle rather than taut narratives about characters facing tough moral choices.

be shaken Culture is often conflated with the "dumbing-down" of America. They are, undoubtedly, partners in crime. Trivia main division s -- which strip meaning from knowledge, providing us with information moreover the not the context we ne to apply it -- contain this relationship. At bottom, they provide us with fleeting sensation. It is not and nothing else neat to know that Luxembourg has the highest gros domestic yield per capita of any nation ($58900 by person, according to the 2005 CIA World Factbook) or that an average apple has 47 calories. like trivia is also strangely satisfying. Like celebrity shooters in People magazine, or a Keith Olbermann rant, it confines our attention to the point of mesmerism. Until -- a hardly any seconds later -- it's across

That's the power of be shaken Culture. In this high-tech, service economy, where increasing numbers of us work with our heads instead of our hands, earn our living by means of what we know rather than what we can do, shaking Culture puts a premium forward that which we value most: information.

And it deliberates two other key developments. First, our piece of works require such a high plain of specialized knowledge and obligate us to bestow so much time reading, absorbing material relating to our have little worlds, that we don't want to work too hard for pleasure.

We don't want works television shows or movies to make demands forward our minds or emotions -- we want them to soothe us, delight us and then leave us alone.

secondary our culture has become to such a degree fast-paced that many of us have missed the patience required to mine the deeper satisfactions of advanced in years