Twentysomething

I’m A Genius

By David Lion Rattiner

There are a lot of people in my life who believe that I have the most intimate knowledge about the strangest things. For example, my Dad the other day asked me what the name of the main ingredient in suntan lotion is. “Let me think about this for a second.” I said, and then I left the room. After a little bit of ‘thought’ I said, two minutes later, “Octyl Methoxycinnamate!”

“How do you know that?”

“I just do!”

I’m the same way about the weather.

Somebody might ask me what the weather is going to be like three days from now and I will tell them, along with detailed barometric pressures and also what time of day you can expect it to feel a certain temperature. People think I’m a genius when I give them this information with such detail.

Well, I am here to confess something. I do not know anything about anything. In fact, I am a semi-idiot. But there is one little trick up my sleeve that other people don’t seem to have figured out, and that little trick is google.com.

Anything, and I mean anything that can be asked, can simply be typed into google.com on the Internet and in a split second, you can find the answer, along with even more interesting information on the subject written by experts. Ask me anything and I can get you the answer in five minutes. Who invented the cell phone? That’s easy, Martin Cooper did in 1973, it wasn’t very practical because it weighed 2 pounds! Voila, I just googled that little piece of info.

What is remarkable to me is how few people go to google.com as a source for an answer to a question in conversation. Oh sure, they’ll go to it immediately if they have a term paper to write or if they have to find the best possible airline ticket, but a simple question will have them saying simply, “I have no idea,” or they will get so frustrated about not knowing something that they will go to the library and research it themselves. Of course there is always the option of asking the “know-it-all kid” who has enough sense to hop onto google.com and google the information for you. But then you feel like an idiot.

Just the other day I was having a conversation at dinner about World War II with some friends and the whole reason that I was doing this was because I just spent about three hours on the Internet reading about World War II on Wikipedia.com, the free encyclopedia that is on the Internet. I had absorbed a remarkable amount of information on the Bazooka, which was first designed and used by Americans to blow up Nazi tanks. There was the M1A1 Bazooka that was developed at George Washington University for soldiers on the ground and made its debut in late 1942. It was 54 inches long and combined rocket powered weaponry and the shape charged warhead. The whole idea was started by a guy named Robert H. Goddard in 1918 after he came up with the rocket powered weapon idea. But it wasn’t until later that his idea was mastered, after others followed his work two decades later.

The weapon was a huge success and when the Germans saw it, they immediately copied it and made a more precise, larger and longer-ranged bazooka known as the Panzerschreck. The Germans and the Americans had this kind of Bazooka/Panzerschreck Freudian type of issue. My gun needs to be bigger than your gun kind of thing.

Am I a World War II historian? No, I just googled it! That’s all I did, dude! And that’s all that the other guy is doing who is answering the strange questions nobody seems to know but him.

Obviously writing this column about this was a bad idea, because now, my secret to my genius is out. But I don’t care, because the guys who also do this act like a bunch of jerks. The problem with google geniuses is that it is very easy to sound like you are a know-it-all when you are not. So in this day and age we have a lot of want to be know-it-all’s running around pretending they know everything, but really have just mastered using the Internet on their Blackberries. I’m sick of watching these people make others feel like idiots.

Don’t you miss the good old days when the know-it-alls would just sit in the library all day and soak up knowledge, not making other people feel like idiots because, well, you knew that they were a know-it-all and knew better to just avoid talking to them unless you REALLY needed to know something?

What’s the population of Fiji?

893,394. Boom. According to google it took me .26 seconds to figure that one out. I’m not impressed with you.

I’m really feeling relieved to get this secret out, because I am so sick of those wannabe computer geeks that act like they know everything and treat you like an idiot because you don’t know something when all they are really doing is finding out the information on the Internet. I’m not impressed. You want to impress me? Be honest.