Know It All

I've been feeling rather uninspired to write due to this month's challenge. Okay, doing a good deed every day is a really good idea, but what am I supposed to write about?
"Today I held the door open for someone" or "Today I gave an elderly woman my seat on the T".
We all do good things for each other every day, and most of the time I don't even notice. I need something I can actually write about. So I'm going to change it up, or in the very least start the January challenge early.

I've been inspired by this book I'm reading, entitled The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A.J. Jacobs. He spent a full year reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. I just finished reading his book called The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, where he tries to follow every rule written in the Bible. He does these year-long challenges (instead of my measly 30 day challenges) and then writes a book about it, and/or has a TED talk about it. His newest book is called Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection, which is next on my list.

Here is the TED video for the book I just finished, and in it, he talks about other "experiments" he has done:

We live in an age where our phones are smarter than us, where people playing word games on their cellphones are at an all time high, and yet it seems that people using correct spelling, grammar, and vocabulary are at an all time low. Our phones correct our spelling for us, penmanship is a lost art due to computers, and grammar is corrected by the little animated paperclip in Word documents. 

We all have questions that randomly pop into our heads, from the serious to the funny, for example:

"How much does an unmarried dependent student have to make before he/she has to file an income tax return?"or most recently,"What is a dingis?" 

I would say most of us have a version of an iPhone, where no matter where we are in the world, we can look up the answers to these questions. So what's our excuse? "I don't know the answer because I'm too lazy to take my phone out of my pocket and type the question into google and then wait for the answer to load". Seriously. 

So for the next 30 days, I will let no question go unanswered. I will learn correct spelling, attempt to use correct grammar, and will find out which actor plays that role in that movie I watched a few days ago...instead of waiting until 3 in the morning for it to pop into my head. We've all been there. 

There's the saying "You learn something new every day", or in the spirit of this challenge, "You learn several new things every day". Now, I want to be original and I don't want to make it easy for myself, so I won't want to take any information from The Know-It-All. I'm not on a quest to be the smartest person in the world. I'm not even on a quest to become smart. I'm just simply trying to make the best use out of the technology that I have, retain some useful information, and learn something interesting. 

I wanted to write about how Paul Hindemith, one of my favorite composers from Germany, favored Budweiser over any other beer. After pouring over articles, letters, and wikipedia entries, I couldn't find any proof to back that up. It's a nice thought though. 

Here's a fact for you. If Stravinsky was around today, he would most likely have an iPhone with the Words with Friends app. Apparently, the guy was a big fan of Scrabble...in addition to being a musical genius. 

Here's a clip from a performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and this video just happens to begin at my favorite part. Well worth the watch, so many colors and textures, really fun to play, and there is even some subtle humorous camera work in there.