Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Quick! Name Three Countries Beginning with P!

My wife asked me this question, minus the additional pressure of the "Quick!", earlier this week. I know she works with shipping software, so I didn't know if she knew and was testing my comprehensive knowledge of trivia, or if she had a point.

"Uh," I said, buying time for the beginning of the tour of the mental globe I could conjure. "Papua New Guinea, the Phillipines, Paraguay...." I didn't know if the world only contained three P countries. I knew I couldn't depict Africa in my mind with any accuracy, or the South Pacific, but I thought the three I named were countries, for sure.

She wasn't testing me; she needed the information for her blog. But she piqued my curiosity, and I knew where to go to quickly uncover an alphabetical list of countries. As an IT professional, albeit a technical writer hanger-on, I might be expected to go to Google or some other Internet source to isolate the information I need. Oh, but no.

I have a World Almanac. A micro-Internet on my bookshelf, and its response does not depend upon the traffic between me and my ISP. My World Almanac indicated I had forgotten such obvious selections as Pakistan, Panama, Peru, and Portugal, as well as Palua. In addition to the names, my World Almanac provides me detailed information about population, currency, land mass, and other trivia too trivial to mention.

Since they continue to print almanacs, I assume I am not the only one who still gets them (albeit this one was a gift from my lovely wife, who must have thought my trivial overload in any conversation was somewhat lacking in diversity and scope). Before people could wander the Internet to use portals and search engines to pique their interests in new subjects to explore, they had encyclopedias and almanacs. Whereas the World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica have pretty much fallen by the wayside, and their online counterparts struggle to keep an online public informed, some hardy publishers keep printing and binding almanacs.

I'd like to take a moment to thank them for the effort, and for the eventual Trivia Night supremacy they're provoking. Although the Internet remains directively informative--you have to really have to make some effort to find factual material--almanacs let you recline in a chair and browse them while a fire hisses from the gas fireplace and swing music whispers from the digital cable stream.

All right, I guess I am in the middle of a shift from the traditional to the digital, but I have the best of both worlds. When almanacs are gone, we'll have one less world of which we can enjoy the best.

- posted by Brian J. @ 11:24 PM