The Humuhumunukunukuapua`a is the state fish of Hawaii, albeit unofficial.

How I came to know that rather curious fact is what I have decided to write about...Wait!...Strike that...how I have come to know a whole constellation of curious fact, arcane knowledge and just plain not common sense is what I want to write about.

I want to make it abundantly clear, which undoubtedly would happen after you read a few of my flawed statements in any case, that I am not a philosopher and that this is not in almost any way, shape or form, abstract, solid or constructed from some geometry of n-or-so dimensions to be construed as an essay in epistemology or my method, rigorous or casual, for how I, we all, come to know things. That is way beyond my scope or ability.

Whew, it was great to get that bit of mental flotsam off my chest.

Back to the fish also known as the Hawaiian Trigger Fish, I simply heard it one sunny Sunday morning on NPR. Now the question becomes why did NPR run such an audio article? Beats me! I have never been asked it in a game of Trivial Pursuit, but would ace the category, if the question came up.

One of my inventions, so don’t you bother to run out and copyright it, is the game of Consequential Pursuits. There are only five maybe ten cards. At the beginning of play everyone sits in the lotus position, comfortable on pillows, opposite one another. After a couple Om Mani Padme Hums the person who feels “the rightness of the moment” picks a card and displays the contents to the assembled initiates. The card thus picked in our tutorial round is “Love”. The participants then spend the next ten to twenty years in deep contemplation on the concept of “Love”. One of the conundrums that must be solved is how someone wins the game.

Look, I know a bunch of stuff. None of it can be considered as practical, germane, important or topical in the quotidian life that I lead. It is our habit at the company where I work to play a bastardized game of Trivial Pursuit. I read the entire card, we all guess and haw at the answer and then I turn to card over and spit up the knowledge tallied on the other side. No pies, no moves, no climbs up the Parcheesi like board, just the questions and the answers, ma’am. The kind of game Joe Friday would play.

One day I was off in the world and came back to a game in progress around the lunch table. “Go ahead ask him!” one co-worker nudged another. “He won’t know! He can’t know that!” said another. The implication was that if I did know the answer I was even a queerer duck than anyone thought. “Okay, “said the first person, clutching the card, “What Philosopher wrote the Blue and the Brown Books?”

Quicker than you can say Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, I answered “Wittgenstein”

“You can’t know that!” said one. “First name?” questioned the other
“Ludwig” I said, “born Vienna, Austria.” Like a true Wisenheimer.

See, they never asked me what the books were about. And I don’t know why I remembered Ludwig very much. Once I owned a copy of all three books and can’t even pretend that I plumed their depths. Hell, I couldn’t even skim their surface.

A friend of mine, Dean to be exact, says the he stopped playing Trivial Pursuit when a woman combatant yelled at him as he answered some equally obscure bit of information, “You have no right to know that!”

I haven’t quit. I love knowing the stupid stuff that I know. It makes life a little more worthwhile. My latest tack is, when confronted with irate faces caused somehow by my answering an inconsequential questions is to say, “Well, why is it that you don’t know that?”

It’s the question I ask my self when someone exhibits knowledge unknown to me. In wonder, I think, “Why don’t I know that?”

Did you know that Marilyn Monroe was the model for Tinker Bell? I often go to sleep dreaming about that.