Arcane knowledge

My cousin, myself, and another fellow (should I call him ''friend''? an e-friend, I guess -- never met him in person...) have been e-mailing back and forth about songwriting, perfect pitch, and related. I mentioned that John Entwhistle (bassist for The Who) said he used to have perfect pitch -- but The Who used to tune up using a broken harmonica -- and after a few years of this, he lost his pitch.

Which made me realize: that's pretty obscure stuff. (In ascending order of obscurity: the name of the bassist for The Who; he had perfect pitch; they used to tune to a harmonica; the dodgy harmonica caused him to lose his perfect pitch.)

As I think I've blogged about before, I have a few pockets of knowledge that are deeper than what most people know. Not as deep as those who specialize in one of those areas -- but I don't think there's too many people around who have the combination of knowledge that I do.


Roughly on a scale of -5 to +5, with "0" being the baseline for what normal males (let's keep this gendered) know about, I'm...

+3 on recording techniques (well, maybe +3 -- I'm out of practice),

+3 on the perspectives of famous and semi-famous pop/rock songwriters,

+3.5 on music instruments and gear (someone who plays a specific instrument would know more about that instrument -- but I have a pretty broad range of awareness of classical, rock, and folk instruments),

+3 on woodworking with hand tools,

+1 on computer stuff,

+2 on awareness of Linux stuff,

+4 on martial arts (not the **doing**, necessarily, but the awareness of different styles, and a little bit on their histories/inter-connectedness),

+3 on super heroes (although I'm out of touch compared to fifteen years ago),

+4 on Sociology and Criminology (Upgraded from "+3" -- I'd been basing this relative to my co-workers, rather than the general populace)

+4 on quantitative (i.e., statistical) research methods (Again, upgraded from "+3" -- most people don't even **think** about this stuff...)


So, I'm not a world-class expert (i.e., "+5") on any one thing. But I have all these weird pockets of knowledge that pop up. Which, not surprisingly, approximately correspond with the amount of bookshelf space taken up by that field.


Conversely, I'm probably -4 for sports, -4 for makes and models of cars, -2 for politics, and -3 for history. Compared to the typical male of my age.


--GG