title: The Indispensable Book of Useless Information: Just When You Thought It Couldn't Get Any More Useless--It Does
author:  Don Voorhees 
description: <b>Don Voorhees </b>is the author of <i>The Incredible Book of Useless Information, The Super Book of Useless Information, The Indispensable Book of Useless Information, The Perfectly Useless Book of Useless Information, The Essential Book of Useless Information, </i>and <i>Disgusting Things: A Miscellany</i>. A native of Morris County, New Jersey, he now lives in Pennsylvania.
zlib_text: **The Book of Useless Information**
  
   **The Book of Useless Information**
  
  The Book of Useless Information
  
  The Book of Useless Information
  
  By Botham, Noel
  
  INTRODUCTION
  
  OH, but just how useless is useless? There, as Shakespeare observes in Act
  III, Scene I, of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, is the rub.
  
  For instance, the news that flamingos can only eat with their heads upside
  down, while of more than passing interest to a female flamingo teaching her
  fledglings to eat up their shrimp, is of little use to a human being trained
  to sit up at a table and employ a knife and fork. Yet suppose someone made one
  a present of a flamingo, and it persisted in eating with its head upside down.
  You could spend a fortune on vet bills before learning that, in flamingo
  circles, that is the way it is done.
  
  So we have to tread carefully. There have to be checks and balances. At our
  Useless Information Society summit meetings, we have these in the form of our
  formidable resident beadle, the dis