I love learning. I consider it a poor day indeed that I don't learn something new. Unfortunately, my brain and the memory contained therein have no filter and no mechanism for getting rid of useless information. I'm starting to envy my computer. Anything I don't want it to remember I simply delete forever from its memory banks. A computer never has to learn that Pamela Anderson has had her breast implants removed unless I tell it so, and I have no intention of burdening an innocent machine with annoying trivia. (Whoops, I just did.) Now, as a reasoning being, I also know that Ms. Anderson had the implants in the first place. Now there's two useless facts I now possess using up valuable skull space that could have been reserved for something, anything else.

Nothing against Ms. Anderson or breasts, I like them both. It's just that I've been noticing that a prominent feature of the "Information Age" is a huge amount of ridiculous information coming my way that I did not seek. Short of becoming a hermit who shuns newspapers, television, radio, movies, billboards and computers, I see no way of stopping this flow of minutia. And so I worry about my brain. I like knowing things. I already have a head full of unrelated arcane facts. My head, and therefore my brain, is only average sized and I fear it is getting full. Anyone who's spent any time with an elderly relative knows that the human memory is a finite resource prone to breakdown in one's later years. And our grandparents learned most of their stuff before the saturation bombing of our skulls began. I’m now past 50 years old and for the past 20 or so of them I've been absorbing reams and reams of printed and audio idiocy that has nothing to do with anything at all. Will my memory fill up early? Senile at 55? Even now the thing I remember most about the first Bush administration is that the man hated broccoli and that fact upset the nation no end. That's not a good sign.

I find myself trying to tune out useless news. I do not care which blond young bimbo got locked up for what offense this week. I have no curiosity as to the identity or any actor or actress’ latest flame. Anything at all to do with hockey or tennis is an automatic eye-glazer. After all, any hockey trivia that sneaks in might push aside some important baseball statistics, for which I have an unabashed passion. I'm not interested in the latest figures on Bill Gates' net worth. I just figure it's a gazillion bucks by now and leave it at that. I don't think I need to know the latest trends among teenagers. I consider that their business, and the mass publicizing of it only takes the fun of it away from them, so why be a spoil sport? I sure don't want to join in. There's not too many sadder sights than thirty, forty and fifty-something year-olds trying to look and act like teeners. Spare me. I also don't want to know about the latest technological advances in shaving. I'm good with that, thank you very much. High-tech science it's not.

I have no whiff of interest in celebrities' sexual orientation, chemical dependencies or dysfunctional histories. Zero. If they perform well, that's enough for me. And that includes politicians and athletes. Besides, let us have our illusions and fantasies. Why burst everybody's bubble so you can get lightweight burdens off your chest? For the most part these people are rich, and nothing annoys the public more than hearing rich people whine. We don't, so you shouldn't either just because some hairdo buffoon with glistened eyes affords you a televised showcase to complain while he or she nods sympathetically for the camera. It just gives people the creeps, and more information than we need to know. Do like the rest of us do and find a friend or a bottle of red eye to hash things out with. And don't think you're helping others with similar problems by "coming forward" publicly. You want to help somebody, shut the hell up and quietly pay for someone's mental therapy or medical care. You are not some social innovator for admitting a problem nor are you anyone's savior. Misty eyes are for family, friends and acting roles.

I don't especially care for the Internet, although I know there is a lot of valuable information to be learned there. The problem is that, in order to find that good stuff you have to endure hours of unbelievably tedious tidbits of knowledge you could do better without. It's like a million phone books folding out of a single phone book and you must turn each page to find what you want instead of being able to flip through the book alphabetically. Who designed this thing? If it truly was Al Gore he shouldn’t be bragging about it. Or maybe he’s like me, a computer-challenged middle aged knucklehead trying to keep up with the times with mixed results. I happen to know firsthand that you can find 27 distributors of rubber galoshes on the Internet. Find them by accident, that is. If you were looking for them you'd never find them. I had no idea there were that many distributors of rubber galoshes. I had no reason to think about it one way or the next. Sears has all the galoshes I ever wanted to think about but there it is, more wasted human memory chips. I even forget what I was trying to look up in the first place, clear evidence of the power of useless information to nudge aside bunches of useful knowledge.

The internet is also full of people "chatting". The only chats I've ever had is face to face with another live human being or on the telephone, thus having no chance of passing myself off as "Candypants from Malibu." Typing lies to unseen strangers is not chatting, it's a bizarre indication that you have way too much idle time on your hands. Me even knowing about this strange phenomenon is using up even more brain space. I can only speculate on the brain drain involved in maintaining a fictional personality and multiple relationships with cyber chatters doing the same. It boggles what is left of my dwindling memory.

What was I talking about? There, see what I mean? The synapses and neurons inside my skull are being squeezed and juggled and scrambled by trivia. What I need is a good defragmenting. I don't remember algebra but I know that Elvis Presley died on the toilet. I loved Elvis and his work and why should I have to know that about him? It's demeaning to him and to me. Where's my delete button? I couldn't tell you what was decided at the Diet of Worms but I know about all kinds of silly fad diets and I'm a thin person. What gives? Why do I remember that Wonder Bread builds strong bodies twelve ways when you couldn't pay me to eat the stuff? Why do I know that so-called "Super-models" have tiny appetites for everything but heroin? Is this necessary? It only sidetracks me from pondering life's larger mysteries, such as: Who put the bop in the bop-shu-wop-shu-wop, who put the ram in the ramalamadingdong?
Am I supposed to care about a guy stealing and sniffing some famous lady's shoes? Is this legitimate news? Of course it isn't. But there it was, page 2 in the newspaper and bingo, it's locked in my brain. Great. I just know some important fact got shoved aside for the foot guy. Let's see, William the Conqueror subdued England in 1066. Okay, good, that's not lost. There's no way of telling, but I suspect I was groping for an answer that I used to know while watching "Jeopardy" the other day. Thanks, foot fetish guy. You replaced Kowloon in my memory banks. I also don't need to hear another word about Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco, all these years later. There never was any upside whatsoever to their tawdry tale and no moral lessons to be passed on to the kiddies. Ditto for the business news pages. Machiavellian power struggles over other people's money don't pique my interest and the meanness of spirit of some of these multi-billionaires is depressing, to say the least. You’d think these guys would spend their days singing and laughing and thanking their damned lucky stars. Give me a billion bucks and just see if you could wipe the grin off my mug.

In the sports section, playoff basketball and hockey has the sports scribes really reaching for stories in these tainted seasons of business page-like big money tales and steroid use that overshadow the athletic events. And guys, I may have forgotten algebra, but I know nobody can give 110% of anything, even something as intangible as effort. Thank God for baseball and Mike Lupica columns, neither of which puts unwanted trivia and cliches into my overtaxed head. Trivia, perhaps, but it's information that I seek, and therein lies the difference. Box scores and baseball guy stories. Can't get enough of them. Baseball wisely never lets two weeks elapse between the final playoffs and the World Series, ala football's two weeks of mind-numbing buildup to the Super Bowl. That's a dangerous thing to do to sportswriters and fans alike, and the lack of real news of actual games leads to some of the most tedious sports writing of the year, every year. Oh great, another profile of the guy who wear’s the dopey team mascot suit! Talk about eye-glazing.

To say nothing of the surreal exchanges on sports radio call-in shows, traditionally lousy with callers with way too much time on their hands. A good rule of thumb here is: if you find yourself getting involved in complicated discussions at midnight on the merits of small power forwards still available in the 5th round of the NBA draft and you are not a professional scout or general manager, you need to get a life swiftly. During the Super Bowl build-up, these shows only get worse, if you can possibly imagine that. In-depth interviews and biographies of team travelling secretaries are only one disastrous result of this down time. Only another story comparing the relative greatness(!) of Cal Ripken Jr. and Rafael Palmiero could be worse. These are games we're talking about here, no? These guys were superb athletes, true, but don't confuse them with Churchill, Roosevelt and Ghandi. Or Mickey, Willie and the Duke for that matter.

We are all in the same boat in this exalted age of information. We all love information and knowledge, but not all knowledge is created equal. Some of it is downright distracting and annoying and a lot of it is totally unnecessary. I don't give a damn how they created the special effects for Star Wars. What ever happened to trade secrets? Just let me enjoy the damned movie and marvel at your technical wizardry and artistry, please. Jimi Hendrix never did tell anyone publicly exactly how he was able to get those other-worldly sounds out of the same equipment every other guitar slinger was using and it only adds to his legend. Explaining away the technical details of the creation of art puts it in the category of an engineering project like a bridge or an automobile. Leave the technical shoptalk to the technicians and let us enjoy the magic. Besides, I need the skull space for my box scores.