In one of my most paranoid states, I'm convinced I've got Alzheimers, especially when I forget important stuff like people's names or whether or if I fed the dogs while I was talking to a friend on the phone.  My husband claims I say things I don't remember saying, which may be true or may be a clever way to get me to do things.  But those worries go completely out the window when I recall various useless factoids when I visit Liquid Planet and get a double stamp on my frequent buyercard.

You see, I've been hired as a technical reviewer for a course.  I have to admit that going through the course is a lot more interesting and fun than I thought it would be.  You see, for the first time a bunch of useless information that has been rattling inside my brain is actually useful, and the fact that I can recall it and then look up the references on the web or in my books is kind of cool.  Take Yersinia pestis, or, Bubonic Plague.  The disease is simply fascinating, though I wouldn't want to contract it.  Here are some factoids I know about it:

--  The Black Plague during the Middle Ages wiped out somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2 the population in areas, causing widespread labor shortages.

--  The labor shortages caused by the plague eventually ended feudalim and gave rise to democracy due to the rise of a middle class who earned wages and demanded higher payments.  When you have a class of freemen with money and land, they start demanding more rights and greater equality.

--  The plague years peaked from 1348 to 1350, doing the worst damage, however, there have been about 100 other outbreaks of plague that were less widespread.

--  Dogs and other canines are resistant to plague; cats are not.

--  Some of the population has immunity to AIDS and smallpox and it has been theorized that the Black Death may have somehow naturally selected individuals because of a genetic variant. 

-- Some have theorized that Black Death may not have been bubonic plague or may have been a combination of bubonic plague and other diseases such as anthrax. 

--  Plague shows up routinely in praire dog colonies in Colorado.

-- Plague is transmitted through flea bites of the black rat.

--  It was called the "blue death" in Medieval times.

--  People didn't know what caused the plague during the "Black Death" and thought it had to do with bad air or vapors. 

--  There are three forms of plague: the bulboe plague, the pneumatic plague and the septicemic plague.  All will kill you in horrifying ways and your likeliness of survival without treatment is slim to none.

--  The Roman Catholic pope was sequestered with smoke and incense to ward off the bad vapors.

-- The flagellates were people who believed that god was punishing the world for sins, so they took to beating themselves with whips in the hopes to purify themselves.

See?  This is all very interesting, and yet, worthless. 

Unless you're doing reviews of material that mentions the Bubonic Plague