Over/Under for today is 7
Raz Over/Under is 8
I got 12 today. And the coinkydink was not so obvious to me but still a good one.
Since we started this ritual of comparing scores on celebrity birthdays, I've been trying to understand what defines the patterns in the ones I recognized.
That I get my own over/under is attributable to the fact that I've always, for whatever reason, retained a lot of trivia. I don't know why. Probably attributable to the fact that we moved a lot when I was a kid, so I was frequently an outsider and spent a lot of time alone reading. And I spent a lot of time reading the World Book Encyclopedia. I also draw a lot of the lyrics I write from news articles, so that cements a lot of things in my head.
There's also an age and time period cutoff in there somewhere. Clearly LTG is more familiar with younger celebrities, and I'm strongest in the 80s and 90s, when I was a teenager and young adult. Part of that has to do with when I started raising kids, and the fact that when my kids got to a certain age I had less free time, and writing and playing music took priority over movies and TV.
Then there are particular interests, like musicians, where I do well. Particular TV shows, like NCIS. One of my longest-time best friends and musical collaborators is a film editor and cinema freak, so we've spent a lot of time analyzing films. For years we competed at predicting Academy Award winners.
But there are still a lot of pretty obvious names and intersections I miss, and others that I know but can't explain why. I have no idea why Anna Quindlan's name and face stick in my head. I was a journalism minor in college, so maybe I ran across her work then. No idea. Robert Knepper sticks in my head, but I was just guessing when I looked to see if he'd ever been on NCIS.
For whatever reason, metainformation has always been an interest of mine, since long before the term was widely known. It has something to do with music, I think. It was a problem for me academically, particularly in math, when I was a kid. I always thought I was bad at math, until an algebra teacher in high school showed me how quadratic equations could be used to approximate fuel/air curves for hod rods or ballistics. Suddenly math made sense, but it was because I had to understand "why" math worked, and not just how. I had the same problem with piano lessons. I needed to be taught music theory first, and most of my piano teachers didn't really understand theory. They just read music from paper.
Patterns. Everything has patterns, and I always have to know the patterns.
