The Book of General Ignorance

By Jesse Kornbluth
Founder, HeadButler.com

Life ain't fair.

We have the diving dollar. Brits have the powerful pound.

We've got Axe Deodorant Body Spray. Brits have Penhaligon's Blenheim Bouquet.

We have American Idol. Brits have Quite Interesting (or QI, as it's known across the pond).

QI is smart TV. It does not shrink from the designation "intellectual British panel game," which may explain why, despite its roaring success, no American network is rushing to import it. The host is Stephen Fry, a large, funny, educated chap who was once half of Hugh Laurie and has a bit of Oscar Wilde about him. [The significant difference, of course, is that Fry sees nothing wrong about openly declaring his homosexuality and delivering such bon mots as "I suppose it all began when I came out of the womb. I looked back up at my mother and thought to myself, 'That's the last time I'm coming out of one of those'".]

The idea of the show -- well, it's complicated, and no one connected to the enterprise can figure out the scoring, but the general idea is that everything you think you know is wrong.

Like the facts. The ones you know. Moths are attracted to flames, yes? A whale could have swallowed Jonah, right? Chameleons change color, do they not?

And camels -- water's in the humps. The planet's mostly water. An American invented baseball. Blackboard chalk is chalk.

Don't bet on any of that.

Flushed with intellectual superiority, John Lloyd, the show's creator and producer, and his head researcher, John Mitchinson, decided to go beyond television and do what all respectable Brits do at some point in their lives -- put out a book. Their purpose: Provide a Real Service in a know-it-all-world. As they write:

We live, they say, in The Information Age, yet almost none of the information we think we possess is true. Eskimos do not rub noses. The rickshaw was invented by an American. Joan of Arc was not French. Lenin was not Russian. The world is not solid, it is made of empty space and energy, and neither haggis, whisky, porridge, clan tartans nor kilts are Scottish.

So we stand, silent, on a peak in Darien: a vast, rolling, teeming, untrodden territory before us. QI country.Whatever is interesting we are interested in. Whatever is not interesting, we are even more interested in. Everything is interesting if looked at in the right way.

In this endlessly amusing and far too informative book, you will unlearn many lies that you have been told were bedrock truths. You will learn how to read questions carefully, the better to find the tricks. [Hey, they're Brits.] You will smarten up. You will develop the proper skepticism about the "knowledge" we think we know.

And you'll become that annoyingly smart person -- the word I'm looking for is, I think, smartass -- at parties. Which makes this an invaluable book.

Click here to buy The Book of General Ignorance now.

Jesse Kornbluth is a New York-based journalist and founder of Head Butler.com, a cultural concierge site and free daily e-mail featuring information on new and classic books, movies and music.

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