C(ulture)++

I don't get why it is that people simply don't know anything. I mean, I'm included in that statement (despite my best efforts). It drives me nuts: information seems to spill out of my brain almost as fast as I can cram more sutff in, and the stuff that does stick is rarely vital to my ongoing existence. For example:

• I can still tell you all fifteen factions of the city of Sigil, from the now-defunct Planescape setting of D&D.
• I have a knack for remembering the faces of actors and determining where else I've seen them.
• I know the hebrew myth of the golem, and that while alive, the word "TRUTH" was inscribed on its forhead. Thus, by erasing one character, the word came ot mean "DEAD," and the golem ceased to live.
• I can tell you that the Oda clan in Shogun: Total War built castles more cheaply.

What can't I remember?

• How to program in Java, even though I spent a whole semester doing it.
• Huge swaths of French vocabulary, even though I speak fluently.
• Whether someone who I'm telling a story to was, in fact, one of the people present when it happened.
• The names of more than a dozen people I went to high school with.
  

So my mind has become sort of a clearing house for inside jokes, gamer esoterica, movie synopses, and science fiction. Meanwhile, my liberal arts education has left me scratching my head as to the names of all those Greek guys whose ancient books I read, and to where those countries in the news are on a map.

I'd love an external memory - a digital database, codified through cross-relations (X is related to Y for reason Z). Whenever I jump onto wikipedia because I'm curious about something (like, for example, who the band Phish was), the details actually stick because I plunk them into this core.

And if everyone else did it as well, people would understand my in jokes! When I say, "It's on fire, and wrapped in bacon!" people understand me. People would know not only who Cthulhu is, but Nyarlathotep and Yog-Sothoth as well. I could joke about why the cats of Ulthar are well-fed, or why Sergeant Schlock doesn't like riding in cabs.

Just wishful thinking, I know. We don't have e-brains yet. It's a shame. People might catch the contradictions in their politicians' shifting campaign platforms.