Name Six things you could have learned in school but you learned from pop culture instead.
1. Aerodynamics - Learned from Top Gun and Blue Thunder. Many concepts I know about how things fly were learned from these two films. The most prominent is that helicopters can't flip over.
2. Scottish History - Learned from Braveheart and Rob Roy. I love cool history stories and William Wallace and Rob Roy are two of the cooler ones. There are historical inaccuracies in both movies but they gave me the inspiration to learn more about their stories. And Rob Roy's are nice drinks to order in fine drinking establishments.
3. General Trivia - Learned from Trivial Pursuit. I know this one seems slightly lame and obvious, but you have to realize that Trivial Pursuit is serious business in our friend circle. Wrestling matches have broken out during this game. Not kidding. So, when you play it that hard and fast, you learn quickly or you get your ass handed to you.
4. Louis the 14th - Learned from the show Encyclopedia. I don't know if anyone else has ever been graced with this show. It was pretty cool. Each episode picked a letter of the alphabet and then did several entries from the encyclopedia starting with that letter. They would use animation, live sketches and songs to teach kids about things. The one I remember the clearest was a song about Louis the 14th, the sun king. It was a great song that talked about building Versailles and such and it stuck with me. Great show if you can find it.
5. Military History - Learned from Age Of Empires 2: The Age of Kings. This game is one of my favorite of all time and its chock full of cool military history information. The game manual alone has tons of stuff about how these ancient civilizations kicked ass and took names. FYI: Favorite race to play is the Vikings. They have a bad ass special unit called a Berserker that regenerates on its own.
6. Current Events - Learned from doing short form improv. Nothing tells you more about what is going on in the public eye then taking suggestions from an improv audience. You will learn exactly what people are talking about, and in some ways how they feel about it. Long form or Harold improv has some aspects of this, but they only have one suggestion to start off. Short form gets a lot of suggestions and you'd be surprised how you can have completely different audiences give the same suggestions. My rule has always been if I don't know what a suggestion is from an audience member, I find out what it is by the next show. So I know how to tell the Jonas Brothers apart and I know how to use a lathe.
Readers: Name six things you learned from pop culture.
