Here are some tidbits you can toss into a really dull conversation...

• The reason old-time firehouses had circular stairways and brass poles is that the horses kept to pull the fire engines — and stabled on the ground floor — kept figuring out how to walk up regular staircases.
• 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 123,456,789,987,654,321
• If you have three quarters, four dimes, and four pennies, you have $1.19. You also have the largest amount of money one can have in coins without being able to make change for a dollar.
• The sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses every letter in the English alphabet.

    Interesting, huh? Did you learn anything new? Know somebody you can impress with one or more of these facts? Before you get too excited, though, let me give you the collective term for such tidbits of information. The word is “trivia.”

...a lot of us are frittering away our lives with the moral and spiritual equivalent of trivia.

    I suspect that a lot of us are frittering away our lives with the moral and spiritual equivalent of trivia. He’s not really a bad fellow. He’s made several million dollars with his drive to succeed — though he has gone through three wives. She’s not a criminal. But nobody can work with her on company projects — in spite of the fact that everybody knows she’s the brightest person there.

    Maybe they’re too much into trivia — success, quotas, money, and awards. And too little into what really matters — people and the God in whose image they are created. Who wants this epitaph: “He put in more overtime than anybody”?

    As you go through life, enjoy your achievements and their rewards. But don’t major in trivia. The real stuff of living is people — and learning to love them.

If I could speak in any language in heaven or on earth but didn’t love others, I would only be making meaningless noise like a loud gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I knew all the mysteries of the future and knew everything about everything, but didn’t love others, what good would I be? And if I had the gift of faith so that I could speak to a mountain and make it move, without love I would be no good to anybody. If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would be of no value whatsoever. (1 Corinthians 13:1-5)