Trivial matters

So how does one actually get to know about these inconsequential yet nifty pieces of information called trivia? Well one very simple way is by just being curious. Let me explain.

I happened to hear this song on the radio (actually the internet radio - one of the very few privileges allowed by my paranoid company) a few days back. It really was a fascinating piece of music with an extremely catchy tune and i kept on humming it even after the song was done with. I vaguely remembered having heard something similar to this track most probably in some ad but i was not able to recollect the details. So what do you do next? Obviously you search for the song! So off i went to Google and after a quick search on the lyrics i found out that the song was called "Tom's Diner" and it was by a Suzanne Vega.

Now that i had identified and found a really good song that most people would not have heard before and most people would like to listen to, the next cool thing is to find the mp3 and send the song to your friends! So that's precisely what i did. One of those friends(in this case Rama) inevitably asks you about the song and that's why you need to read up on it. Since i had never heard of either of "Suzanne Vega" or of "Tom's Diner" before that day, i had to do some more research on the song at songmeanings and on songfacts and that's when i ended up finding out that this particular song was one of the very first pieces of music to be encoded into mp3!!

Actually Karlheinz Brandenburg (the guy behind the MP3 algorithm) accepts that the MP3 compression format is specifically tuned to play the song "Tom's Diner". And that how i also came to know that Suzanne Vega is informally called "The Mother of the MP3"!!

Now that's what you call trivia!