Non-Existent Uses For Extraordinary Talents

"And that's it, is it Trevor?"


I know I am becoming obsessed by THAT book (see previous posts) but it came to mind again tonight.
God can be an arse sometimes so please spare a thought for American, George Widener. George featured in a fantastic TV programme this evening about savants. He is a savant - more specifically, he is "a prodigious savant".
He is in love with numbers - he calls them his friends and says they follow him about everywhere - and, despite being autistic, he has mental powers of calculation which truly defy belief.
George, who is also an exceptional artist with a draftsman's eye for detail and recollection, would be classed as a genius, alongside the likes of Chopin and Leonardo, were it not for his disability which makes tasks which are simple to the rest of us, like shaving, an impossibility.
Now George's spectacular talent may be unique but he is not alone when it comes to people having extraordinary and seemingly inexplicable abilities - savants, in other words. The programme highlighted a guy who can play back a complex piece of music on the piano, however long and intricate the piece may be, having heard it just once. Another chap could read and memorise 500 pages of text in an hour and he had committed to memory thousands of books and millions of pages.
The only comedic moment in this otherwise fascinating programme was the story of Tom, a Scouser, who became a prolific and talented painter in mid-life immediately after suffering a brain hemorrhage, despite never having painted before or been trained. The hemorrhage happened when he was sitting on the bog, a friend knocked on his front door and so he tried to curtail his toilet time by straining harder than he otherwise would have done!!!
Anyway, back to George. What exactly was his extraordinary skill? Well, if you give him a date, any date, he can tell you what day of the week it will be/was. I frequently don't know what day it is today and so to hear someone throw "February 18, 2037" at George and then hear him, without a pause, say "a Wednesday" was quite shocking. "October 9, 1826?" "a Monday!"
Fucking Hell! That is scary. I spent a brief moment wondering how George was able to do this but, while the documentary makers went on to spend the rest of the programme trying to answer that question, it then occurred to me...................what fucking use is it? I mean, pianoman could at least make a living as a concert pianist. Bookworm boy's memory skills have a thousand different applications. But George.......?
Ok, it would break the ice at parties and come in handy when people in the office were trying to book their holidays but apart from that? Poor bastard.
It's a bit like those stupid fucking entries in the Guinness Book Of World Records. Fair enough, the tallest person, the longest jump, the highest mountain and the fastest object probably all warrant a mention. The quickest someone has hopped from Land's End to John O'Groats or the longest anyone has balanced on their left ear do not.
As I said, spare a thought for George but I'm afraid useless talents have got to go to Grantham....................tonight (it's a Monday).
P.S. For those who are interested, the documentary makers suggested that a savant makes use of the right side of the brain (often as a result of injury) which deals with detail and lower thought processes while the rest of us are stuck with predominantly using the left side which deals with analysis and logic........unless of course they are a DJ, Big Brother house member or a reader of The Sun, in which case they have found a way of functioning without resort to the brain at all.