While watching a YouTube video recently, I learned an enormously unimportant fact entirely against my will.
An ad interrupted the video to tell me that British royalty Prince Harry and Duchess of Something Meghan are set to have a baby, the details of which are officially private.
Ironically, it already was none of my business before I heard about it. But this was by personal choice. I lack the inclination or even the ability to care about what’s up among British royals. I don’t have anything against them. I also don’t have any interest in them.
Note: That would change were the Duchess of Sussex to give birth to a life form heretofore unheard of and named it Brexit.
I also learned against my will that Jessica Simpson — who is famous for what I have no idea — recently had a daughter.
I’m serious about not knowing who Jessica Simpson was. I say that because I Googled her for purposes of this column. Turns out she’s a popular American singer-actress. Who knew?
My ignorance regarding celebrities is either an indication that I’ve outlived my time, or that I’ve come to understand I’m running out of time and shouldn’t waste any of it on stuff of no interest to me.
Part of my pop culture ignorance is due to the fact I haven’t watched television in ages, and I don’t listen to the radio. I can’t stand having my attention commandeered by celebrity news.
Am I uninformed? Oh, yeah. But I’m uninformed about stuff that I don’t want to be informed about, and not stuff I do.
For example, I’m interested in public safety information. If cops are trolling TRAX cars with drug/bomb dogs, it’s of supreme interest to me.
Likewise, if a sexual predator is lurking in the neighborhoods where my grandchildren live, I need time to prepare a proper ambush and also arrange for spending the rest of my life in prison.
The same goes for military news. I wouldn’t want to be the last one to know that President Donald Trump declared war on Iceland or Fiji. What if I had plans to go there?
I wasn’t always this oblivious to innocuous current events. There was a time when I followed the behavior of celebrities who are almost unknown to today’s fan rats.
I still know Eric Clapton’s birthday (March 30, 1945). I know how many times Steve McQueen was married (three), and way more about the life of Howlin’ Wolf Burnett than I know about George Washington. And I still commemorate the anniversary of Jim Morrison’s death (July 3, 1971).
But ask me to name songs by Justin Bieber or Miley Cyrus and I got nothing. I might pause fast-forwarding if a TV story came on about one (or both) of them being set upon by a pack of badgers, but that’s it.
All of this indifference to current celebrities ended during Easter dinner when a teenage granddaughter announced that she was saving up her money to attend the August concert of someone/thing called “the suicide boys.”
Since suicide runs in my family, I checked them out on the internet to see if this was a joke. Nope. There is a hip hop duo dubbed “Suicideboys.”
I need to pay more attention to things that don’t interest me. Judging from the titles of a few of their songs, my granddaughter will go to a Suicideboys concert when there’s a confirmed sighting of Elvis — and not before.
Robert Kirby is The Salt Lake Tribune’s humor columnist. Follow Kirby on Facebook.
