It’s been noted, by myself and others, that I have the curious ability to remember just enough of almost everything I have ever read so as to appear that I remember everything ever written by everyone. This ability fails me now and again but I usually seem pretty smart. “Seem” is the key word.

Anyway, The Claw of the Conciliator has held a mirror up to my somewhat phony life with the post How to pretend to be high-brow, on the cheap. The Claw suggests using the culture of free on the internet to help pass yourself off as one of the élite:

The trick is to read a little bit about many different topics, so that you have a lot of breadth but little depth. A great way to do this is reading journals, which will provide you with a nice sampling of interesting essays and articles. And these days you can read a lot of these journals for free because their archives are available on the Internet.

I would also suggest changing the home page on your browser (or if you’re like me, one of the multiple tabs on your home page) to the Wikipedia Random Page. Just copy the url http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random and paste it into the home page location in the preferences section of your browser. It’s usually the first pane of the preferences window under the file menu. I think I first read this suggestion on Lifehacker. Why not try it? Who knows what you might seem to learn!