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Nullo's avatar

What would you consider a good idea for a useless "supernormal" skill or ability?

Asked by Nullo (22033points) May 14th, 2010

For example, Douglas Adams’ novel, ”The Long, Dark, Tea-Time of the Soul” features, at one point, a girl who is unaccountably able to rattle off the previous day’s stock prices as they fluctuate – in real time, as it were. While fascinating from the scientific standpoint, the ability is, in itself, of little value.

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14 Answers

Primobabe's avatar

I can write backwards, with perfect cursive penmanship—an utterly useless and meaningless skill.

Nullo's avatar

@Primobabe I dunno; DaVinci doctor-scrawled all of his notes backwards to keep people from reading them. I guess it was novel then.

talljasperman's avatar

Telepathy with fish..or the ability to make everything plad in a 3 mile radius

Cruiser's avatar

The ability to read women’s minds. ;)

CMaz's avatar

Drinking a glass of milk. Knowing, specifically, what cow it came from.

jrpowell's avatar

Being able to turn gold into dirt.

janbb's avatar

Being able to fart and not have it smell or make noise. Oh – you said useless?

filmfann's avatar

@janbb my wife is deaf, and has no sense of smell. If I fart in bed, she doesn’t know, as long as it doesn’t vibrate the bed.

janbb's avatar

O Lucky Man!

KatawaGrey's avatar

In the third X-men movie, there is a mutant who can go from being a fat guy to being a normal size guy. Every time I see that, I think, “The government wants to lock him up for that???”

I should think a useless ability would be the ability to tell exactly how fast a person is going to sneeze before they sneeze.

@Cruiser: It would only be useless because you’d have to know how to interpret it all. ;)

Primobabe's avatar

How about some of those lame-o members of the Legion of Superheroes? I mean, what was the deal with Bouncing Boy? I guess he’d take a bus or taxi to the scene of a crisis, only to bounce over a wall that someone else could have flown over? And, what about Matter Eating Lad? He’d need to chew his way through that same wall, when another superhero could have simply punched a hole.

Berserker's avatar

If zombies were real, there might be a reason for me to exist. ^^

Cruiser's avatar

@KatawaGrey Sounds like too much work to me!! (tried enough times) ;)

28lorelei's avatar

-the ability to turn chocolate milk into mud
-the ability to remember every flower you’ve seen (useless unless you happen to be a biologist)
-the ability to know exactly what the president of Mauritius is doing every moment (e.g. now he’s dressing, now he’s eating breakfast)

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