Importance of knowledge

I'm getting tired of complacent people that desire neither knowledge nor the prospect that a great deal of knowledge is around the corner. I, like most everyone else, used to laugh and and sneer at the nerds on Jeopardy, flexing their vast array of useless facts and branches of knowledge. Or so I thought. What, may you ask, is so important about knowing the name of the biggest lake or peninsula in the world? Well, nothing in of itself, unless one wishes to pursue the path of geology. But what about in the context of conversation? Believe me, I've been in a lot of interesting, whirlwind conversations, in which the flux of topic flow is apt to give one vertigo and take one into the nether regions of strange, remote things to talk about. The participation of each person is required to keep the conversation going, almost like a ping pong match. I like to think of it as such. With imagination (which the Jeopardy nerds lack) and a knowledge of a particular event being discussed, the jokes and conversational possibilities are greatly expounded upon, well beyond the scope of most people. This is why the average person (especially girl) is of no interest to me. No taste for the weird, abstract, or the intellectual. Just sports and quotes from the latest episode of Family Guy. Uggh