4.2.12 WC: 191694 my head as a 55 year old memory association from a high school English class in which we had to memorize the author's various works that we read but probably didn't understand. (To show how little has changed in more than half a century of poor education, my daughter in her sophomore year at Yale had to memorize and spout back on the final exam, the name of British landscape portraits, the year they were painted and the museum in which they hang. It's as if God hadn't invented Google precisely to eliminate such absurd memorization tasks.) A few years earlier, I impressed my children at Steve’s ice cream shop in Cambridge, which offered free ice cream to anyone who could answer really obscure trivial pursuit questions. The question of the month that no one had answered was: “What was the Lone Ranger’s family name? (Most people said “Ranger.”) I immediately blurted out “Reed.” I added that Reed was also the Green Hornet’s family name because according to the “origin story” in a comic book that I had read half a century earlier, they were cousins. During my junior year in high school, my memory for obscure facts and the “parlor tricks” I played with it got me an interview with the producers of a television game show called “The $64,000 question,” but I failed the personality part of the test and was rejected. That was fortunate, since the show was rigged. (I still have the letter from “Production Services Company” at 667 Madison Avenue informing me that the results of my written examination “are gratifying” and inviting me for the personal interview I failed). But my “mother’s memory” has served me well as a lawyer, teacher—and joke teller. (The downside of remembering every joke I ever heard is that I rarely get to hear a “new” joke, because I’ve heard—and told—a good many jokes over my lifetime). I not only remember the jokes I’ve heard (and told and retold) over the years, but more importantly, I remember nearly every case I ever read, nearly every