Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

The daily stream of wisdom that issues here must give the impression that Rainy Day is more than just one man and his keyboard. It has to be a team, say the sceptics. No individual could be so perceptive, say the doubters. Well, that's what happens if you grow up where rainy days were many and the pauses between the showers were coloured by quotations from Poor Richard's Almanac. By the way, Benjamin Franklin's publication, which appeared continuously from 1732 to 1757, has now made the Web 2.0 transition thanks to flickr.

Anyway, the blogger-to-be was fascinated by Poor Richard's saying such as "Necessity never made a good bargain", "No nation was ever ruined by trade" and "A fool and his money are soon parted". That latter was a favourite, and its veracity was confirmed once again at the weekend when it became apparent that the Munich-based insurance corporation Allianz is being taken for €2.5 million in an internet scam known as Dropping Knowledge.

On Saturday, this hilarious con job was carried out in Berlin, where "112 internationally renowned individuals" (Jesper Green?) answered "100 of the most pressing questions" (What is God's religion?) at the cringingly pompously-named "Table of Free Voices". According to the Allianz blurb, "Among those who have agreed to drop their knowledge at the Table are filmmaker Wim Wenders, Danish environmental activist and information technology innovator Jesper Green, German physicist and alternative Nobel prize-winner Hans-Peter Dürr, as well as Bolivian human rights activist Oscar Olivera. American actor Willem Dafoe will be one of two question narrators moderating the event." No comment.

The Dropping Knowledge website, which is the public face of the entire concept, and what the sponsors will be left with when the pseuds depart, is so pathetic and breaks so many rules of usability that Rainy Day has forwarded the URL to Jakob Nielsen with the request that he add it to his list of sites that offend against the Practice of Simplicity, which is necessary to make the internet useful. After all, as Poor Richard might have said, if a thing is not useful, throw it away. Well, he might have put it more eloquently. He did say, however, "An empty bag cannot stand upright" and Rainy Day is adamant that the preposterous Dropping Knowledge is nothing but windbaggery and that it will not stand.