“The guy who played bass on The Knack’s 1979 hit song ‘My Sharona’ was also the first lawyer to represent Dr. Jack Kevorkian.”

I don’t know where I picked up that bit of information, but it was something I’d tell people at parties or in bars or coffee shops or wherever, just dropping it randomly into a conversational lull – or even using it as an exit line, like, “Hey, lemme leave you with a piece of trivia before I hit the road.”

For years, I’d tell people this thing. I was like Scott Pilgrim always telling people about the origin of the name Pac-Man in Bryan Lee O'Malley’s comic-book masterpiece Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World (a series that was later made into a movie – a vastly underrated movie, please note – by Edgar Wright).

And why not tell people such a thing? The factoid was nigh on irresistible, triviawise: The sudden combination of “My Sharona,” the debut single from The Knack, a song with a killer guitar riff, a catchy little pop number about lusty young love, a perennial banger that’s enjoyed even by those who weren’t alive or old enough to be young & lusting when it hit the airwaves and instantly shot up the Billboard charts to Number One …

… and good ol’ Jack “Dr. Death” Kevorkian, the macabre celebrity pathologist who assisted so many desperate people (130, he once claimed) in killing themselves, until he was convicted of second-degree murder for it and spent eight years in prison.

That's a combination made to incite attention and stick deep in a person’s memory.

Unfortunately, my own memory was being a mite, ah, recalcitrant.

The last time I told someone that bit of trivia, I thought to fact-check myself via Wikipedia immediately afterward, maybe even glean a little extra quotable information, especially since doing that would help me procrastinate on whatever five most imminent Austin Chronicle deadlines were looming like angry shoggoths in the day-job background.

“Fuck you, angry shoggoths,” I may have muttered over my shoulder as I clicked the link to Jimmy Wales’s text-heavy online wunderkammer. And promptly discovered how wrong I’d been.

Oh jeez.

Listen: The guy who played bass on The Knack’s 1979 hit song “My Sharona” was not also the first lawyer to represent Dr. Jack Kevorkian. The guy who played bass is named Prescott Niles – and he had nothing to do with Kevorkian. It was Doug Fieger, the guy who played rhythm guitar for The Knack, who was …

… the brother of the Kevorkian-repping attorney Geoffrey Fieger. And it’s not mentioned exactly where that legal-eagle Geoffrey fits into the chronological line-up of Kevorkian lawyers over the years.

Got all that?

And it’s a bit less compelling of a trivia item now, too, isn’t it?

Ah, the shoggoths are coming, fuck my life.