Random drunk woman to her companions: “What is the Great Gatsby?” And then, a few seconds later: “Siri, what is the Great Gatsby?” — overheard at Hamburger Hamlet via Caroline An Stockstill, sent along to Overheard In LA, posted by Emma G. Gallegos on 5.26.

The fact that the drunken questioner was ignorant is not a problem. Asking was a constructive and intelligent act on her part. It’s the companions who didn’t know either. Think of that — not one of them had even heard that Gatsby was a fictional rich guy in the 1920s, and that he was created by a writer named F. Scott something. Not even a shard of some aspect of this information welled up in their brains. When I was 19 and drunk at 1:30 am you could have pulled me aside and said “who was Voltaire?” and I would have said, “I dunno, some French guy, writer…why?” I would have at least said that.