I’ve always liked quiz games, especially if they are dealing with subjects that I know a little bit about. I really enjoyed the original Trivial Pursuit, before they changed all the questions to nothing but pop culture. Even back in the day though, I remember that me and all of my brothers would cringe to land upon a ‘sports’ square, because none of us knew or cared about sports much, and I myelf only knew about one person for each sport. If it was a baseball question I always guessed Babe Ruth (about 1 in 10 questions were about him), for football some guy named Joe Namath was usually your best bet, soccer was Pele, track and field was Jesse Owens, swimming was Mark Spitz. After 5 or 6 tries usually you would get one right, the trick was to get it right when you were on the square that actually let you get a piece. In my family, getting a sports piece long before anyone else generally guaranteed a win. Except for the center square where you had to answer a question of thier choice to clinch the win, it was always the stupid sports question that would get asked, so you had to go through the same thing twice. This gave others a chance to catch up, and then the lucky one to get an easy sports question would win.
Recently though, Trivial Pursuit is boring. Subjects such as top 40 hits, TV, movies, and what celebrity was seeing who are not priorities in my cranial knowledge database. On the other hand, knowing which chemical element when ingested in small quantities makes you reek of garlic for months is a high priority in my filing cabinet of useless information. (The answer is Tellurium. Remember small quantities. It’s quite toxic in larger doses.)
Perhaps not surprisingly, one of my favorite TV shows in Japan is トリビアã®æ³‰ï¼šç´ 晴らã—ããƒ ãƒ€çŸ¥è˜ (The Spring of Trivia: Wonderful Useless Knowledge) which is dubbed and condensed into a 30 minute format shown here in the US on Spike TV as “Hey! Spring of Trivia”. This show alone makes we wish I could spend more time in Japan than I do, currently only a couple of weeks a year to visit my wife’s family.
Anyway, so every once in a while I stumble along a link to a quiz of some kind, and as long as it isn’t one of those stupid banner ads (Who is this a picture of? a:Paris Hilton b:Jessica Simpson c:Other random blonde girl-for-hire d:You’re in idiot if you actually click on this banner and expect anything but mal-ware) I’ll take a couple of seconds to look at it in curiousity. But after looking at most of the online quizes I stumble upon, I can only come to one conclusion: the internet thinks I am an absolute idiot.
The other day after infrequently checking my hotmail account, exiting it took me to Microsoft’s “We’re trying to be hip and urban-type cool” page there was a link to an astronomy quiz titled Space: How Out of it Are You? OK granted, the name is a really bad pun, but astronomy is pretty interesting, and the only branch of physics that seems to be making much headway in recent years, so I checked it out. Please take a look at the quiz yourself. If you cannot answer these questions and you are older than say, 10 years old, you are an idiot. I was kind of hoping that question #4 might be a trick question, since there has been a lot of debate about classification of what really is a planet and what is not, putting Pluto into question, or perhaps having to include one or two planetoids beyond Pluto’s orbit. Nope, nothing of the kind. Just count the planets in the stupid “My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas” mnemonic phrase that we all learned when we were six and you’ll get the right answer, nine. The only difficult question asks what the number of constellations are, but I hardly consider astrology to be a meaningful part of astronomic knowledge.
So, what does a person do if they have a few spare minutes on the internet and want a challenging quiz? Fortunately, google has the answer. I found this page, which has a lot of interesting quizes. Try any of the quizes that are labled ‘tough’, ‘difficult’, ‘very hard’, or ‘impossible’, and you won’t be completely dissappointed. Still some questions are lame, such as a multiple-choice question where all 4 of the answers are numbers that are very close together so you have to just guess, but there are some really interesting stumpers in there. My favorite: what living part of the body has no blood supply? This one I couldn’t figure out, but when you hear the answer it has a very definate ‘aha!’
The answer here:
The cornea.
So true what you said about trivial pursuit.