It’s difficult not to get swept up in the grandeur and majesty of the Olympics. People are drawn to watch, to spend hours watching brave and dedicated athletes perform incredible feats in bitter cold from the comfort of their warm couches. It’s powerful and mesmerizing. It’s like a fever, which is why, looking at the incredible number of events, all I can think is this:
Olympic Sport or Illness?
Curling
Scurvy
Rickets
Skijoring
Bandy
Alpinism
Pelota
Roque
Rackets
Croquet
Sauna
Sibelius
Pellagra
Beri beri
Tryptophan
Influenza
Luge
Slalom
Norovirus
Nordic combined
Rabies
Rubella
Monkeypox
Salmonella
Polo
Scoring
23-25: Gold
21-22: Silver
19-20: Bronze
15-18: Copper
11-14: Tin
7-10: Rubber ball on a string
4-6: For crying out loud, it’s only once every four years. Would it hurt to take a little interest?
1-3: You will be forced to give a humiliating interview about your loss
All of us are getting older whether we like it or not. Or so I’ve been told. Personally I’m not convinced that I’m getting older, although, to steal a line from Tom Lehrer, it is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age he’d been dead for twelve years, but that’s another story.
One of the keys to staying young is to keep the mind active, or so I’ve been told, and one way to keep the mind active is to take a skeptical attitude to every silly notion you’re told. Another way is with puzzles, toys, and games. My mother-in-law, for instance, regularly does crossword puzzles and other games, and has given me quite a few books of crosswords and other puzzles which have kept my mind active, especially when I have to use my mind to figure out where I put them.
The Christmas season is also traditionally a time for toys and classic movies, so here’s a little mental activity: classic toy or character from L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories?
1. Tik-Tok
2. Stretch Armstrong
3. Slinky
4. Yo-Yo
5. Jellia Jamb
6. Tik-Tok
7. Mr. Potatohead
8. Weebles
9. Patchwork Girl
10. Colorforms
11. Jinjur
12. Kalidahs
13. Frisbee
14. Hammer-Head
15. Jack Pumpkinhead
16. Aibo
17. Gumby
18. Polychrome
19. Mombi
20. Creepy Crawlers
21. Kabumpo
22. Hungry Hungry Hippos
23. Toto
24. Triops
25. Mannheim Steamroller
Scoring:
22-25: You’re incredibly mentally active and also spend too much time playing with toys. How old are you?
18-21: Christmas is still your favorite holiday and the time of year when you make the whole family watch The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz.
15-17: You’re a master of crossword puzzles.
12-14: You know without checking how old L. Frank Baum was when he was your age.
6-11: You’re mildly amused by toys and think Oz is in the southern hemisphere.
1-5: You were banished from the growups’ table for playing with your food.
So I had this idea for a quiz: match the real-life serial killers with the films that their crimes inspired. I started with Psycho, Silence Of The Lambs, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but when the answers came up Ed Gein, Ed Gein, Ed Gein, I knew it was either a terrible idea for a quiz or a brilliant idea for the world’s most morbid slot machine, but that’s another story.
Instead here’s a quiz that should be ridiculously easy if you’re of a certain age or really into cryptozoology, or of a certain age and also really into cryptozoology, two things which just might go hand in hand.
Pop Quiz: Musical Group, Performer, or Cryptozoological Creature?
A miser turned all his wealth into a single large lump of gold. He then buried it in a field. Each day he would go and dig it up and marvel at how much gold was his. A thief noticed this and followed him secretly. Then when the miser was gone the thief dug up the gold and took it.
The miser was greatly upset by this, but a farmer who had observed it all said, “Place a rock where your gold used to be and pretend that’s it. It will do you as much good.”
Discussion Questions
1. Is it always better to diversify your assets?
2. On whose property did the miser bury the gold? Was it his own or public land? Would this make a difference?
3. How should the thief declare the gold on his tax returns?
4. Was the thief a professional or a guy who just happened to notice the miser going to the same place every day? Spend some time on this question. Your teacher’s fixing a gin and tonic.
5. What kind of profession is “miser” anyway? Have you ever mised?
6. Is this story victim-blaming?
7. Like many of the fables attributed to Aesop this story has been retold in various versions for over 2500 years. How did the farmer basically manage to invent modern economics?
There’s a story that Salman Rushdie was once asked by some friends what Hamlet would have been called if it were a Robert Ludlum novel. Rushdie immediately came up with The Elsinore Vacillation. He then turned Macbeth into The Dunsinane Reforestation, The Merchant of Venice into The Rialto Sanction and Othello became The Kerchief Implication.
That inspired this less than erudite pop quiz: Robert Ludlum novel or episode of The Big Bang Theory?
The Barbarian Sublimation
The Hades Factor
The Holcroft Covenant
The Luminous Fish Effect
The Shiksa Indeterminacy
The Matarese Circle
The Tangerine Factor
The Sigma Protocol
The Lazarus Vendetta
The Griffin Equivalency
The Financial Permeability
The Arctic Event
The Van Allen Belts
The Dumpling Paradox
The White Asparagus Triangulation
The Scorpio Illusion
The Icarus Agenda
The Codpiece Topology
The Killer Robot Instability
The Cornhusker Vortex
The Aquitaine Progression
The Bus Pants Utilization
The Thespian Catalyst
The Apocalypse Watch
The Pirate Solution
Scoring:
23-25: You used to use your tablet for reading. Now you mostly use it for watching TV.
20-23: You’ve watched all the Jason Bourne movies.
15-20: You plan to spend your summer vacation reading but mostly just watch TV.
10-15: And so the bartender tells Shakespeare, “You can’t come in here. You’re bard!”
5-10: Hello fellow English major.
1-5: So you got the Shakespeare jokes but are wondering about this “Big Bang Theory” and who this Ludlum guy is.
Match The Instrument To The Emotion It Best Expresses.
World’s Smallest Violin
World’s Smallest Tuba
World’s Smallest Piano
World’s Smallest Trumpet
World’s Smallest Picolo
World’s Smallest Viola
World’s Smallest Drum
World’s Smallest Triangle
World’s Smallest Theremin
Mock Jazziness
Mock Heart Of Rock’n’Roll according to Huey Lewis
Mock anti-climactic emphasis to a stirring opus
Mock Jocularity
Pretty much the same as a regular size one
Mock Sympathy
Mock Complex Range of Emotions
Mocks Those Made-For-TV Movies Like Mega Shark Versus Crocosaurus and Sharknado that are supposed to be hilariously over-the-top ironic but end up just being stupid
Mocks Your Mock Sympathy
Scoring is of course completely arbitrary and meaningless and any wrong answers will be severely punished.
Because love is in the air and because I really love doing these things it’s time for another pop quiz. But first a quick word about romance novels: I found many of the titles on the Romance Writers Of America website, an organization that promotes and supports local libraries everywhere, and that is no joke. And neither are the titles.
Now without further ado, since it’s all much ado about nothing anyway, here’s your pop quiz. Winners will have the satisfaction of knowing they spend too much time on the internet.
It’s that time of year and also time for another quiz. Halloween is the season of monsters and death and ghosts and skeletons and demons and scary clowns and also the only time I can get the Monster Cereals, all of which makes it my favorite holiday. The candy is just, er, the icing on the cake. And the cake filled with blood and entrails and releases bats and ravens and tarantulas and hideous creatures from another planet when you cut into it, but that’s another story.
For this particular quiz I reached into the darkest, deepest, most horrifying recesses of my subconscious–in other words to my childhood.