People keep passing around online games and quizzes. This is a bad habit, people, and one that is likely to keep your inbox full and you unproductive. It is also likely to make your email partners mad at you.

Take the other Sunday: Here I was, minding my own business and trying to think of something clever to write about, when our sneaky editor, Bel, sent me the link to a new game she was 'sure I would like'. A likely story. Misery loves company. When I emerged an hour or so later, having become stuck and frustrated at level 12, I was reminded of that awful episode in Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Wesley and his girlfriend, the only teenagers in the cast (and therefore the most responsible citizens), were forced to pry addictive computer-game headsets from the reluctant hands of the bridge crew of the Enterprise before evil code-writing aliens took over the galaxy.

Yep, it was like that.

I got revenge, though. I sent her and every other h2g2er I was talking to at the time a fascinating link. The Salem New Age Center is located in Salem, Massachusetts, famous home of Witchfinders Anonymous, and the folks there are certainly experts at all things bell, book and candle. I was being evil by passing this test around – it concerns the mysteries of the New Age, and if you can pass it, your head is as full of nonsense as mine is. Being a card-carrying member of the tinfoil hat brigade, I of course scored outrageously high marks. I particularly enjoyed the question, 'What causes spontaneous human combustion?'

The fact that I knew the answer to that one¹ is downright embarrassing. Be careful spending your time in occult bookstores. You never know when the Inquisition might return.

I stumbled across the Salem Center gem while noodling around the web looking for up-to-date information on IQ tests. It seems that the organisation Mensa, which used to be considered so nerdy even I wouldn't join it, has been enjoying an upsurge in popularity, probably coupled with the recent phenomenon according to which the word 'geek' is actually considered a compliment². Mensa, which requires a certain level of IQ³ for membership, has even spawned an online cottage industry in instructional materials by people promising – for money! – to help you ace those IQ tests and get in thick with the pocket-protector set.

I've always thought that tests intended to measure intelligence often measure – well, something else, such as ability to fit in with current models of thought. Even the EU IQ test was weighted toward letter/number pattern recognition. It had just occurred to me that a test measuring one's ability to distinguish, say, the energy of the head chakra from a hole in the space/time continuum might yield a different sort of intelligence measurement, when I ran into the folks at Salem. That's called synchronicity, and theories about it were promulgated by the late, great CG Jung (who agreed with me about UFOs).

Now, I can't retail the Salem test – you may take it online – because it's their test, and copyrighted, so I thought I'd make up my own. It's a weirdness test. If you get a high enough score, you're weird.

Like most of h2g2, I suspect. Unfortunately, it won't get you a cool tote bag and bragging rights, but you can be smug, anyway. There's no law against that.

1. When you read the news that a member of the House of Lords is having a confab with the Illuminati, what do you do?

1. Complain to your spouse that the country is going to the dogs.
   
   
2. Rush to be the first to complain about this on h2g2.
   
   
3. Look up his email address, so that you can warn him that the Illuminati are in league with the Grays from Zeta Reticuli.
   
   

2. When Jehovah's Witnesses knock on your door, what do you do?

1. Ask them politely to leave.
   
   
2. Invite them in, listen, but don't buy any magazines.
   
   
3. Spend 2 hours arguing with them about the Book of Daniel.
   
   

3. Recent polls show that 80% of US citizens believe that a UFO landed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. What is your response?

1. This only goes to show that Americans are dumb, dumb, dumb.
   
   
2. Hm, maybe I should re-examine the evidence.
   
   
3. Hah! Then it must be untrue. The majority is always deluded.
   
   

4. Where do you get your news?

1. Reliable, neutral sources like the BBC.
   
   
2. Interesting, quirky blogs like this one.
3. The Discarnate Masters from ancient Lemuria, via trance signal.
   
   

5. What does 'channeling' mean to you?

1. Wrestling with the spouse for control of the television remote.
   
   
2. Attempting to understand the role of intuition in decision-making.
   
   
3. Listening to the voices inside my head – what's that you say? I should invest in wind farms?
   
   

6. How many decks of cards do you own?

1. There might be one around somewhere, I haven't looked recently.
   
   
2. A drawerful, including pinochle decks.
   
   
3. Three different Tarot decks, but I prefer the Waite, as the Major Arcana are more traditionally represented.
   
   

7. What do you think when you see the full moon?

1. Another month has come around, I wonder if I paid that electric bill?
   
   
2. How romantic. I feel a poem coming on.
   
   
3. Mercury is in opposition to Venus, I'd better take precautions.
   
   

8. What is your view of world knowledge?

1. The scientific model, though incomplete, is capable of explaining everything we need to know about reality.
   
   
2. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
   
   
3. Our current system of reality is an illusion that is way past its sell-by date.
   
   

9. What are the MIB?

1. Characters in an amusing film.
   
   
2. Agents of the Illuminati.
   
   
3. Not nearly as scary as the transdimensional Watchers.
   
   

10. Why do you take online quizzes?

1. There's nothing on television right now.
   
   
2. I want to compare my score with others and gloat.
   
   
3. I regard them as sources of spiritual enlightenment⁴.

Whew. If you've grokked all that lot, you're probably either ready for the nice young men in the clean, white coats, or you're some sort of unrecognised genius.

I stress unrecognised. Nobody's going to give us loonies credit for our service to the world. But hey, we're above all that.

See you on the flip side.

Fact and Fiction by Dmitri Gheorgheni Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

15.11.10 Front Page

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