Sunday, November 29, 2009

Mentally Stimulating Diversions

In another one of my infamous dinner parties that involve raucous laughter, fusion food, mismatched plates, and usually youtube escapades, we introduced my friend to a great time-waster. Now as a college student, typing that six page essay, you are guaranteed to be spending at least a third of your time not writing your essay. This time could be unevenly distributed among Facebook (the clear winner), Youtube, New York Times, Apple Store, or in my case, Blogger. However, a site with growing popularity is the Sporcle.Com.

Described as "mentally stimulating diversions," Sporcle is chock full of addictive trivia games. Let's break down the phrase. Is it mentally stimulating? Yes. My personal favorite is "Can you name the Countries of the World?" because that's how I get to know my geography and win raffle prizes at Southeast Asian Festival for labeling all the Southeast Asian countries properly. Yes, I am addicted, but YES I know my geography. There are funky ones like "World Turkey Population," which are a waste of time and I doubt are mentally stimulating. However, there are also throwbacks like "Can you name all the Pokémon Characters (Generation 1)?" and the "Can you complete The Fresh Prince of Bel Air?" that are definitely mentally stimulating. I think. Is it a diversion? Sporcle just sucked three hours of my life last night. You can make the judgment call.

All in all though, it was hilarious to complete these quizzes with friends and those three hours flew. While typing in Bizarro and finding out the spelling of "Liechtenstein," we laughed like no other. The cereal mascot on the left is called "Frankenberry" and I do not know if I would feed my child cereal with such a mascot. There are 7 countries that end with "-stan" and the party includes Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan (with TWO Y's), and Tajikistan.

I invite you to beat our record for the Countries of the World: 133/195.