What is our education system coming to? Er, to what is our education system coming?
 Photo from Flickrby The Rocketeer4
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The radio station that brought us the videoclip of which we dare not speak is now having a trivia contest. Well, they always have a trivia contest in the mornings1, but now they are having a special one throughout the day2. The idea is that the contestant competes against one of the station’s D.J.s and if they get the answer right but the D.J. gets it wrong, they get to go a party and maybe win a car and a trip to Cuba. There’s even a quiz on their website that you have to complete to qualify3. And recently I heard two callers who were unable to answer the most basic questions. |
Case #1:
Question: What is a geometric figure with 5 sides called?
Answer Given By Idiot Contestant: A triangle.
What?? Seriously, how is it possible not to know that a triangle has three sides??
Case #2:
Question: What was the last province to join Confederation?
Answer Given By Idiot Contestant: Quebec.
I’m sorry – are you serious??? Please hand in your Canadian citizenship immediately.5
1Called “Stump the Show”
2Called “Are You Smarter Than a Fox Jock?”
3I just checked out the online quiz and it appears that you can try the quiz as many times as you like until you get the answers right. Which may explain how these contestants are getting through.
4Word up for Creative Commons licenses
5For my American readers, I’m not sure how up you are on Canadian history, but Quebec was one of the original four provinces in Confederation (along with Ontario, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick). Not knowing that Quebec is NOT the last province to join Confederation is kind of like not knowing that the sky is blue.
And Smarties for everyone who knows the last province to join Confederation is Nunavut in 1999!
Sorry, Rebecca, but you got caught on a technicality. Nunavit is a territory, not a province.
Correct answer is Newfoundland, now Newfoundland and Labrador.
But Beth, you did spell it wrong. It is Nunavut, not Nunavit.
Of course the first thing that leapt to mind for the first question you listed was “pentagram.” Hee hee. I’m so evil and Wiccan, obviously.
Somewhat unrelated, the whole TwitterSync app that you’re using to sync your Twitters (no, I will not call them that other stupid name) just is… not working on Facebook, because Facebook is still of the form “Beth ” and that’s not how you write your entries in Twitter and yeah… it looks bad. And I want you to look good. Plus I don’t think the app is picking up all your different Twitter stuff because I went and looked at your list of recent updates in Facebook and it only had a subset of the (many, many) Twitter entries you made.
Forgot to say: hilarious blog entry title… props to Beth!
@Kalev – Yuppers, it was NL (now NL&L). And my bad on the misspelling of Nunavut… stupid IE doesn’t have a spellchecker! (Although spellchecker probably wouldn’t have caught that one, would it?)
I believe the TwitterSync excludes any TWEETS (=P) that use the “@username,” as they don’t make a heck of a lot of sense in FB. Of course, it also doesn’t make sense that “Beth” appears before my tweets in my FB status, but for the convenience of not having to update my FB status in addition to tweeting, it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make!
And I’m glad you liked the title… I was pleased with myself when I wrote it.
I think it was NF originally and now the abbreviation is NL.
Let me check… yes, wikipediag agrees with me so I must be right.
I think you are being lazy: you should totally update both Twitter and Facebook… with totally different things so it seems like you suffer from MPD.
In other news, damn appropriate mental illness labelling because really, schizophrenia is so much more interesting-sounding than MPD.
Oh it turns out even MPD is not right… it should be DID.
MPD – multiple personality disorder
DID – dissociative identity disorder
In still other news, aaarrggghh… I can’t edit my comments to take out the “g” at the end of wikipedia!
See, I knew it was NL, but I thought the question included territories. Next time, I’ll get a clarification on the rules!
(as a side note, my mom has some NL currency from before they joined Canada. It’s pretty!)
@Rebecca I’ve never seen NL currency! You should take a picture of it and blog it!