Are You Smarter than a Sporcle Quiz?

My staff meetings usually end with a trivia question or game of some kind. Skye, my Senior RA in Suffolk, is a Geography major and for a while we would sit around the service desk answering questions like "name all the countries with 4-letters" (i.e Laos, Cuba) and how many African countries can you name? (I got 12 out of 53 the first time, and forgot Kenya, Madagascar, and Ethiopia. But did manage to remember Zaire, which doesn't exist anymore. Pitiful.) I thought Skye was making up most of this trivia, and she was for the most part. Then one Wednesday before staff meeting Kye and Kait were on line playing trivia games like "3- letter body parts" and "American Presidents" on a website called Sporcle.com. I jumped on my office computer and 30 minutes later had to be dragged away to facilitate the meeting. I would have much rather kept guessing at how many Beatles songs were #1 in the United States.

That was about a month ago, and now Sporcle has become my go-to time waster. See ya, Bounce Out. Adios, Facebook. There's new game in town and it's twice as much addictive as you are. I think I like it so much because you actually need to think about these. I dove back into 10th grade Global Studies for Countries of Asia, recalled Masterpeice Theatre movies to name all the novels of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and (luckily on the first try) labeled all the states by knowing what the look like and their location, not just alphabetically. Not trying to brag here, but I don't think I could have really done much of that before Sporcle. Doing a new quiz about world leaders or European Union members for the first time is kind of like "Jay Walking" on The Tonight Show. Except without Jay Leno. It may have taken me a couple tries, but at least now I can name all the countries of Europe, including the obscure ones (where is Andorra? ...Exactly). It's so funny how all the information you cram so hard for in high school, or learned back in 3rd grade just leaves your brain!

Don't worry, there are tons of quizzes not related to geography or history or literature. If you can name all the WWE Hall of Famers, there's a quiz for you (and I'm sure Isaiah's already done it). So if you have a minute (or hours) to waste, check out sporcle. Some of my favorite quizzes to do are movie quotes, opening lines, countries of Europe and Asia, and any of the various Harry Potter ones.