Media smarts

Folks sometimes wonder about the intelligence of us media folks. I was laid off by one of them big newspaper companies, so my IQ must have been below the bar. Or maybe it was that I was too often near a bar.

Not sure, but I was eventually forced to own part of a media company to secure stable employment.

Not all of us in the media are as smart as that Diane Sawyer who is on ABC. An ABC reporter noted that one of the Boston bombers had been taken into custody. Sawyer was quick to dig deeper.

“This is beyond any drama that can be written, Pierre, and again when we hear that he is in custody, what does that mean?” Sawyer inquired.

She’s super-duper big-east-coast-media smart. Probably 99 out of 100 TV news people would not have thought to posit the custody question.

To be sure, a simple-minded farm boy from Johnson County has a tough time in this media business. Beginning in November 2008 when this version of The City Wire was launched, I began to be frequently informed and/or reminded of my ignorance. One guy suggested that with my ignorance on full Internet display, my family must live in constant embarrassment. These folks certainly cause one to self-reflect, especially when they exhibit the courtesy to provide the critical intervention using a pseudonym.

However, these folks who question my intelligence are on to something, which is to say I’ve found a way to quantify my ignorance.

In 1998 someone bought me one of those daily calendars where you tear away each day. My gift was the 365 Amazing Trivia Facts calendar. It presents questions like, “Which element is the best conductor of both electricity and heat?” A condom is not the correct answer.

Another question: “What end did the evil queen meet in the original version of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?’” The answer is not that she was furloughed because of the sequester. Turns out, she had to wear red-hot iron shoes and dance until her death at Snow White’s wedding. Sounds like a swell wedding. (Although most of us white folks dance at weddings like we’re wearing hot iron shoes.)

There was this question: “When it comes to Canadian slang, what is a silly-sider?” A condom is not the correct answer.

I began to track the number of days I correctly answered the trivia question, which, unfortunately, provided a good measure of self-incriminating evidence about my lack of smarts. Following is the data.

1998: 14 correct (Was just two years from being married, so my mind was not yet fully recovered to a point where I could think for myself.)
1999: 38
2000: 36 (Let’s blame the Y2K bug for falling behind. Remember the Y2K bug?)
2001: 40
2002: 26 (Second child arrived this year.)
2003: 37
2004: 26 (Am blaming this on Bush’s re-election.)
2005: 37
2006: 26 (Am blaming this poor number on the year marking 20 years out of high school.)
2007: 33
2008: 29 (Am blaming this on Obama’s election.)
2009: 29
2010: 50
2011: 47
2012: 60 (While an impressive number for me, it was not a surprise because the number was predicted by the Mayans.)

Am not sure what happened in the recent three years to boost the number of correct answers. I don’t feel smarter, so the questions may be getting easier. Or it could be that Obamacare is already having the positive effect promised by the President. Or maybe it’s because I quit answering every other question with “condom.”

Following are a few examples of the questions I correctly answered.
• “What presidential wife rebelled at being addressed as First Lady, claiming ‘it sounds like a saddle horse?’”

• “What royal womanizer is Hugh Hefner dressed to resemble in the portrait that hangs over the fireplace in the Playboy Mansion library?”

• “What was the chief use of dilithium crystals in TV’s Star Trek series?”

• “Who popularized the expression ‘bada-bing’ by uttering it unscripted, in a top-grossing Hollywood movie?”

As you can see, being able to correctly answer such questions is of great value to the craft of modern journalism and a pillar of confidence to my fragile self-esteem.

However, I failed to correctly answer a more recent question (April 26).
“What did rebellious Boston colonists do to British customs commissioner John Malcolm in 1775 when he attempted to collect tax on tea?”

The answer is that the colonists forced him to drink large quantities of hot tea AFTER they stripped him, gave him the tar-and-feather treatment and paraded him through the streets of Boston.

Apparently, that’s how folks in Boston used to take people into custody.