MightyJack
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I’m in the U.S. on Eastern Standard Time. GreenwichMeanTime.com tells me that that’s five hours behind you. I’ll friend you on Steam and see when our online times can match up. Thanks! 🙂
I made it to the theater *and* I actually got to watch the whole show this time! It’s a Christmas miracle! 🙂
Exactly right.
My take: there are many different kinds of intelligence, many different ways to be smart and many different things to be smart about. You can be book smart, street smart, mathematically smart, socially smart, polItically smart, and a whole lot of other kinds of smarts too numerous to name. The IQ tests and similar tests that are the sole qualification for Mensa membership only measure one small segment of things to be smart about, and it’s not all that easy to define what that segment is and what it really means.
And nobody can be smart about everything. There’s just too many areas of smartness for that to be possible.
@Angel
Something else that comes to mind since you mentioned autism… Mensa tends to have a pretty good sized segment of members with Ausperger’s syndrome or some more severe manifestation of autism. Test-taking can often be a strong suit for people with Ausperger’s or autism, and that’s one of many reasons why Mensa can be a haven for people with some form of that condition. I play in Scrabble tournaments regularly, and there’ve been many discussions about how and why competitive Scrabble is also a haven for people with some form of Ausperger’s or autism.
And hey, if this thread results in some more members for Mensa while we’re collaborating on a song, I’ll consider that a double win. 🙂
@Angel
Mileage varies among different Mensa groups of course, but my experience has been that trivia games are very popular among Mensans. I can think of three different kinds of trivia games off the top of my head that were played at recent game nights. I own a trivia game that won a prize for being voted one of the best games at MindGames that year. The Mensans I know, myself included, tend to love crossword puzzles, which usually could also be considered a trivia quiz with a few extra conditions thrown in to help narrow the answers down. Then there’s the annual CultureQuest event where all the Mensa groups in the country compete to try to get the highest score on an insanely difficult trivia quiz.
Having said all of that, once again I like the phrase you’ve come up with: “don’t tell me it’s a trivial pursuit”. There’s got to be some good way to use that phrase in this song… one possibility that comes to my mind goes something like: “I aced the test at CultureQuest/Don’t tell me it’s a trivial pursuit”… something along those lines. Or something along some better lines that somebody here may come up with.
We could make this bitter, imply that this guy hasn’t been much of a success outside of Mensa, but I’m not sure I want to go there.
The original song had a hint of that implication in there… you’ve got a trophy wife and a nice car, but I’m better than you because I’m A Mason Now. I’d like to keep that “I’m better than you” aspect in there, but it leaves the question open of what and who he’s declaring himself to be better than. Somebody else with a trophy wife and a nice car? Nah, already been done. An average Joe? Somebody who’s more into sports or other physical pursuits than brainy and nerdy ones? I don’t know.
One question: how rational is it to suggest that someone would join Mensa to meet girls? I ask because I’d like the narrator to do something irrational. 😉
I’d say, probably not very rational. In the case of my own local group, *definitely* not rational. I do know people who have met and married someone through Mensa, but typically the social motivation has far more to do with meeting “people who are more like me” or “people who get me” than finding a date.
One more thing to add, because I haven’t devoted nearly enough space to writing about this yet… 🙂
The American Mensa website and the national events I mentioned earlier give a better idea about what happens in Mensa on the national level, but I thought it might help to talk a bit about what happens on the local level. At the local level, it’s something along the lines of a social club where local chapters organize different kinds of get-together events to suit the tastes of the local members. In our chapter, this is how we roll…
We see arty and/or thought-provoking movies and talk about them over dinner afterwards. We get together at members’ houses for potluck dinners, movie nights, holiday parties and game nights (usually involving the same kind of brainy games that were talked about two posts ago). We get together for dinner and conversation at restaurants we like. We put out a newsletter that talks about local, regional and national Mensa events and issues, along with whatever the various people who contribute articles feel like writing about that they think would interest the group. Some Mensa groups organize field trips to interesting and/or scenic places in the region or they’ll attend or teach classes that cover topics of interest to the local members… we haven’t done too much of that ourselves, I think we tend to focus more on socializing locally.
To be totally honest, I see the same basic mix of people and personalities at local and national Mensa gatherings that I see at any other geeky gathering I go to, and I think it’s the same basic mix that anyone else would see at their geeky gathering of choice… comic book convention, sci-fi convention, game convention, JoCo concert, JoCo internet forum, take your pick. Think about what the group dynamics of those gatherings are, and you’ll see pretty much the same thing at a Mensa gathering of comparable size.
I had to start a new post for my part two of my final thoughts, because my previous post was going over the character limit… I tend to run a little long when I get started. 🙂
So anyway… it looks like you guys have totally got the right idea for the right direction to go with the new version, but I just want to make sure it’s stated clearly for the record… just as “I’m A Mason Now” is not so much poking fun at the Masons but at some fictional guy who has got way too big of an ego and an attitude about being a Mason, I want to see “I’m A Mensan Now” not really poke fun at Mensa but at the same kind of fictional guy. I’m a Mensa member and I like Mensa, and personally I could do without some of the people in Mensa who think and act like they’re a superior life form because they’re in Mensa. I’ll give you one example of this kind of thinking that I see every so often in our national magazine that makes me cringe every time I see it, and maybe this can somehow be thrown into the song in a good way… every once in a while someone will write a letter to the editor that essentially says: “Hey guys… we all know that we’re all very smart here and everyone else in the world knows it too, and the world has so many problems that need to be fixed by people with the brainpower needed to come up with the right solutions… why don’t we invite the leaders of the world to consult with us about how to solve the problems of the world and use our big brains for the good of humanity?” Ugh. I could make this long post twice as long by describing in detail every problem that I have with that kind of egotism, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll just say that that’s merely one example of the kind of attitude that makes me shake my head sadly and want to write a song poking fun at a fictional Mensan who’s got way too big a head about being a Mensan. 🙂
Wow, so much to respond to. Here we go…
@mtgordon: Bragging about being able to solve brainy puzzles of some kind, especially the kind that show up on the IQ tests and similar tests that are acceptable for Mensa membership, will definitely have a place in this song. I’m thinking some kind of braggadocio about being the best at games that you would expect to see a Mensan be drawn to (Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, chess, etc.) also has a place here. Brainy but of dubious practicality is definitely the way to go here.I also had thoughts about throwing in something involving some even more exclusive high-IQ organization(s)… I was thinking that maybe the narrator wanted to join one or more of them to prove himself to be even more superior than Mensa membership already has in his mind.
And I totally hear you about needing some more knowledge about what typically goes on in Mensa… that’s why I’m hoping that another Mensan on the forum might come along to help out at some point. I also have someone in mind in my local chapter who I can show whatever we come up with to and I think he’d have some fun and creative ideas of his own to contribute. But for now, here’s a couple of links that can help you or anyone else with some quick research…
Wikipedia page for Mensa International: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_International
Home page for American Mensa: http://www.us.mensa.orgI think the national Mensa events that you’ll see links to on the American Mensa home page may hold some potential for our purposes… CultureQuest, MindGames and the Annual Gathering. CultureQuest is, in essence, an impossibly difficult trivia quiz that is tackled by teams annually in every Mensa chapter nationwide to see which chapter can score the highest. MindGames is essentially Origins or GenCon for Mensans, with the slight difference that every game is a brainy kind of game that was published recently and Mensans give feedback on them and vote for their favorites and the games with the most votes get an award they can put in their advertising. The Annual Gatherings (and smaller Regional Gatherings) are essentially Mensan conventions… the activities and events that (hopefully) you’ll see listed in descriptions of the AGs and RGs should give you a better idea of what Mensans like to do when they get together in large groups. The name of the national publication is Mensa Bulletin, in case that tidbit of knowledge helps with a song hook or something.
Personally, I think the phrase “mind games” belongs in the song somewhere… the best idea that’s come to my mind so far is to put it at the end of the chorus: “… of a guy who’s got all the mind games dooooooowwwnnn…” I’m pretty sure there’s a better way to use it that’ll come to somebody at some point… like Angelastic says, we’re in the brainstorming phase at this point. Speaking of whom…
@Angel:
And you’d better get smart if you want to stay
I *like* it. That’s a keeper, as far as I’m concerned.
And as far as typical IQ test questions go, here’s a couple of links that should help…
A sample test from Mensa International: http://www.mensa.org/workout2.php
A sample of test questions from IQ Test Labs: http://www.intelligencetest.com/questions/index.htmAlternatively, you can think back to the kind of questions that you saw on your SATs or other scholastic achievement tests… during the time period that most of us took them, high scores on those tests were acceptable for eligibility for Mensa. That’s how I got in.
A couple more thoughts to toss out before I wrap up…
I can’t help but think that knowing the first hundred or so digits of pi might be one of the brainy and nearly completely impractical things our narrator might brag about. I also can’t help but think that since testing well on the right test at some point in your life is the Mensa eligibility requirement, the word “testy” should go into the song in a good and clever way, somewhere somehow.
I just wanted to let Spek and anyone else who might be interested know that this Christmas gift is the gift that is still giving a year later.
I’ve been a fan of musical video games for a long time… Dance Dance Revolution, Karaoke Revolution, SingStar, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, I love ’em all. I’ve been wanting to play UltraStar for a while now, especially when I saw the JoCo songs that were now available for it, but they wouldn’t work so well on the creaky old Pentium III PC I’d been using for so long. But I just recently upgraded to a decent Pentium IV for cheap, just in time for Ultra Star Jonathan Coulton Christmas Countdown to be a welcome Christmas gift for me this year. Thank you, Spek and collaborators!
Thanks! Out of curiosity, is there any particular reason why these particular songs are given a free download link?
It might be too late for this answer to be of any relevance to you… but when I downloaded one of the karaoke versions of “DSJD” and saw that it had “Rave Mix” in the title, I listened to it and I detected no difference between this version and the version we’re all familiar with from Thing A Week.
Well, I had fun singing at the arts & crafts show and I got some good feedback from listeners. By the time I sang “Soft Rocked By Me”, I felt as though the fair was being soft rocked by me and by the time I sang “I Feel Fantastic”, I really did feel fantastic.
Some highlights from my two hours singing there that come to mind:
The singer/guitarist who was taking over for me said he liked my voice and asked if I could come sing with his group sometime… he said they sing to entertain people in the lobby of a local hospital at 2 PM every Tuesday. I’m usually working at that time, but sometimes I get out early enough that I’d be able to join him and I’d like to do that sometime and I told him so. He asked me if the stuff that I was singing was by Kenny Loggins. I told him who it actually came from.
Most of the time I was singing for people who weren’t paying any particular kind of attention to me… live muzak, like I said before. So it was nice to get applause from the nearby vendors after my second song (“Curl”), and I thanked them kindly for it. And it was also nice to see one of the random passing shoppers bemusedly smile and shake her head and say “Shop Vac…” while I was singing that.
I didn’t have quite enough Christmas-themed music programmed on my Iphone to meet the requests for holiday music that I got, so I ended up singing “Chiron Beta Prime” twice, “Christmas Is Interesting” once and “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” (my favorite Christmas song and the only non-JoCo song I sang there) twice.
And after I was done singing, it was *really* great for me to hear from this nice middle-aged lady who was a vendor at a table that was right next to where I was. It looked to me like business was pretty slow for her while I was there, which as it turns out gave her plenty of time and opportunity to listen and actually pay attention to what I’d been singing. She told me that I had a very good singing voice and that she’d noticed that I was singing some very clever songs, and who were those songs by? And of course, I thanked her and I told her. So one person there actually noticed how good and how clever Jonathan Coulton’s music is after hearing me sing it! That’s one more person than I expected, given the nature of the venue.
Good times.
I see you’ve met my assistant Rudolph
His appearance is quite disturbingI was thinking that changing that second line to something highlighting *why* Rudolph’s appearance could be quite disturbing would be a good idea. Something like “His red nose…” or “Rudolph’s red nose…”
