What's Elvish for "duh"?

McKellen then went on for several minutes enumerating the things he might buy with the proceeds, which include a dozen cars, at least three islands, and Sean Astin.

Regularly scheduled program

I was prepared to extend the mini-hiatus indefinitely while I continued to lock horns with FreeRice, but yesterday at lunch I finally tasted level 50, and now I can die happy (or at least go back to posting). Suffer!

Next week, look for more funny and less geeky. Scout's honor.

Learn words, donate food

A Spin magazine feature turned me on to FreeRice.com, a Web vocabulary game hosted by poverty.com. For each word you correctly match with its definition, you donate 20 grains of rice to a food bank, paid for by the banner advertisers.

This blogger has attained level 46 out of a possible 55, so bring it! Post your scores in the comments.

Eeeeewwwwwww.

There seems to be a perfectly valid explanation for it, but I would still submit that there are few finer how-do-you-dos than this headline:

Atty: Male DNA Found in NY Broker's Sink

The nature of genius (or, sorry about all this)

I'm a geek. You know that, right? That whole genius thing in the last post - it didn't give me its methodology, and so I could not accept it at face value, especially when other blogs I read and enjoy got much lower scores. In fact, Porkchop was the only one to get the Genius tag.

I mean, I could just say that this is the smartest blog ever - but you already know that in your heart, though I don't have the data to back it up, and we don't abide truthiness here.

So, I went to readability.info and got a bunch of different readability grades, and explanations thereof. It was fascinating (see note on geekdom above). On the school-grade scales, we got:

• Kincaid, 5.8
• ARI, 6.0
• Coleman-Liau, 9.0
• Fog, 8.9
• Lix, <5*
• SMOG, 8.7

*Bite me, Lix.

That's a pretty wide range right there, which makes me glad I don't write standardized tests. I furthermore learned that we had started 2 of the 20 sentences on the front page with subordinating conjunctions, which is surprising, considering our irascible insubordinant spirit. (Did I convince you that I know what a "subordinating conjunction" is? Good.)

This Web site gave me a Flesch-Kincaid score, and apparently Flesch thinks much more highly of our writing than his colleague - together, they gave us a 10. So eat that, 5.8th-graders.

But I think my favorite index is SMOG. Sure, it gave us a middle-of-the-road score, but it has a deliciously one-factored formula: sqrt (((words<=3 syllables)/sentences)*30) + 3. So if I told you to "fornicate vigorously fortnightly with a truculent velvety wolverine," SMOG says you'd need to be midway through Grade 20 to understand it.

Then, you'd probably giggle.

We've been called worse

Because Dave from Out There found the tool, we had to confirm our suspicions. Yes, reading this blog makes you a bona fide genius. Congratulations, you!

Heavy reading

Facebook felt like showing me the "Top Books in the Colorado Springs, CO network" when I logged in today.

1. The Bible
2. Harry Potter
3. 1984
4. Mere Christianity
5. Wild At Heart

Are the people reading (3) preparing to deal with the people reading (1), (4) and (5)? And where does "The Boy Who Lived" fit into all this? I think I'm going to stop leaving the house, just in case.