IQ Test --

Being raised in a family with ten children has its advantages and disadvantages. It's easy to get lost if you want too. Despite each of us having so much in common, with so many people to do things you kind of evolve into your own little specialties. One of our sisters became the meat connoisseur; before any of us received a piece of meat at dinner she got the first choice. When questioned why, we were told she didn't like fat. I guess this meant the rest of us did. For some reason I don't remember any wars over gristle or sucking on a piece of fat for an extended period of time.

I believed that one of my brothers was the smartest of the group. For the majority of his life he hasn't disappointed that observation. If you had to choose the one with the dullest bulb - I would have been in the running. In today's school system I would have been earmarked "Special Education." This would have been because there is special funding for the kids in this category. I had a speech impediment, (which I will talk about in a later story). I took special classes and just barely seemed to slide by. So now you know why I was so excited to talk to my brother one day and found out that he had taken an IQ test on the Internet. Apparently he had proven his intelligence and done extremely well, way above the national average. Now I had always thought that these kinds of tests on the Internet were more like the shell games I have seen people playing on the street of New York. The game was really easy and everyone got it right until some guy decided to bet money on his choice, then who knows where that ball ended up. With each one of the test results you could order an evaluation to better understand how smart you really were. This sounds more and more like a shell game to me.

In order to confirm his family supremacy he gave me the web site and told me to check it out. The test didn't take that long and was a lot more interesting than what I was doing at work. There was a bit of anxiety as I was ready to push the final key and discover just how stupid I was in comparison to the rest of the world. Oh well, what did I had to lose; I was already married and had a bunch of kids that couldn't disown me and they weren't old enough to get jobs on their own. Finally I pushed the button; the computer started acting like it is tallying up my total, minus a few points because I was stupid enough to take the test in the first place. Then the final results - I had beaten my genius brother by one point.

All right, this isn't anything like the shell game - it was true! I was not only smart but all of the special education crap was bogus. I should go back to Adams Elementary and tell those stupid teachers they were wrong. Man I'm smarter than most of the country. Now to call my brother - there was a new intellectual chief among the family. After breaking the news and giving my brother my educated opinion, it was only fair to ask him what he thought. "Sounds like some shell game to me," he said.