I recently made my second Sporcle quiz. This one is dedicated to the excellent dark fantasy books written by Anne Bishop. You can take the quiz here: http://www.sporcle.com/games/valerina_chan/anne_bishop
Can you name them all?
Archive for the ‘Games’ Category
Anne Bishop Sporcle Quiz!
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
All About Curling
Monday, May 17th, 2010Months after the Winter Olympics have passed, I still think often of Curling, that bizarre sport in which athletes slide an over-sized puck down the ice and sweep the track ahead of it to control the trajectory, yelling in screeching voices as they go. As I was browsing the web for infographs, I stumbled upon this one:
At last, Curling explained! I’m pleased to say that I pretty much figured out all of this just by watching the sport and going, “Huh. Weird.” Meanwhile, a right-handed artist provides his own Curling explanation while drawing with his left-hand.
And best of all, Stephen Colbert created a sing-a-long training montage featuring outtakes from his time spent with the U.S. Curling Team.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Exclusive – Curling Team Tryouts Outtakes Pt. 2 | ||||
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Alas, the next Winter Olympics can’t come soon enough.
Countries of the World
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010One of my April goals (other than, you know, that whole Script Frenzy thing) is to memorize the 195 countries of the world.
The last time I needed to know anything about world geography was in 6th grade (a long 13 years ago) when a significant portion of the curriculum was dedicated to memorizing the countries, continent by continent. Remember the mnemonic My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas as a way to memorize the planets before Pluto got kicked out? Well, when it came to memorizing countries, I had my own self-created mnemonic devices, only they were much longer and more nonsensical.
My grown-up, just-for-fun memorization of the world’s countries is made possible not by mnemonic device, but thanks to a series of geography quizzes from Sporcle.com. The quizzes challenge you to name the countries of North America (23 total), South America (12), Europe (45), Asia (48), Africa (53), Oceania (14), and the World (195)!
Here’s the progress I’ve made in the past week:
Memorizing countries is fun! And spelling them is even funner! Next up: the capitals!
Fantasy Baseball Turns 30
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010I’m participating in a fantasy baseball league for the first time, and TIL (today I learned) that fantasy baseball celebrates its 30th year this season! ESPN has a great article featuring the stats on the top hitters and pitchers of every year since 1980 along with Remember When? facts highlighting fantasy baseball’s most surprising moments and exciting players.
In my league news, I’ve been bouncing between 1st and 5th and back up to 1st since the season began. It’s too early for any one team to pull ahead of the others as many of our players are stuck on the DL list (come ooon, Ian Kinsler, I need you!) or struggling to hit their stride this early in the season.
After a weak start, my batters are finally pulling themselves together, although my 3rd baseman Ryan Zimmerman (Was) has been missing games because of a pulled hamstring… I may end up with multiple players on the DL list before the week’s end. My star pitcher Roy Halladay (Phi) has been the saving grace of my pitching lineup, pitching a complete game last Sunday against the Houston Astros, while relief pitcher Neftali Feliz has been made closer for the Texas Rangers.
I took a risk yesterday when I dropped Jose Lopez (Sea) and picked up young hot shot Chris Young (Ari). Lopez wasn’t doing much of anything for my team with only one hit, one RBI, and a pitiful 1.something-something batting average. Young, on the other hand, is on fire right now. After his first week at bat he has 4 hits, 3 home runs, and 11 RBIs, and I wanted to snag him before anyone else wised up to his hot streak… so I did!
Sporcles of Fun
Monday, April 5th, 2010As anyone who has ever been a college student, intern, or mid-level manager knows, the Internet can be a wonderful tool for procrastination. There’s the obvious Youtube and Facebook distractions, as well as the lesser-known (but still wildly popular) Reddit, Akinator, Stumble Upon, and Free Rice sites.
Last week I discovered my new favorite “mentally stimulating” diversion on the web.
Sporcle.com features more than 2,000 published trivia quiz games and 70,000 user created games that have been played more than a quarter of a billion times. The trivia games range in subject from the classic (name the state capitals, US presidents, countries in Europe, etc), to the contemporary (identify animated Disney films, corporate logos, professional sports teams), to the obscure (name the digits of PI, Hobbit dwarves, twelve labors of Hercules, etc).
In the past few days I’ve tried somewhere between 50 and 100 quizzes, some more than once. Did you know there are more than 40 countries in Europe? And that 6 US presidents have had the first name “James”? Or that Laos and Iran are the least valuable country names in Scrabble?
Knowledge is fun!
