I just had the interesting experience of scoring under 100 in an on-line IQ test. Various things can be blamed for this, not least the fact that a whole promised section of analogy questions whizzed by instantaneously giving me no chance to even get them wrong, but even taking that into account I don’t think I was doing particularly well. It seemed a bit…culturally biased, if you ask me. Like you’d probably do better on it if you gave a tinker’s toss about who the various members of Girls Aloud were, for example (questions based on recognition and recall are easier to do if the items you’re being asked to remember have some significance for you. You might as well have asked me to remember the order of appearance of a series of badgers. Actually I would have done better with the badgers. I feel a friendly curiosity towards badgers, whereas my sentiments concerning members of Girls Aloud tend towards undifferentiated loathing).

Back in the good old days when IQ tests used to reassure me of my mighty intellectual superiority over most of the rest of the human race, they were also a whole lot more abstract. Perhaps what this shows is that in the wholly abstract universe I long to inhabit, I’d be a philosopher-prince of radiant awesomeness; whereas in this actual, foul, empirical world of slime through which I’m forced to drag my wheezing corpse, I’m frequently stymied by the repellent intellectual ungraspability of, you know, things.

Sod it, I’m going back and taking it again. If I can’t do better this time, that proves I’m stupid.