Real Genius

It's official, I'm a genius.

Well, except when it comes to picking football games.

I came so close today. My four-team NFL parlay was a perfect 3-0 going into the afternoon games, when all I needed was the Rams to beat the 49ers by 3 points--the one game I felt most confident about. Of course they fumbled deep in their own territory late in the fourth quarter, San Francisco capitalized, and that's all she wrote. So instead of being up over $300 for the weekend, I took it in the shorts for over a hundred bucks. I should just bet straight up--I'd be doing much better. I would've gone 3-for-4 on the NFL today, and yesterday in my college pool I went 6-for-7 again. But I was greedy and did parlays instead. So instead of cash, all I have is a decent win-loss record.

Perhaps there is a lesson in there somewhere.

On the other hand, I have to toot my own horn for a bit. I finally got the results this weekend from a lengthy IQ test I took sometime back, and I found out, believe it or not, that I have an IQ of 138.

Included in the results was chart that was good for the ego, which has taken a few bruises lately:

Descriptive Classifications of Intelligence Quotients
IQ	Description	% of Population
130+	Very superior	2.2%
120-129	Superior	6.7%
110-119	High average	16.1%
90-109	Average	50%
80-89	Low average	16.1%
70-79	Borderline	6.7%
Below 70	Extremely low	2.2%

And I found this interesting notation at the end of the results:

Your Intellectual Type is Visionary Philosopher. This means you are highly intelligent and have a powerful mix of skills and insight that can be applied in a variety of different ways. Like Plato, your exceptional math and verbal skills make you very adept at explaining things to others — and at anticipating and predicting patterns.

That makes perfect sense, and it jives with my earlier days teaching options trading classes, and today when helping folks figure out the right way to play not-so-simple games like Craps or even Pai Gow.

Of course, a higher-than-average IQ has nothing to do with common sense, and some days I worry that I'll leave the house without wearing any pants. But it's nice to know that I've got a few more marbles rolling around upstairs than say, Forrest Gump or your average Howard Stern fan. And it goes a long way towards explaining my extreme lack of patience with people who Just Don't Get It, and why I was so damn bored all the way through school.

But it comes with it's own burdens--by all accounts, I should be a damn good poker player. I can easily figure pot odds and all that, but I just don't have the patience to sit in a poker room and grind it out, especially now that televised poker has created a generation of asshat players. So while I remain bracelet-less and broke, I can take pride in the fact that ESPN hasn't documented me being a complete farking moron at the World Series of Poker, either.

But some days I'd rather just have the money. Like today, for instance.

Oh, and speaking of genius, remember that ammunition box I mentioned earlier that caused my gimpy foot? Well, it's still taunting me. Like a schoolyard bully using my lunch money to buy candy for the prettiest girl in class...

The other day, I mentioned how breezy it was here in Vegas. Well, it was still pretty warm outside, but we'd turned off the air conditioner here at the house and opened up all the windows. I purchased a box fan a couple weeks ago, and it sits on the window sill above my bed cranked up on 'High', recirculating the air in my bedroom. So I was snoozing on my bed with the tv on that afternoon, enjoying the breeze.

I was dozing pretty well when a huge gust of wind blew the fan out of the window and it landed squarely on my head, not only scaring the shiat out of me, but it hurt like a sumbitch because it fell from three feet above my bed and landed right on my cheekbone. And that blade was whirring around at full speed, so for a moment I panicked, thinking I'd end up all disfigured like the Phantom of the Opera, except with no musical talent to fall back on.

I jumped up, threw the fan off of me, and went to look in the mirror to make sure I wasn't bruised or bleeding. No major damage, just a little redness and my eyes were watering from the impact, but I was ok. And I wanted to go finish my nap.

The wind was still howling, but instead of just leaving the fan on the floor, I figured that it just needed to be weighted down, and then a gust of wind couldn't knock it off of the window sill again. So standing in my room trying to figure out how to weight down the fan, I remembered that I had a bunch of ammunition stored in the closet.

Here comes further evidence of that whole 'genius' thing...

So I took out a couple of boxes of 50 full-metal-jacketed .45 ACP rounds that tried to cripple me a few weeks ago, put the fan back up in the window, and then set the ammunition on top, adding several pounds of weight to the fan. Not wanting to tempt fate, I got back in bed, but this time put my head at the other end, just in case.

About a half hour later, I was sound asleep when another monster gust of wind came along, blowing the whole thing out of the window again. And I'll be damned if that same box of ammunition didn't land directly on that same gimpy foot!

I woke up spouting a stream of expletives unheard of since the last time I hooked up my surround system, my foot throbbing, the wind howling, and that unbreakable fan happily spinning at full speed, askew at the end of the bed and delighting my ears with a wonderful new sound as it tried to consume one of my socks.

Yep, I'm a genius I tell you. Me and Einstein . I'm sure he'd be proud that I'm doing my part to carry the torch for us geniuses, even if I sometimes forget to wear pants while doing so...

Mikey