I’m sure everyone has received those chain-letter quiz thingies that float around the e-mail channels. I’m talking about those long lists of questions that function like the literary equivalent of cocktail-party smalltalk by letting your fellow correspondents learn some trivia about you. (Just to show you how far down the road to grumpy old coot-dom I am, I can remember when these things were written on actual paper with actual pen-and-ink and passed around classrooms. I imagine school kids today probably send them over their cellphones.)

I usually delete these things from my inbox on sight — I figure I’ve already got plenty of distractions with which to waste my time — but as the last couple of posts have demonstrated, I’m in a fairly trivial mood today, so when I received one such quiz this morning, I went ahead and filled it out. I’ve decided to share my responses with you fine folks out there in Internet-Land. Enjoy the bitter knowledge of my inner workings that you never really wanted to possess! Bwa ha ha!

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There’s another one of those big personality surveys making the rounds on the ‘net this morning, 100 questions about your cultural preferences called the “Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index.” This survey originated on a blog belonging to a Manhattan music and drama critic named Terry Teachout. Given Teachout’s credentials, it’s not too surprising that some of the items on this survey are a bit, well, hoity-toity, and not really the sort of thing that would appeal to a non-New York intellectual. (That’s a roundabout way of saying that I, like fellow blogger Kevin Drum, didn’t know enough about many of the choices to have any preference. I hang my head in shame at my apparent Philistinism.) However, Teachout does state that his blog is about “all the arts, high, medium, and low,” and, true to that declaration, his survey has plenty of the lower-brow stuff that I can relate to. Besides, I like taking these things. And therefore I offer the following window into my tastes, or lack thereof:

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Oh, the stuff you find when you’re exploring the dank, shadowy corners of the Internet. This morning I was perusing the assorted trivialities at MetaFilter when I came across a link to something called The Gematriculator, a Web site that claims to be able to determine the relative level of good and evil contained in any other Web site or piece of text. This Gematriculator gadget is based on an obscure “science” called (what else) Gematria, which searches for patterns in the text. Numerical values are assigned to certain letters, the occurrence of these letters is tallied up and divided by the holy number seven, there is some kind of nonsense involving the Finnish alphabet… if you’re interested, follow the links above to read more about it. Personally, I didn’t get that far. I probably missed out on the really interesting bits involving ritual mollusk sacrifice and the reading of meerkat entrails. My loss, I’m sure.

The point of all this ciphering is to determine how much of the Spirit of God is present in the text being studied. A high level of the Spirit obviously indicates that a text is Good, whereas a lower level naturally denounces one’s writing as Evil. Just for un, I ran Simple Tricks through the Gematriculator, and here is the result:

To be honest, I was surprised the results were so low. I figured my babblings would be at least 75% Evil. Guess I’ll have to try harder in the future.

Incidentally, please notice that I’ve learned a new trick. I now have the power to include photos and graphics in my blog entries. Cue the maniacal laughter! Soon, I shall take over the world! If only someone would shoot that pesky Mr. Bond for me while I waste time revealing my plans…