Mensa, as you are no doubt aware, is the club for people with 98th percentile IQ's. According to the last IQ test I took. I have 98th percentile IQ. This alone leads me to believe that IQ tests are not really that accurate, since I seriously doubt that I am "smarter" than 98% of the people in the world. Plus I really really hate the notion that there is a standard measure of intelligence which makes one "smarter" or "dumber" than other people, since I am of the belief that there are all sorts of different kinds of intelligence, and even if someone is, by all outward appearances, a total dumbfuck, they are probably really really good at like... whittling, or something else I could never hope to do well.

Anyhow, at the same time I also take pride in having a high IQ, which is contradictory to my belief that an IQ score isn't really that important, which further reinforces the notion that an IQ is not a valid measure of intelligence, since obviously someone like myself, with a high IQ, can hold contradictory beliefs in their head and type run-on sentences. So, of course I would jsut love to discredit Mensa, as I'm sure lots of people do, and which I'm sure they are quite used to. At the same time, I think it would be cool to be a member (again with the contradictory beliefs), but am averse to the whole due-payment thing without knowing if Mensa's really that big a deal. Perhaps they offer a free trial period.

If I did join. I think it'd be really fun to find the Mensa members with the top 2% of IQ's, and form a meta-club called Mensa Mensa or Mensa2 for short which would generally deride the other Mensa members and light their drinks on fire with our minds.

Oh yeah. The reason I bring this up is because I bought this collection of Mensa Mighty Mind Benders Word Puzzles which I like to go through and try to solve just before going to bed if I'm pretty high as part of my ongoing experiment on the hypothesis that smoking does not impair one's cognitive ability (Conclusions reached thus far: G.I. Joe is hilarious, and Gummi Worms are awesome.), and so far I can still figure the damn things out, but the funny things is, they seem to rely on general knowledge just as much as the ability to relate elements, determine patterns, and other brain processing stuff. For example, they want the reader to descramble words into the names of famous scientists, or decrypt codes to find the names of famous baseball players. Thing is: I don't know that many baseball players, so these types of puzzles stump me. Ones where I do happen to possess the general knowledge required are typically pretty easy. So if I don't know these things, does that count against my intelligence?

One could argue that if one is truly intelligent, they will be able to find the information required, but I really don't feel like looking stuff up on the internet at midnight to do research for a friggin' word puzzle, and apparently, neither did their writers or editors. One of the puzzles requires that I arrange the letters which make up the names of a number of famous Hollywood actors across a grid in such a way that a diagonal through them creates the last name of another famous Hollywood actor. Thing is, one of the famous Hollywood actors given is "Keanu Reaves (sic)". Yeah, that's right, Reaves with an "a", which as you are no doubt aware, is not the way Keanu spells his last name. So take comfort in the fact that though Mensa members may enjoy the company of other brainiacs, they apparently do not proofread the stuff they publish. Let's all have a little chuckle at Mensa's expense. Heh heh heh. There, I know I feel better.