Gauging Your General Knowledge

26th July 2005, Tuesday

24 days to go to my Japan trip...

I was woken up by the constant roar of thunder as well as the splattering of rain drops on the walls and window panes...
It was the perfect weather to snuggle and curl within your blankets and continue smittened in your slumber but then it is still a Tuesday morning which I was supposed to get up and going for work.
The nice cool weather is good but the whole storm is more of a hindrance for the usual process of commuting to work.
I was fortunate today to have Dad ferrying me to the MRT station as he "smuggled" a truck back from work after his overtime last evening.
With the rain showing no sign of subsiding, the trip was very much slowed down and I, as expected missed the shuttle bus into my workplace and had to fend the weather and strolled towards the building...

A busy morning with an extraordinary barrage of samples to run which would be a persistent fashion ...
Got an email from my Iwate host apologising about his late reply and enquire on what we would like to do at Morioka...well that has really not been worked out till we are there for sure...

My buddy at Osaka had the best time with the "Natsu-matsuri" (summer festival) and watching live fireworks display...
Well in fact there was rumoured to be a firework display at my constituency as well in conjunction to the National Day celebration, but it seemed to be a made-up urban legend from Ferris who kindly smsed me about it...
I was half-heartedly waiting to see a color-litted night sky but I was too cooped up in my room watching my series and doing up my webpage...
Well no fret as there would be a series of fireworks festival held by the Marina Bay area in the coming month, which would be a spectacular extravaganza of course you had to skewer yourself among the masses to have a good view of it though...

Had an interesting article on the Today paper by an English teacher, Denyse Tessensohn who are irked by the critical level of General Knowledge her class of newly-titled local teachers possessed within them...
But seriously with the hustle and bustle of our pace in this age and time, I really doubt many would had that spare time to find out more about any other trivial things unless they had to go find out (such as doing a thesis, presentation or perhaps trying to join "Singapore's Brainiest Kid" to meet the gorgeous Cheryl Fox)

Personally I don't hone myself to possess a good level of General Knowledge but I'm sure in my younger days when there was limited media attraction like Playstation, or the internet (Hell, TV only began on Saturday at 1pm with "Sesame Street"), we spent sometime reading some books of trivia information (much thanks to Bookworm Club as well as the thousands my poor parents ploughed into a set of encyclopedia which ended to be used to balance un-even table legs somewhere in my household)

And looking at the younger generations these days I really think they are more interested in mugging for their exams or smsing their friends or anything else youngsters love to busk in these days...I doubt they would bother about trivia and general knowledge...

So looking through the list of questions at the front page of the article, let's see if I would have any knowledge myself:
1) "What's Angkor Wat?" Should be that ancient relics in Cambodia and classied as one the heritage (if not one of the 7 wonders) of the world.
2) "What is Socrates' role in history?" Hey isn't he one of Pele's old Brazilian team-mate which is so dominant in the 1970s World Cup... he even had an equally talented footballer brother, Rai (no not with the Future Son)
3) "Name a single novel by Alexander Dumas -senior or junior." I give you 3: "The 3 Musketeers", "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "The Man behind the Iron Mask".
4) "What's the name of the third in the trinity of Hindu deities after Brahma and Vishnu?" Bala? Muthu? Rajagopal? Banu?

Okay time to do some googling...
1) Yes I am right about Angkor Wat...
2) No Socrates is not a Brazilian footballer as I thought but an ancient Greek philosopher who was the first in his era to had the guts to question everything and everyone and even offended the leaders of his time which sentenced him to death nonetheless.
3) Bingo, hit the jackpot about 3 literatures by Alexandre Dumas, pere (father in French).. (Well because those were the 3 most successfully adapted into Hollywood big screen)
4) Yikes... the third of the Hindu deities is Lord Shiva, oh please forgive my plain ignorance.

There you have it , I got like 50% of this mini trivia test...but I wonder how the people around me would fare better if given the same test...

Now let me give you a simple trivia question what's the full annotations for DNA?
If I don't know this I should be encamped in the deepest chasm of hell and be sodomised with pineapples by Adolf Hitler...

Japanese word of the day:知識 ~chi-shi-ki~(Knowledge) Always good to bear some general knowledge, never know who you can impress..btw DNA stands for Deoxyribonucleoside...