The best of the crap

Time is slipping slowly into a safe, and the moment when you most want into your cache of memories, the vault is locked, the combination a mystery. ... Or at least that's what a night of drinking will do to you.

Anyway, I wanted to give a quick blurb of praise to Electronic Gaming Monthly's best writer (or its funniest, at least... Sorry Sharkey). Tucked away in the back pages of every issue lies a true comic genius that I'm hoping you're familiar with. His name is Seanbaby and each month his comedy gets more and more ferocious -- like a Jean-Claude Van Damme roundhouse kick to the face that increases in intensity with each repeated blow.

Here's an excerpt from EGM's January 2009 issue:

Everyone loves to delude themselves about how much self-improvement they sneak into their lives. I've got some bad news, though. Swimming through triple-cheeseburger drippings to get your Diet Coke isn't a healthy meal. Watching pornography in ankle weights isn't a workout. Conan with French subtitles is not learning a second language, and sticking a baby in front of Mozart only takes jobs away from puppet musicians. And most of all: High-speed, second-grade math on your DS is not making you smarter. More to the point, I also put my brain through a battery of tests with every brain videogame I could find.

I remember reading that intelligence is traditionally measured in five different ways: Arkansas capitals, shot put, ham glazing, TV/VCR repair, and necromancy. I threw out these outdated, culturally biased categories and came up with two of my own. The first is Reasoning. This is a very measurable standard of intelligence based around arithmetic and logic. The other is Practical Intelligence.

Reasoning is easy to quantify; it goes from one to five. Practical Intelligence is much more difficult to measure, so pay close attention. Smart people in the wild show off their intelligence through the inverse of their knowledge of culturally shared experiences. You'll find that the smarter a person is, the less applicable knowledge they have. To explain anecdotally, people were asked if they enjoy watching VH1's Rock of Love with Bret Michaels. Their answers ranked, with five being the smartest, and one the dumbest:

• 5 - I'm sure I don't know. In fact, I'm so smart that I don't even know what a Bret Michaels is.
• 4 - Blarg of Blarg? I don't watch much TV, and my intelligence makes it hard to even remember what you asked.
• 3 - I've seen it, but only because I taped Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire all those years back, and now my damn TiVo thinks I watch game shows where the prize is people.
• 2 - I never miss it! I even caught hepatitis from sharing a drifter with a chick from that show!
• 1 - Enjoy it?! Man, I'm withholding emotional support from my daughter so she'll grow up and give future generations her own Rock of Love!

Now that you're fully briefed, I'll rate each game on how well it improves my brain in the two categories. Some games that didn't make the cut to clinical trials were Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!, Mega Brain Boost, and Best of Tests DS. Best of Tests DS is by far the best adaption of traditional IQ tests, but I refused to review it because I kept pronouncing it "Best of Testes, Yes." This was not only the exact opposite of the spirit of the article but also impossible to prevent. I apologize to the makers of Best of Testes, Yes -- recipient of the coveted Official Nintendo Seal.

If you'd like to learn more about Seanbaby and his charitable organization, please donate to his website linked here.