WTF is this all about them there boys in Louiseananer is just briter than I is.
I'm a loving the fact that you are showing Louisianians (as we are sometimes stereotyped) are FAR from dumb !!!!
Stereotyped is right, that's why I dropped my southern accent long ago. Most people refuse to believe I'm from LA. I've had to pull out my birth certificate and prove it before...but you don't SOUND LIKE a southerner...I never say "ain't" either...or "y'all"...absolutely never...
As far as intelligence goes, yeah I'm smarter than the average bear, IQ tested at 146 when I was 7 years old, (an uncle says 151 but I don't believe it) still around 141 or so at age 52. That puts me in the top 10% of the population, but it's always been more of a hassle than anything else. As a kid I just wanted to be a KID...not a genius...everybody hated me after the teachers used me as an example - "he's a year younger than you and he can do it, why can't you?"...What happens when you tell an 8 year old kid "he's better than you"??? Bad idea, but they did it anyway. And boy is it a bad idea to do something first couple of days of school that lets the teacher know YOU are the smart one...Especially when you just moved there from somewhere else and nobody has ever seen you before...Rarely could I be accused of being a teacher's pet...and I almost flunked high school, did flunk a couple of subjects, trying to be "normal". I hated being smart, all it got me was trouble. I actually tried to be a regular dummy like everyone else. Damn teachers never let it happen...
My thing was, though, I just wanted to know...loved to learn, still do...my favorite things to do were read and play guitar. I still do both every day. Rarely ever did anything else, except for lots of baseball from 6th grade on till I trashed my knees too many times. (can you say weather vane?) But if I asked my parents how or why, they always told me look it up. The encyclopedia became my very favorite book. Anything that caught my interest, I'd study it. Not just read an article, spend 2 or 3 years digging up books and info. I studied mushrooms for 2 years before I picked my first one. That's what got me into computers, a friend helped me fix my machine, old 486 with a dead hard drive, I crawled in bed at 3 AM and promised myself if I had to ever open it up again I wouldn't ask anybody any questions. A year later I upgraded it to a P-166, never asked anyone a thing. Next thing I knew I was doing it for a living...
These days I usually try not to let it show much, at least until people get to know me. Most people are intimidated by high intelligence and don't want to get very close, so I never had any friends until I started to keep it under my hat. Especially in school. Three bullies once threatened to beat me up if I didn't let the ring leader cheat on my test that day. I refused, showed up the next day with a baseball bat, chased him around the school. I worked for my smarts, he can too.
As far as the virus hoax thing goes, I've been a computer technician for about 10 years, it comes with the territory. I learned how to spot them early on, when I started getting them from everybody that had my email address. For some reason the very first one I saw looked suspicious, AOL is not an antivirus company, why would they be the ones announcing a new virus, so I looked it up...Might have been MS, can't remember, but same idea.
Didn't take long before I could spot a hoax in seconds, chain letters and pyramid schemes too. Snopes, hoaxkill and urban legends have been great resources for a long time.
Thing that always bothered me is - why is it everyone I've ever known who was exceptionally intelligent also had very little common sense? Myself included, sometimes I think with all my brain power I just have to be completely dumb...I do some of the stupidest things,...sometimes the obvious just completely escapes me, the first thing you would automatically think or do in a situation is sometimes the last thing I'd ever think of...and really simple, everyday things people do without thinking, even if they're mostly brain dead...
oh...I knew that...DUH!
