Last night, like many of you, I settled into my leopard-fur covered butterfly chair with a Clearly Canadian in my hand and my laptop on my thighs, readying to catch the much touted Paris Hilton interview on Larry King Live. The things I do for this job and you people. (Ed. Note: I would have watched no matter what.) The interview kicked off at 9 PM EST on the nose, and a friend of mine in LA and I gabbed over Instant Messenger about various things — namely, how boring the interview was. Sure, she wasn’t wearing her blue contacts, and yes, her mouth strangely reminded me of my Grandmother’s 83-year-old mouth, which, considering the things I’ve seen Paris’ mouth touch, was strangely disturbing. But more importantly, after about 5 minutes of watching her, I felt sluggish, incorrect and frankly, dumb. (If you missed the interview, the entire thing is on Youtube, along with sexy Anderson Cooper’s on-air mini-connipy.)
It was then that the idea hit me: What if watching Paris Hilton actually made you dumber? Well, there was only one way to find out — take a series of highly scientific IQ tests online, and see what happens to my score.
Now let me preface this by saying that as a youngster, some may have thrown the words “child prodigy” around a little too loosely. Sure, I skipped a grade, but after all I was roughly 3.5 feet taller than the other children. It was physical more than mental, I always believed. The only official IQ test I ever took was at the age of 6, when I scored a 146 and forever branded myself one who would have, what the experts refer to as, “social problems in middle school.”
Now that that’s out of the way, I certainly had a lot to live up to (read: myself at 6). So right around the time PP Hilty started musing on “hot bologna sandwiches in jail” (surely a euphamism for forced lesbian sex), I headed over to the first result on Google for “IQ Tests”, fittingly, IQTest.com. Of the three, this was certainly the most in-depth. So around the time Paris read aloud her first poem written in the clink (to which my IM friend wrote “Move over, Dr. Maya Angelou!”), I was trying to figure out whether or not “This sentence has thirty-five letters.” After ten grueling minutes of test taking, I was pleasantly surprised with the results:
A 140! Not bad, considering I had Paris’ voice going into my earholes. And that’s at least 50 points higher than anything Paris would dream of scoring! Then again, she is a seventh grader.
After the jump — I take 2 more IQ tests to see if Paris Hilton, indeed, makes one stupider.
Click here to find out the SHOCKING RESULTS!
On to the next test — the bar had now been set quite high, and I was starting to pay more and more attention to the Larry Paris Banter. Larry asks her about the MTV Movie Awards, and she reveals that she was playing a trick on all of us (!) because she didn’t want to cause a whole media circus outside of Lynwood. I clicked on Google’s second result, Tickle.com, and began. If you think it’s easy figuring out whether if some Wicks are Slicks, and some Slicks are Snicks, then some Wicks are definitely Snicks is true or not, try doing it while also listening to Hilton explaining that her biggest flaw as a human being is that her voice gets high when she gets nervous! If even reading that didn’t cause you to spontaneously vom, than you, sir/madam, are a better person than I. Then again, lest you forget, she earns her money! She ain’t no mooch! And, in a related story, her jaw is killing her.
OK, test number 2 was complete. The results seemed to be taking forever. And, unsurprisingly, my IQ dropped 4 points, to a respectable but not necessarily boast-worthy 136.
Here’s the visual proof.
OK, so I’d gotten a little dumber, but not to the point that I needed to be spoon-fed applesauce while wearing a hospital gown. Plus, this test labeled me a Visionary Philosopher, something that would undoubtedly be added as my Myspace headline only minutes later.
It was around this time that the Paris Hilton interview really started to piss me off. When Mother Teresa herself couldn’t name her favorite passage in the Bible (that’s like studying for a test for 23 days and getting a zero percent), and when she told Larry she’s never done drugs, EVEN THOUGH nearly 850,000 pictures exist of her on the internet getting hit in the face with a giant powderpuff of cocaine. Either the girl was barely a barely functioning human being, or a highly functioning sociopath.
On to the third IQ test! I was feeling tired, dizzy… this Paris interview was slowly nixing my will to live. On to IntelligenceTest.com. While ADD McGillicutty continued droning on about how righteous she is, I was cracking the code on “All kittens are playful; Some pets are kittens; Therefore…” Sadly, “My womb is crying” was not an option, but I did my best.
10 minutes later — and my future appeared on my laptop screen, sucker punching me in the face. My IQ, after nearly an hour of watching Paris Hilton on Larry King Live, was a mere 118:
In the course of 60 minutes, it had dropped 22 points!!!!! What does this say about the future of our children, America’s children, who subject themselves to this tabloid garbage day in, day out? And what about our nation’s entertainment bloggers, like yours truly? Could it be this stuff is making me stupid?!?!
I’ll leave the analysis to the scientists, and instead choose to make a sweeping generilzation (remember, you’re dealing with a 118′er, I can’t be expected to actually analyze something): LISTENING TO PARIS HILTON MAKES YOU DUMB. As if you needed to be reminded.
Stay tuned next week, when I find out if listening to
