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For the General Reader | |
u | The Witness of Two Stones. Making our mark on our environment. |
u | The Myth of Leisure Time [essay]. Why hasn’t technology given us more free time? |
u | Safeguarding Kids’ Use of the Internet [essay]. It’s never going to work. |
For the Mensa Press | |
u | The Aesthetic Aristocracy [Bulletin editorial]. Majority rule is no way to judge art. |
u | It’s All Entertainment [Bulletin editorial]. How do we choose what we spend our time on? |
u | “Daddy, How High Is Up?” [Bulletin editorial]. Asking questions is fun for grownups too. |
u | Last Words. [Final Bulletin editorial]. Advice on taking care of Mensa. |
u | Boundaries [Intelligencer editorial]. Differences among Ms are not barriers. |
u | Thanks Given [Intelligencer editorial]. Appreciating Ms of many types. |
u | The Case of the Counterfeit Sizzle [Intelligencer editorial]. Quantity is the wrong goal. |
u | The Origin of Densa [Interloc article]. A Boston M creates an enduring parody of Mensa. |
Interested in topics pertaining to Mensa? Please see also Dick Amyx’s Mensa pages. | |
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For the General Reader
The Witness of Two Stones | ||||||
Copyright © 2004 Meredy Amyx. | ||||||
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From cabin 10 of Fern River Resort in Felton, California, I can hear the soft, rushing sound of the river. The cabin porch and a graveled area in front of it, about 15 feet to cliff’s edge, look down over a relatively broad, shallow stretch of the San Lorenzo River, eminently wadable here, where a slight but perceptible drop in level adds contour and sound to the flow of the water. The river is small, barely more than a creek, and the rainy season is past.
Directly across the river is Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. Through gaps in the shrubs and trees, we can see occasional hikers passing along the River Walk trail. We followed that trail last time we were at the park. It was most unremarkable from the park side, without much of a river view. Much better from here. The descent to the river from the cabin is an easy flight of steps of packed earth shaped by wooden retainers and crowded on both sides by creeping plants and ground cover. A vine of blue bell-like flowers resembling small morning glory blooms hugs the hillside. The drop is no more than 30 feet, but it is enough to create a sense of imaginable separation from civilization to wilderness. The sounds of Highway 9 are muffled here. Beside the river, if I don’t look back and up at the row of guest cottages on the cliff, I am in a landscape that is probably different in no significant way from what my hominid ancestors saw when they came here and stood at this small sandy clearing with its narrow beach of water-rounded rocks.
To my untrained eye, many of the rocks look like granite. I see the familiar black-speckled gray rocks like the granite of Yosemite. But there are many variations on this theme in amber, brown, pink, blue-gray, and white. The yellow-amber ones in particular are flecked with quantities of silvery material that I label pyrite without any actual knowledge of whether pyrite is found in this form or not. In addition to the granitelike rocks, I see stones of other character and all colors: small, black, and smooth; purple with white striations; brown with tiny yellow flecks, resembling bird eggs; gray shale and orange shale, some of it recently broken, layers separated but all still lying together like a book with a broken spine; pure white quartz; ordinary generic gray gravel; and a small number of agate-looking flat rocks with layers of green and pink and umber and lavender and cream. When wet, these stones will show a bright paintbox of colors. I see from the shape and texture of this small beach and the line of vegetation that in rainy seasons most of these rocks will be under water. When my hominid ancestors stood here, the beach might have been wet. The river might have been fuller. The rains of winter might have been falling. The colors of these rocks might have been as deep and varied as the wildflowers and the blossoming trees. Perhaps some of the rocks even stood out as more attractive than the restclear, or bright, or sparkling. Perhaps someone picked up a pretty rock to carry it away, at that moment discovering in himself some aesthetic discernment.
The four-year-old hominid knew just what to do with a rocky beach by a river. He picked up a rock and threw it in the water. Behind him on the beach, his father picked up one hefty stone and set it upon another. Just two stones, one firmly placed atop another, and a message is born, a symbol is created. It says, “Man here.” It says, “I was here, I did this.” Perhaps soon it will also say “Mine” and “Keep away” and maybe even “Sacred place: God, notice me here.” But for now it is only the assertion of presence of a being that is not a bear or a deer, a fox or rabbit or wolf or any other kind of mammal, and certainly not a bird or reptile or amphibian or insect. Perhaps a manlike creature is not the only thing that could construct the first rudimentary cairn, but it is the only thing that would. I know this by my belief in the endurance of the essential traits of living beings and in the felt commonality with my ancestors. While hominid pater is constructing a monument to his humanity above the high-water mark, hominid mater has her four-year-old by his mop of hair down at the water’s edge and is burnishing his hide with a small, thick branch of a fallen tree that has enough bark clinging to it to make a good scrubber. His older sister has already begun to gather other branches, and soon the family will construct a small lean-to shelter here, on the strip of sand just above the rocky beach, protected by the cliff, where they will sleep peacefully to the soft, rushing sound of the water. If the family of hominids turn and look above them, they won’t see the steps. They won’t see cabin 10 on the cliff, and they won’t see me beside them, watching with affectionate interest as if they were my own family. But because they are there, I am there. I pick up a large stone and place it upon another stone. Man here. | ||||||
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5 May 2001 | ||||||
[This article was published in the July 2004 issue of Intelligencer, the newsletter of San Francisco Regional Mensa, edited by David Kirby.] |
The Myth of Leisure Time |
Copyright © 2001 Meredy Amyx. |
When I was a little girl in the decade of the fifties, I heard a lot of excited rhetoric about the coming wonders of technology. Labor-saving devices were heralded in nearly every area of our lives: we’d have machines to do the drudge work, and our time and energy would be freed for better things. I used to watch my mother feed clothes by hand through the wringer of the old washing machine, teaching me skills I would never use. I remember getting our first automatic washer, a major event in our household of seriously modest income. Later there was an electric dryer, too—no more sheets frozen stiff on the clothesline. From the electric mixers in the kitchens right on up to the automating of product assembly in huge factories, we saw the age of machines approaching its imaginable climax, with ourselves as the beneficiaries—and the benefits summed up in one word: leisure. We pictured ourselves lolling about in hammocks with a book or reclining at our ease in front of that new phenomenon, the television; or playing on the snow slopes, the softball fields, the lakes and rivers. What a sweet word, leisure! The privilege of the wealthy classes, the freedom of time, would come to all—to the very ones whose jobs were being made easier by the machines. For of course the rich didn’t need more leisure or relief from work—it was already being done for them. Whom could it mean but the rest of us? It sounded like heaven in all its liberated glory, but with enough earthly spice thrown in to make it interesting. Over the years, as mechanized efficiency became a commonplace and as the number of household appliances and small workplace devices that were considered necessities grew, we continued to work just as hard, and yet continued to believe in the promise of leisure. Fears that machines would put people out of work were silenced by reassurances that jobs wouldn’t be eliminated, just changed, and that people would have to learn new skills, but there would still be plenty of work for all. In the affluent postwar years, this sounded believable. Then came the machine of machines, the computer. O wonder of wonders, this sending of the gods would save us not only the exertion of our bodies but the exercise of our minds. Thinking machines would run themselves and run the other machines and run us too. Now we were virtually on our way to an endless vacation on the tropical beaches, with all the practical needs of our life, our society, and our world taken care of by machines of such subtlety and complexity that even we their creators stood in awe of them; for they did, as our tools have done from the first moment we took rock in hand, not only what we could not do for ourselves but what we could not even imagine doing for ourselves. And if we ever sensed a fundamental gap in logic between the prospect of leisure and the promise of work for all, we did not articulate it in any useful way. Instead, it was more to be heard in vague grumbles of the workers: w
I feel like I’m working harder now than I did twenty
years ago. Where’s all that free time they promised me?
Laid off . . . unemployed. Not working. Hmmm. Have we overlooked
something here? The laid-off and the fired and the left-behind disappear
from our workplaces, but they are no longer invisible on our city streets, in
our parks and parking lots, in our neighborhoods. Not only have our consciousnesses
been raised and our homeless become less inclined to hide in shame, less willing
to shoulder all the blame for their condition, but there really are more of them.
Here we are, clinging to our high-paying but often arbitrary and soulless jobs,
and there they are, having fallen from grace, surviving we know not how, with
nothing but a pink slip between us and them—a pink slip that could come any day
because there is no corporate loyalty any more and we have to fight every day
to secure our employment for one more pay period. 3/4/2001xt |
Safeguarding Kids’ Use of the Internet |
Copyright © 2001 Meredy Amyx. |
I have not seen or heard one truly useful piece of advice about protecting
kids and their use of the Internet. In general, we truly respect one another’s privacy in our household, and we do not spy on our kids, open their postal mail, eavesdrop, or watch over their shoulders as they use the Internet. We also do not believe in censorship, although we do think some reading matter requires a certain level of maturity. But we do believe in responsible parenting, protecting our kids and ensuring their safety and well-being, teaching them standards of decency, avoiding exposure to experiences they are not ready for, and maintaining as much openness and honesty of communication as the parent-child relationship affords (understanding that they can’t, won’t, and shouldn’t tell us everything about their lives, any more than we tell them everything about ours). But the Internet stymies our otherwise fairly clearly held views and practices in this matter. The filter programs, like NetNanny, are useless. Not only do the word-based ones filter out countless nonthreatening and potentially valuable sites but they fail to trap for many truly objectionable ones because they rely on keywords that area easily circumvented. What's more, those that operate on lists of specified sites can't keep up with the daily addition of new ones, nor can we spend all our time seeking out exactly the places we don't want to go and don't want our kids to go, in order to add them to the list. Our older boy, at 15, installed a keystroke capture program that he found free online. It gave him passwords not only to the filter program but to Internet dial-up access itself (as well as the contents of everyone’s outgoing e-mail). He didn’t do it to spy on us or circumvent us but to try to see how often his younger brother was logging on, because he thought his brother was skipping school to play on the computer during the day (he was). Even so, our password protection, and NetNanny, instantly became worthless. The younger one, then 12, with his typically more direct approach, simply went to the directory and deleted the filter software, what he could find of it (enough to cripple it), and went on about his business. Despite lifelong training, neither of them has any concept of what we mean by privacy. It doesn't bother them to sign up for junk mail, fill out forms with personal information, be targeted by bulk advertisers, send credit information over the Web, or post their personal journals online for friends, family, and strangers to read. Paradoxically, they are going behind our backs to tell all! To me, this unself-conscious revelation of personal information to strangers is one consequence of growing up with television and viewing the (fictional) lives of other strangers as a voyeur through the invisible fourth wall of television. They think nothing of exposing their own lives in the same way, with name, address, phone number, and links to all their friends: exhibitionism as a social art form. They just don’t want their parents to see it. On the Internet, anyone can have an audience. We have a network of millions who all want to be in the spotlight, the center of attention—corporations as much as individuals (who really wants to go visit margarine manufacturers online and learn all about them?)—and they all say, “Look at me, me, me.” (Hallmark has been telling us for generations that each and every one of us is “special” and “deserves” everything, and a multitude of advertisers and educators have taken up the cry—it does sell product—and now we have a generation of kids who believe it.) So we have a theatre of one seat, in front of the computer, and a thousand thousand separate stages. There is no way to control that, not if the person (child or adult) is reasonably intelligent, resourceful, and determined. The people who think this can be managed are seriously deluded, and they worry me as much as anyone else because they contribute to a false sense of security. I don’t know what to do. I just understand that so far neither direct nor indirect methods of trying to influence my kids’ activity online has done anything to deter their use of the Internet exactly as they please. I have said more than once that it would not bother me to take the whole system and all its boxes and wires and dump it on the curb on trash day; but my husband is just as hooked on it as they are, and I am whistling in the wind. 2000 |
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For the Mensa Press
The Aesthetic Aristocracy | |
Editorial, Mensa Bulletin, November 1979 | |
Copyright © 2003 Meredy Amyx. | |
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The arts, by their very presence before the public, fall victim to a perversion of the democratic ideal. Being accessible, they are devalued. People are led to the delusion that given paper and ink they can write, just as surely as, if they assemble the right ingredients and follow the recipe, they can cook. Nearly everyone can sing a little, dance a few steps, draw a simple picture, write a letter, or compose a short rhyme. From childhood most of us are encouraged to use the readily available materials of graphic arts and to study at least one musical instrument. Perhaps we tend to see the arts as extensions of the minor artistic experiences in which we ourselves have participated. Few of us were taught to analyze what we see and to distinguish the adequate from the inferior and the superior from the merely adequate. Our mentors, who for the most part may have been no better qualified to do so than we, failed to show us reason to regard Kilmer’s “Trees” with any more or less appreciation than we might bestow upon Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” We know that a mechanical device succeeds if it works. Criteria for artistic success, on the other hand, are nebulous, and taste, elusive as it is to define, is even more difficult—if not impossible—to teach. It may be that taste, like a gift for scientific understanding or a talent for artistic expression, springs from a source that is innate and intuitive and can only be cultivated where it already exists. “Good taste rests in the cultivated sensibilities of those few . . . who concern themselves with it.” And those few know who they are: they are the aesthetic aristocracy. Will there come a day when the aristocracy rebels, throwing off the oppression of the democratic majority? Will that aristocracy recognize before it is too late that the public cannot identify and will not support the best in art, and that it is only for themselves—the aesthetic aristocrats—that the best is worth preserving? If this is to happen, people of genuine taste and discrimination must dare to risk social ostracism and democratic anathema. They must come out of the closet, embrace elitism fearlessly, and admit their snobbery without apology. Those who lack the private wealth to patronize the artists of their choice might join forces as a sort of latter-day Medici family to impose their standards upon the public. The most effective route of all might be to employ that fine institution of the democratic tradition, the vocal minority. The aesthetic aristocracy could declare itself to be the least represented, most underprivileged minority of all. It could demand equal time, engage in battles with broadcasters and publishers, and lobby politicians. Disavowing any interest in strength through numbers, it would have to admit only those possessed of the finest aesthetic discernment. It would scrupulously exclude from its ranks any pretender who cannot distinguish artistry from craftsmanship, no matter how superior, and any misguided soul who equates good taste with morality. Its goal must be supremacy, its ally the scientist, and its champion the philosopher. And the Bastille yet to be stormed is mediocrity. | |
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It’s All Entertainment |
Editorial, Mensa Bulletin, December 1977 [Excerpt] |
Copyright © 2003 Meredy Amyx . |
I never fail to be impressed by people who can give a spontaneous answer to the question, “What is your philosophy of life?” It’s a question that always stumps me. Having had a number of philosophy, theology, and literature courses, having devoted some attention to the arts and humanities, having in fact been sired by a professor of philosophy, and having paid special note to other people’s statements of their philosophies, I can’t help feeling somewhat remiss in being unable to summarize my own. It just seems as though a philosophy of life is something that everyone ought to have, like an education, a driver’s license, or a toothbrush. Maybe one’s own philosophy is as elusive as one’s style—a thing that other people recognize but that is very difficult to identify in oneself. Nevertheless, somewhere along the line I did formulate a principle that has been extremely useful to me, both in analyzing my own actions and attitudes and in interpreting those of other people. To put it in its simplest form, I would say of any activity not directly necessary to support life, “It’s all entertainment.” Some people who have heard me say this have reacted with instantaneous comprehension, having reached the same conclusion on their own. Some, after thinking it over, have expressed general agreement. And some regard it as much too frivolous an idea to merit serious discussion. Indeed it does sound frivolous, but I must confess with a faint blush that even when I try very hard to be serious, I am aware that being serious is one form of entertainment for me. Without wanting to trespass in the province of the psychologist, of whose field I am largely ignorant, I would assert that the principle of entertainment suffices to explain why we do what we do. Forced choices aside, when we exercise our options in directing our energies and spending our attention, our preferences all reflect our own senses of entertainment. We are diverting ourselves, amusing ourselves, passing the time in whatever way pleases us best. Recreation—sports and hobbies, watching television and engaging in conversation—are obvious forms of entertainment. Other forms, though less obvious, partake of the same character. Consider, for example, the person who goes into politics; who campaigns, travels, debates the issues, engineers deals, and does all the other things politicians do. Is he acting under any vital compulsion?—no, it’s his form of entertainment. So also is it entertainment for the scholar who probes the dim corners of archaeology and yields up an expanded definition of a single ancient word or idea. The obscene phone caller, the doorbell ringer distributing tracts, the pigeon feeder in the park, the teenage vandal, the kid in the street hawking underground newspapers, the caller on the late-night radio talk show, the sniper picking off cars on the freeway, the scientist tracking down a new species of bug, the housewife on a relentless quest for the whitest white, the devout theologian counting up the instances of the word “the” in the Bible, the writer hacking away in his cluttered den, the impresario who imports foreign circuses, the volunteer reading aloud for the blind, the believer who charts his astrological course daily, the city gent who keeps chickens, and the Mensa officer who spends the wee lamplit hours shuffling pieces of paper all have this in common: they are amusing themselves in a manner of their own choice. At some level, in some way, however odd it may seem, you may be very sure that your local newsletter editor finds some kind of entertainment in fussing with copy, messing about with glue, and maybe even folding and stapling and labeling. Equally, there is something about membership lists and programs and correspondence and nonsensical midnight telephone calls that appeals to your local secretary. Sometimes aspects of their jobs are distinctly distasteful, but that's the price tag that goes with the particular form of entertainment. Personally, while I may not find it inspiring to have to proofread endless pages of copy or to return manuscripts I’m unable to use, in general I think it’s dandy that Mensa lets me play with all these pieces of paper. That's one kind of entertainment for me. At times we may be puzzled by the behavior of other people—especially behavior that we may perceive as negative, hostile, or disruptive. Though we know very well that, being the complex and perverse creatures that we are, we are bound to disagree, nevertheless other people’s actions may occasionally strike us as senseless. We can’t understand what might motivate them, or what possible benefit they see in doing things that might hurt or disturb other or bring censure upon themselves. But we have the answer: for them, such activity represents entertainment in some form. Recognizing this fact may not show us how to deal with the situation, but it does help us to see it in perspective. Without a doubt, working out a solution and restoring peace and order would furnish entertainment for somebody. Clearly, this simple formula has unlimited application. It can serve as a guide to understanding our own actions and those of others in their barest forms. It can provide a common denominator for activities and situations that appear otherwise unrelated. And it can help prevent us from taking ourselves too seriously. I would hate to think that my whole philosophy of life could really be summed up in this one far-from-profound idea. Surely defining my attitudes about life, reality, and other such things, ought to be a more complicated and demanding task. Undoubtedly the exercise will be entertaining. |
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“Daddy, How High Is Up?” | |
Editorial, Mensa Bulletin, January/February 1980 | |
Copyright © 2003 Meredy Amyx. | |
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(Dick doesn’t know everything, though. Someone else had to answer the one about whether, as my cat gets fatter, her hairs grow farther apart or become denser. And I still want to know why men have nipples.) I got up from a nap just the other day having had a strange vision of steel girders, paper clips, and filing cabinets all migrating northward. “Honey,” I said, “I have another ‘Daddy, how high is up?’ question for you.” Dick laughed. “I’m ready,” he said. “Let’s have it.” “Why isn’t all the iron and steel in the world at the North Pole? Or at least, why aren’t all the magnets in the house drawn to the north wall?” Now, I know that I could go look these things up someplace, and I also know that with enough thought I could probably reason out the answers to most of them just from the general knowledge I have. But when one of these questions tickles my mind, I don’t want a comprehensive lecture on the properties of electricity or a treatise on the behavior of light. I just want to hear an answer to my specific question and then go away, satisfied, and forget it. I know there are other Mensans who feel the same way. The response to Virginia Sturges’s letter in the July/August Bulletin raising similar (though not quite so simpleminded) questions of her own is proof of that, and the Question and Answer SIG, formed as a result, continues to encourage members to share both their curiosity and their bits and pieces of knowledge. Some of us go a step further and, instead of merely raising a question, indulge in logical speculation and propose possible answers of their own. Often enough, their suggestions are either incomplete or downright inaccurate attempts to explain something that has already been thoroughly researched and illuminated by someone else. When that is the case, there is always a reader somewhere who can cite the pertinent literature and who self-righteously chides the speculative writer for speaking out of turn and failing to do his homework. I say, so what? Almost invariably there is another Mensan whose imagination is sparked by the query or the hypothesis and whose own mind is quick to draw new inferences or reveal the next question. There is no more reason, in my view, why we should stifle our impulse to these harmless mental exercises than there is reason for all other runners to let the record-holder race alone. Yes, there are experts who already know the answers. And yes, there are sources where we can look them up if we really wish to embark upon a serious study. But it is as pleasing in Mensa to be free to ask ignorant questions without being thought stupid as it is to know that, as Harper Fowley says, somewhere in Mensa there is somebody who has the answer. It is a form of play—child’s play, if you will—and it is every bit as healthy for adults as it is for children to play with the mental equipment at our disposal. We grow in the process, and our awareness grows. And if we ever do arrive at the definitive answer to just how high “up” is, well, let’s hope there’ll be another question. | |
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Last Words | ||||||||||||||
Final editorial, Mensa Bulletin, March 1980 [Excerpt] | ||||||||||||||
Copyright © 2003 Meredy Amyx. | ||||||||||||||
. . . I would like to take a moment before relinquishing my soap-box to emphasize just a few things I think it is extremely important for Mensans to remember:
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Boundaries |
Editorial in Intelligencer, newsletter of San Francisco Regional Mensa, July 2000 |
Copyright © 2003 Meredy Amyx. |
Caution to the Winds Nobody Under
Forty Opportunity for Young People |
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Thanks Given |
Editorial in Intelligencer, newsletter of San Francisco Regional Mensa, November 2000 |
Copyright © 2003 Meredy Amyx. |
Metaphorically we often refer to Mensa as a place. We say, “Mensa is a place where. . . .” We use this expression because the language does not yet offer us a good way to talk about a virtual environment and the characteristics we associate with it. When we speak of Mensa as a place, we are saying something about the experiences we have had in Mensa, but that is not a literal “in.” Mensa is wherever Mensans are. Mensa is right where you are sitting, standing, or lying down as you read this. Or, more perfectly, perhaps, because Mensa is defined by its single commonality, Mensa is wherever and however two or more Mensan minds meet. Because Mensans are just people, and people are a complicated and often unruly amalgam of traits of which intelligence is only one, Mensa can sometimes be a messy place. How many of us have ever had messes of one sort or another in our lives? All of us, I daresay. And we bring that, all that, every bit of it, into Mensa with us. Here we are, with our foolishness and grandiosity, our temperament and our reflexes, our generosity and kindness and quirkiness and delight and fears and greed and anger and paranoia and gentleness and altruism and mean-spiritedness and humor and every other thing, and our much-vaunted braininess, and how much of it do we actually suppose we leave behind as we enter the metaphorical door of Mensa? Thus is Mensa as we find it, exasperating and wonderful and sometimes impossible to live with, just like people. Despite the many times over the years when I would have liked to take all of Mensa and stuff it into a paper bag, staple it shut, and drop it off the nearest 4200-foot steel suspension bridge, I am grateful for Mensa and grateful for the people I have known in it: the grand dreamers, the charismatic leaders, and the competent, quiet doers; the unabashed eccentrics, the connoisseurs, the experimenters, and the doggedly conventional; the eloquent speakers and the writers of gloriously rational prose, the nitpickers and the critics, and the nonverbal conceptualizers and imaginers; the tosspots and the teetotalers, the open-armed hosts, the congenial guests, and the perennially shy; the planners, the coordinators, the mavericks, the comedians; the irrepressibly creative, the plodders, and the deep souls; the bylaws-writers and the rule-benders; the brilliant analysts and the off-the-wall flakes; the pompous bombasts, the humanitarians and philosophers, the harmless nuts, and those special people who have a genuine gift for being spectacularly ordinary; the memorable acquaintances and the solid friends. Yes, and even the monumental egos. We owe much to monumental egos in Mensa, from its birth forward. I remember the late chairman Charley Fallon’s telling me, “Ego isn’t a bad reason for doing something, if you accomplish a good result.” Alongside the ample instances of ego-driven behavior, I have also seen some truly admirable examples of humility and modesty that could teach us much about ourselves. Everyone I have ever known in Mensa is somewhere on this list of those I deeply appreciate, except the deliberately cruel, destructive, and heedlessly self-serving and those so unaware or uncaring of the effects of their words and deeds that they sow nothing but discord and distress wherever they go. For them, I have a paper bag. |
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The Case of the Counterfeit Sizzle |
Editorial in Intelligencer, newsletter of San Francisco Regional Mensa, September 2000 |
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The Origin of Densa | ||||||||||
Copyright © 2005 Meredy Amyx. | ||||||||||
In June of 1974, a glossy magazine called Intellectual Digest, popular
in certain segments of the population, ceased publication, leaving a hole in puzzledom. | ||||||||||
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And
that, for historians everywhere, was the first appearance in print of the name
and idea of Densa, the low-IQ society: the creative offspring of John Coons, puzzle
master of Boston Mensa. | ||||||||||
A-Bomb-inable
Puzzle II by John D. Coons The Boston chapter of Densa, the low IQ society, has a very active ice hockey SIG. The group has organized into four teams representing Charlestown, Revere, Medford, and Brookline. They recently completed the league season, each team playing each of the other teams once. In no game was a total of more than nine goals scored. The members of each team were carefully selected. Members of the Charlestown team always tell the truth. Members of the Revere team never tell the truth. Members of the Medford team make statements that are alternately true and false. The Brookline team contains representatives of all three groups The four teams have nicknames of SLUGGERS, CLIPPERS, THUMPERS, and ROUGHNECKS, in no particular order. The group recently had its local players banquet at the prominent local restaurant, the Chelsea Fryer. Five players were seated at one of the tables. All the teams were not necessarily represented, but there were no more than two players from any one team. The players were named BUTCH, ROCKY, LEFTY, DOPEY, and FLASH. The players were overheard commenting as follows: | ||||||||||
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Match each team with its nickname. Determine which team each player plays for and the score of each game during the season. [Reprinted from BOMB (Boston & Outskirts Mensa Bulletin),
August 1974, Meredy Mullen, editor. BOMB is now Beacon; Meredy Mullen
is now Meredy Amyx. Mensa newsletters may reprint with credit to Interloc
if they include this credit line in the reprint.] | ||||||||||
For
answers and an explanation of the puzzle, click here
[external link]. Copyright © 2005 Meredy Amyx. | ||||||||||
John
Coons served as Boston Mensa local secretary from 1975 to 1978 and was later elected
to the AMC as RVC for Region 1. He died in 1993. Meredy Amyx edited BOMB/Beacon
for three years before becoming editor of the Bulletin. She has been a
member of San Francisco Regional Mensa since 1977. | ||||||||||
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[This article was published in the June-July 2005 issue of Interloc, a publication of American Mensa, Ltd., edited by TJ Lundeen.] |
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Notes:
Athens project
Dognig