Take This Easy Quiz!

There are a pair of cranes set up for the renovation of Reser Stadium (formerly named Parker, after a sports hero, now named in honor of the frozen burrito). Currently, they are strung with Christmas lights and are very pretty even from our kitchen window. From the lookout tower, they are spectacular, and I appreciate the spectacle right now, as rain pelts the windows and I alternate between studying for my anatomy & physiology final and refreshing my mind with other things, like blogging.

Faithful reader Peni Griffin says this in a comment attached to my post below, about the quiz which revealed that I am from the Sun:

Here's a research topic for someone with a need to write magazine articles - the history of pointless pop quizzes. Did they start in the 20s with the magazine explosion? Did they coincide with the spread of standardized IQ, aptitude, and psychological testing? Did the Victorians have a prototype, as they did of so many things?

Well, I knew from the start that the Victorians definitely did quiz their guests in all manner of ways. It was one of the standard parlor games, to ask each person present to answer allegedly revealing questions like, "What quality do you admire most in a woman?" and "What single word describes paradise for you?" (Karl Marx, who did most of his own revolutioning in middle-class English parlors, answered those two with "Weakness" and "Fighting").

For that matter, every new development in psychology, from phrenology to hypnosis to dream interpretation, was brought out as an amusement in the best parlors.

But I had a devilish time finding a web site I could link to for corroboration. I paged through all sorts of fun stuff, and learned about innumerable variations on charades and blind man's bluff, but couldn't find what I was looking for.

I did, however, find a most interesting article by a blind psychologist who is critical of the modern "parlor game" of being led around blindfolded in order to "experience" blindness:

http://www.barnard.edu/ods/simulation.html

And that will have to do, with Victorian profiling left for another time, because it is late, and I should either be studying for my final (ten hours away as I write), or else sleeping.