Mental Floss regularly produces great quizzes, but I thought this one was especially fun: Identify the book given a vertical strip photocopied from the text.

How’d I do?

I could’ve gone 10/10, but second-guessed myself on the last question.

Yay! Mental_floss added two of my submissions to their Random Fact Generator (this one and this one).

Boo! The average ratings for them are 2.74/5 and 2.7/5. C’mon, people! Those are well-written, interesting, and cliche-free!

As I was going along, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make 50%. So 75% was a pleasant surprise.

Where I whiffed it, after the jump …

Brian Doyle-Murray (I hyphenated the first two names), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (ditto), and Catherine Zeta-Jones (no hyphen — which should really be an alternate correct answer; as her birth name, it “correctly identifies” her, too).

What’d I miss?

Sisyphus’ crime (totally blanked on that) and Hesiod’s seminal work.

WHAT I MISSED:

Burger King’s King size (I went with Royale) and Pizza Hut’s Panormous (I guessed Banquet). Dammit.

Another stellar Mental Floss quiz:

Average score was 73%, so I squeaked out an above-average performance.

For whatever reason, it took some casual reading about Seattle trivia king L.M. Boyd and a subscription to Mental Floss to spur the idea of a recurring trivia column on Seattlest. But it did. And the idea is spurred.

I’ve kicked off what will (hopefully) be a weekly post, “7 Astounding Yet True Facts About…” with a post on Dick’s Drive-In.

If’ you’re curious about other Seattle institutions, lemme know and I’ll slot ‘em in.

Can you name the 10 highest grossing films in America that were not part of a franchise (no sequels, no prequels, no sidequels)? You’ve got five minutes.

I got three in the first few minutes … then was inspired to get three more before running out of time.

I tried five different spellings for Shrek before remembering that yes, there were sequels.

David Israel’s “Who Am I?” quiz on Mental Floss asks you to identify 10 books based on 10 clues written in the first person.

I scored 70%, though I think I’ve only read 35%. Thank you, general knowledge!

One peeve (with spoilers):

The first time around, I typed Moby-Dick, but it was marked wrong because of the hyphen. That’s a flaw, especially since the book title is printed both ways. Ah, the limits of technology.

That did make me happy I remembered the exact title (with correct spelling) for Kavalier & Clay, though.

From Mental Floss: Name the 10 Most Populous U.S. Cities in 2 Minutes.

I managed 8 out of 10. (Spoilers after the jump.) Good quiz idea, Jenny Brown.

Note to self: Subscribe to the Mental Floss RSS feed.

I missed San Jose and San Antonio. I should’ve gotten the former, but I didn’t remember the latter being that large.