Speaking of Addictive Excuses . . .

In addition to wasting time with social gatherings, racquetball, and Peggle, I have been spending an inordinate amount of time on Flixster. Specifically, I've been wasting away my days and nights partaking of Flixster's Never-Ending Movie Quiz -- as have both PigPen and The Anti-Cap'n, although my addiction is a bit more advanced than either of theirs. The questions for the quiz are all submitted by other Flixster members, which would be kind of cool, if not for the fact that apparently 99% of the Flixster members creating questions are 14 year old girls. How else to explain the fact that the vast majority of the questions revolve around one of the following:

• Johnny Depp
• Hilary Duff
• Orlando Bloom
• Lindsay Lohan
• Channing Tatum
• Amanda Bynes
• Chad Michael Murray
• every teen romantic comedy made post-2000
  

Honestly, due to the quiz I will have the names of the cast and characters of High School Musical burned into my brain forever. So, taking the quiz becomes a matter of slogging through endless simplistic and repetitive questions in hopes of finding a semi-intelligent or interesting one.

The quiz does give users a chance to give a questions a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" after answering it, with the idea being that after a certain number of "thumbs down"s the question gets yanked. My policy for giving a thumbs down to a question is that it must meet one of the following criteria:

• Be written with such horrible grammar or spelling as to be nigh unto incomprehensible
• Have the wrong answer selected as the correct one*
• Be so vague that the question could refer to more than one person or film**
• Be about something other than movies

However, there seem to be a good number of people whose criteria for giving a question a thumbs down is "Hey, that wasn't about [insert teeny-bopper idol here]!" or "I would actually have to watch something that wasn't on the Disney Channel to get that right!"

And how do I know this? Because I've submitted a few questions of my own to the quiz, with the sole purpose of making sure there are some actually challenging questions out there. Not that my questions are all that challenging; you just have to have actually seen the movies in question. So far, the number of thumbs up on each question is almost equal to the number of thumbs down, which tells me that there are a few people out there who also appreciate a break in the monotony of tween-centered questions.

So, what are my questions?

One about my favorite part of Idiocracy
One about dwarfs in red raincoats
One about the song I start to sing when I'm riding with PigPen
One that practically nobody but Rebel Monkey will know***
One that's just for my mom****
One that's just for fans of quirky tongue-in-cheek 50s sci-fi b-movie spoofs

Outside of the question for Rebel Monkey, I don't think any of them are super-obscure, only relatively obscure. But, if you want to see stats on exactly how obscure my questions apparently are according to the other Flixster quiz-takers you can click here.

And, if you happen to answer any of the questions, I would appreciate a thumbs up if you don't mind; need to keep moderately challenging questions alive as long as possible before the hordes of High School Musical fans drown them out with "What movie do Zac Efron, Ashley Tisdale, and Vanessa Anne Hudgens star in where they're in a musical in high school? (Hint: the answer is in the question!)" style questions, and I finally lose my mind.

*You would not believe how many people ask "How many tentacles does Doc Ock" have and then put 6 or 8. It's 4, people, 4!!!!!!!!
**The prime example is "Name that movie that had two guys dress up like girls" and then a fill in the blank. I can think of several options for that one, but since the question maker was obviously a moron, I put "White Chicks." Not surprisingly, I was right.
***This one was a documentary she and I saw at the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham in 2002; the actor in question was actually there for a Q&A afterwards.
****The answer to this one was oft-references around our house when I was growing up