A Spoonful of Neutrons

I know a precocious young boy with an IQ of bazillion. One day he walked up to me at my retail job and said, "Let me guess: this is your holiday job. You graduated from college and you work here?"

I recently spent a long, intimidating ride home eating ice cream with this young fellow. As usual, he made me question the value of my college education as I stuttered out answers to his questions with my palms sweating profusely. After spewing out a mouthful of scientific trivia, he said, "It's amazing what you can learn on Yahoo, isn't it?"

At one point we argued fiercely about whether zombies would be considered human and attempted to draw parallels between cells and viruses. We discussed the probability of the apocalypse in 2012 and whether the local drive-in movie theater would bother tacking up a “Closed Forever” sign in the event of such a global catastrophe occurring at the end of the season.

He asked me many questions, some with familiar answers, others which merely baffled me.

Do you know how much a spoonful of neutrons would weigh on Earth?

Do you understand how the Mayan calendar works?

What has four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three at night?

Do you know any “yo mama” jokes?

Did you know that a virus isn’t a living cell?

In fact, I did know that a virus isn’t a living cell, thank you very much. So that is one point for me against an elementary school child. You think you can beat me at this game? There must have been at least one biology class that I did not spend drawing cartoons of myself sleeping.

The really shameful thing is that I don't know any yo mama jokes off the top of my head. Not even one.