They gave a Mensa test Saturday at the library in Attleboro. Mensa, you know, is the high IQ club, for the smartest 2 percent of humans.

The test was two hours long and cost $40. It was in two parts, and you needed a score of at least 98 in one of them to qualify for Mensa membership.

Hey, I'm a smart guy and - like you - I think I'm smarter than I am.

I'm the champ in my house in Lounge Chair Jeopardy. That's where you sit after dinner in your lounge chair with your shoes off and a scotch on the rocks next to you, and watch Jeopardy on TV and call out the right answers before the contestants and anyone else in the room can.

Sometimes it's so draining and competitive I doze off before Final Jeopardy. So, sure, I was going to take the Mensa test. But I didn't.

First of all, two hours is a big chunk of weekend time just to prove something I already know.

Secondly, 40 bucks is kind of a stiff fee for getting into a club I'm not sure I want to be in. I don't know enough about them. For instance, what are their clambakes like?

Thirdly, I took what they call a Workout Test on line from Mensa International. It was 30 questions and you had a half hour to finish it.

Then you got your results, instantaneously.

I zipped through the test, finishing it in 21.6 minutes according to my cell-phone stopwatch. I guessed at about a third of the answers and left one blank.

By my math, I needed 29.4 right answers to get a score to get in the 98th percentile.

They were very polite. "Your score was 19 out of 30," they told me. "That score is a little low, but it is always possible that you could pass the Mensa test."

It went on to note that I was not qualified or disqualified from actually taking the real test for membership.

I was disappointed by the test. It was multiple choice in most instances, which I had hoped for, but it wasn't knowledge-based but instead focused on weird, obscure things like logic and deductive reasoning. Those were never my strong suits.

So, I'm satisfied with a score of 60.3, which makes me smarter than the average bear.

I reasoned with myself, as I contemplated taking the test and penciling it in on my calendar, that if I passed the test I would bill The Sun Chronicle for the $40 and write a column about my experience.

If I failed to pass muster, I would pay for the test out of my own pocket.

I think I made the smartest choice: I took a test for free and still got to write about it.

Footnote: I didn't give you any examples of the questions because you might like to take the test I did. If so, go to www.mensa.org/workout2.php.

And don't forget to time yourself. And let me know how you did.

Feedback

In last week's column about the town of Delaware Water Gap, I wrote that it was a competing vacation location with Sarasota, N.Y. Oops.

I was a little too far south. I should have written Saratoga.

A smarter columnist would have caught that.

Thanks for the papers

Thanks to Bill Hogarth for a copy of the Burlington Free Press from Vermont.

Sunday sermon

"The Founding Fathers believed that in a country with a free press the people would eventually figure out who was telling the truth."

See you next week.

ORESTE P. D'ARCONTE is publisher of The Sun Chronicle.