To me, the most amusing part of the scholarship competition is the part that actually deals with scholarship, the recently-added "Miss America Pop Quiz", a series of eight multiple choice questions for the final five contestants on matters of current events, pop culture and history.
Here's the trick: they need to make the questions easy enough so that most of the contestants will get most of the questions right, so that they don't all look stupid and the organizers aren't embarrassed. If the 'winner' only gets 2/8 right, you're a laughingstock.
At the same time, though, the questions can't be so easy that all of the contestants pretty much get all of the questions right, because in that case the quiz will have no effect on the competition, and the organizers get accused of "dumbing things down", and that ain't right.
Which leaves you with questions that people should get right, but that you know that at least someone won't, and when they don't, you feel embarassed for them. And entertained.
From last night, here's some questions which had at least one wrong answer, and, in some cases, 3-4 wrong:
Which of these women was the first female Attorney General -- Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Ginsberg or Janet Reno?
Who said 'Give me liberty or give me death'?
Who was President during the Bay of Pigs affair?
Which Cabinet department does Elaine Chao head?
There was only one question which every contestant got right, and it wasn't "what does the slang term 'bling-bling' refer to?", which only the two African-American finalists correctly answered as 'jewelry' and not 'money' or 'a cell phone'. Cute.
No, the one they all got right was "If the President and the Vice President are unable to serve, who becomes President -- the Secretary of State, Speaker of the House or Secretary of Defense?", which indicates, perhaps, a lot of West Wing fans in the competition.
No contestant got more than 5/8 questions correct last night, and Miss Wisconsin brought up the rear with only three correct answers, which proves, perhaps, that intelligence is hereditary.
You see, Tina Sauerhammer (Miss Wisconsin), was also the contestant whose platform was 'organ donation' because her late father, then suffering from an autoimmune disease, missed his doctor's urgent "Hey, your new kidney's here!" message while attending her Miss Wisconsin Pageant because he left his beeper home that day.
D'oh!, but wait, it gets weirder. Because the "dumbest" of the Miss America final five, Ms. Sauerhammer, was also the one who skipped high school to enroll in college when she was 14 years old and graduated medical school at the age of twenty-two. And she doesn't know what bling-bling is? My mom knows what bling-bling is. Sheesh.
Sauerhammer finished third overall.
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