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Pop Culture
May 19, 2008, 08:31AM

8 Reminders Of How Dumb We All Are

Here's a list of child prodigies, who do things like invent complete languages and perform surgery before puberty. However, they tend to burn out under the weight of overwhelming expectations and spend their later years as merely interesting eccentrics, psychologically harmed by their upbringing. So don't feel too bad about not finishing your novel.

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" #2. Kim Ung-yong

This Korean super-genius might just be the smartest guy alive today (he's recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as having the highest IQ of anyone on the planet). Granted his record doesn't quite have the cachet of other Guinness records like "World's longest midget toss" or "Oldest male stripper", but it's still fairly impressive.

Kim entered university as a physics student at the age of three. We're not sure how many parties he got invited to at that age, but word has it nobody shotguns a juice-box like Kim Ung-yong. Later at the ripe old age of seven, Kim was invited to the United States by NASA to study, although to be honest we're guessing he was invited because they suspected him of being an alien.

#1. Pablo Picasso

The popular image of Picasso (who's full name was, seriously, Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruiz y Picasso) is of the artist in his later years when Picasso was a lovable mistress-hopping misogynist who created art so filthy it would make a construction worker blush. Well, assuming you could make out what was going on.

Picasso made art for most of his 91-year lifespan, and he got an early start. His artistic endeavors had to be briefly delayed until he learned to talk, but once that little hassle was out of the way he immediately insisted his father hand over his brushes and teach him to paint, and nobody says no to Picasso (a fact many a model in her early-20s would learn in later years).

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Discussion
  • Pretty damned good story. But I wonder why the author stopped in 2002 after Gregory Smith had the unfortunate experience of hob-nobbing with Jimmy Carter. Master Smith is 18 now: what has he done for humanity lately? Or maybe he's a sort of regular teenager, drinking cough syrup and learning how to drink beer.

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