Well, I started to take up the Tall Skinny Challenge at Bible Apps. I succeeded in getting him some “company at the top,” but I have to ask how long it actually took him to amass 27,000 points! I think I’ve got to call it quits rather than work on the extra 23,000 points I’d need to edge him off the top spot. I have no illusions of knocking him off of Technorati, either ;^)

The Bible Apps quiz displays a random verse in the King’s English (King James, that is) and gives you a multiple-choice selection of which book of the Bible it’s from. Once you get past the King James and get in the groove, it’s not too bad… and is actually a little bit addictive at that point. The game gives you stats on how many you’ve managed to answer correctly in a row, your “current streak,” percentage correct, and your average time to answer. I was hitting 83% in an average of 6 seconds with a “best streak” of 36 questions. I was down to a 5-second average at one point and managed to bring my average up from 80% as I went along.

The thing that’s interesting to me is the patterns that I saw emerging not from the game, but from Scripture itself. The key to doing well at the game and responding quickly (assuming you haven’t memorized the entire canon) is knowing the major themes and literary genre of each book. Some of the answers are obvious, but if you only get a piece of genealogy or a sentence fragment, it’s helpful to know that it fits an apocalyptic style or narrative, or a book narrated in the first person.