It’s the last day before finals and you’re reading this because you don’t want to study. Yeah, I know how it works. You’ll go home in a few minutes and play video games or make yourself lunch. You’ll do your laundry or maybe clean the oven.

But you won’t study. Not yet anyway. You’ll wait until you’re good and ready – and require the assistance of mild amphetamines.

If you’re bored, try taking the “Study Habits & Test Anxiety” online quiz provided by the counseling center at New York State University at Buffalo (http://ub-counseling.buffalo.edu/stressstudy.shtml) It’s something to do besides hitting the books anyway.

This column, for instance, is an excellent excuse not to study. I tried looking up the names of famous procrastinators, but it appears that no one who is interested has gotten around to publishing a complete list. Birds of a feather – eh, something like that.

I did find a few: Jane Austen wrote her most famous books in her youth but didn’t publish them until a few years before she died. J.R.R. Tolkien took 14 years to finish The Lord of the Rings.

Leonardo da Vinci carried the “Mona Lisa” around with him for 20 years before finishing the final brush strokes. Frank Lloyd Wright put off drawing the blueprints for the Falling Water home for weeks and then completed the plans for the entire house in three hours after the owner phoned to tell him he was coming to the office.

Hollywood’s John Huston finished editing the film “The African Queen” just days before its release. The next year he finished the final cut of the 1952 version of “Moulin Rouge” only hours before its December premiere – which happened to be the deadline for Oscar eligibility.

The point is we’ve all had those moments when the peeling veneer on our desks becomes particularly fascinating, or we begin to wonder how many teeth a narwhal has – something else for you EEMB majors to look up when you finally do hit the books.

To aid you in your indecision, I have prepared a list of questions to ponder before you study:

Name the two candidates who received the most votes running against Vladimir Putin in the March 2000 Russian presidential election.

Where do they keep the original fossil of archaeopteryx?

Disney’s annual profit is equal to the total gross national product of how many island nations?

What would your first dog have looked like with green fur? Purple?

If you ran for president, whom would you pick as a running mate?

Who were the eight baseball players who constituted the Black Sox of 1919?

How many times is the letter “o” printed in this newspaper?

How many beat poets had their works published between 1950 and 1959?

Who owns the photo rights to the pictures on your textbook covers?

How many cameras were used to shoot the film “The Last Starfighter”?

How many doors are there in the MultiCultural Center?

When George Washington Carver invented peanut butter, was it chunky-style or smooth?

When was the first edition of your last math book published? How many pages did it have?

Why are you still reading? Don’t you have a final to study for?

Josh Braun is the Daily Nexus science and technology editor with an overactive imagination. This is his last column for the year. Good luck on finals, and he’ll see you in the fall.

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