Uh oh, Sunday is Father's Day! What to do? Take our quiz.

Sunday is Father’s Day and we all know what that means. Or do we?

Maybe a virtual trip to the NASCAR Father’s Day Gift Center (No, we’re not making this up. It exists on the Internet.) for racing socks or barbecue tools? Or, for the DIY crowd, perhaps an original piece of art based on Dad’s smiling face?

But if you really want to know what’s in your dear Papa’s heart and soul, cozy up to our Father’s Day Quiz and get the real skinny on Father’s Day: what dads really want, why the day even exists, and why that LeBron James bobblehead doll may be talking to you, but not to your dad.

21. OK, OK, OK. But if we really want to get him something tangible, what’s top on the national Pop’s wish-list?

Jason Clark/The Evansville Courier & Press/AP
Brayden Thompson, of Evansville, Ind. picks out his prize along with his father, Scott Thompson, after Brayden popped a balloon with a dart to win while playing one of the kids games during the Hadi Shriners' 2012 Shrinersfest along Riverside Drive in Evansville, Ind. on June 6.

a. A cigar snipper in the shape of a miniature guillotine.

b. Landscaping services.

c. A vintage 1964 hot red Corvette.

d. A 12 megapixel point-and-shoot Panasonic Lumix TS1 digital camera.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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