Rock Gods Metallica just became the first band to perform live on all seven continents last week.  Adding icing to the cake, they accomplished this enormous feat within the last calendar year.  However, the news isn’t all unicorns and rainbows.  Without stating its intentions, a private polling organization released survey results which strain credulity, and frankly, are depressing.

736 randomly selected participants, ages 13-25, were given the following information and question: “Metallica just performed on on Antarctica.  This means they have performed on all seven continents in 2013.  What is a continent?”

• 13% answered “I don’t know”
• 36% answered “Something in space; like an asteroid, I think.  Metallica sure is crazy”
• 19% answered “It’s another word for country”
• 32% answered “One of the main landmasses on the globe, usually reckoned as seven in number (Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, North America, Australia and Antarctica).

More surprising than the fact that more participants thought a continent was an off-earth body is that these young people never learned that the longest answer is usually the right one.

Nevertheless, “you can’t keep a good dog down” as they say, and the older Metallica fans are lifting themselves out of these findings’ mild depression by reminding themselves that over the last 22 years Metallica’s Black Album is the “highest-selling record in the U.S., period.”