Evn, who thinks strife is the bee's knees, has
tagged me with a meme.
I think meme is a fun word and a fascinating term, sociologically speaking.
However, I am usually reluctant to participate in them, on the grounds of
Too Cool for School vs. Yearbook Club. Not this time, though. Overriding this impulse is the fact that Evn gets principal credit for my re-entry into the legitimate blogosphere, and, damn it all, he is right. I do love lists.
(Spoiler Alert: There will be four lists in this blog)
Without further ado, the rules of this meme:
1. Link to the person who tagged you. (Check. I am on top of things!)
2. Post the rules on your blog. (Boom! Meta-check!)
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.
But before we do this, I would like to offer a curtain-raiser. So, without further ado, here is my commentary on Evn's
Six Random Things:
(Oh, snap! I linked to it twice!)
1. Funny story about this one. Evn was once (mostly against his will) conscripted into service as the official cockroach killer for the MLA Offices at our college by the head of the program, a dear, departed professor and a surprisingly powerful Jewish woman at our
very Catholic university. It was a job he hated. But the rest of the job was super-cool, so he had to put up with it. How super cool could it be, you ask? That office had the world's most awesome porch, and if that doesn't tell you everything, I don't know how to talk to you.
2. Marilyn Manson was also edgy in the mid-90's, if that gives you any perspective.
3. I'm pretty sure this entry is a thinly-veiled metaphor for how much time he spent drinking.
4. Who's bed he ends up in is somehow irrelevant to this particular compulsion.
5. I have nothing to offer here, but I've put myself into the position of having to comment on every one of these, so instead, I'm going to tell you about the whale that exploded (this is a partial repost from an old blog):
Okay. So this Sperm Whale, which is funny enough to begin with, dies at sea and washes ashore shortly after, fairly intact. Taiwanese scientists ( I thought all they did was make action figures) see this as a golden oppurtunity to cut open a dead Sperm Whale, load his ass up on a flatbed truck and drive him through the widest street that gets to their office - you know, the middle of downtown... um, Taiwan. Meanwhile, unbeknowest to anyone but God and whoever could've suspected that John Ritter's number was up, the Sperm Whale is being consumed from the inside by the mites that contribute to the deterioration of all things once living, but particularly in the ocean and being this Whale. Mites have to poop, too, and the way they happen to go about it is by releasing methane and other gases ( in actuality it's the reason you flatulate - that's microscopic bug poo buildup), and these mites have been doing it with aplomb**. But the Whale must obviously be going through rigor mortis or something, because his muscles can't relax enough to let this gas out. So what happens next? (Melissa Singletary from Elvington, Wisconsin writes, "Dear Beakman...") You guessed it. That Whale fucking blows up. All over the Taiwanese marketplace. Spewing blood, slime, feces, and guts all over the place - all over the daily shoppers. ka-BOOM! Guh-ag! Citezens, unexpectedly covered in filth, being vomitting and passing out. Total mayhem. Absolute chaos. And to top it all off, the large intestine wraps around this vespa, arguably the worst idea in motorcycle technology since Fonzie learned to jump over a shark.
Coolest. Thing. Ever. And then, as an afterthought, the article mentions that the dead whale had been reknowned (prior to it's pickup by the Taiwanese scientists) for it's 5' penis. The way I see it, the penis crashed through the window, knocking a hat and jacket off of a manequin, only to have the clothes land on the penis which now stands in the manequin's place. It's so funny I was laughing and retching all at once. Now why can't CSI be more like that? Oh, wait. It is.
** - aplomb refers to some chick from Hawaii that lounges outside and feeds the lazy coconuts.
6. Sometimes I ge the feeling that certain things don't exist (like Norweigian as a language), and Erasure is becoming one of those things.
Tired yet? We're only halfway through our lists! On to six random things concerning me:
1. I
love old episodes of Match Game that they show on Game Show Network. Unreasonably, man. Part of it is Gene Rayburn's microphone, but mostly it's two things: 1 - the "G" list celebrities. Charles Nelson Reilley, Brett Sommers, Nipsy Russell, McLean Stevenson, Richard Dawson, and Kitty Carlisle Hart couldn't carry a fresh bowl of oxygen, let alone an audiences' attention for half an hour. How was this popular? 2 - the premise of this game show is categorically insane. Host Rayburn reads a fill-in-the-blank sentence (mad lib style), and the contestant makes a guess at what the "stars" answers were. Only thing is, the stars could've written anything. And this is Charles Nelson Reilly we're talking about. If Rayburn read, "Old Tom said, 'I think my doctor is a quack. Every time I go in for a check-up, he demands that I pay him in
blank," Charles Nelson Reilly wouldn't write something like "crackers" (the duck analogy, plus a hoary old way of saying someone's nutballs), or "pennies" or anything remotely resembling an answer, he'd write, "Soaps from Rosalind Russell's guest washroom" or some other shit. I am not kidding when I tell you that most of these episodes were decided by scores that looked like hockey games or baseball games from the deadball era.
2. I met more important people working at a dry cleaners than I have in five years in the theatre / museum business. So there.
3. I have no concept of proportions when it comes to cooking. I can only make industrial sized dishes for families of twelve. Hope you like leftovers! Unfortunately, this leads to scads of over-eating, as my parents somehow lived through the great depression despite being born a good twelve & twenty-two years after it.
4. I get a bug up my butt about certain jokes, and if I don't get a laugh out of them, I will hang on to them and drag them into the ground until they work. Some lines I have found absolutely hilarious which somehow have yet to find an audience:
"That's the best idea I've heard today, and I've heard four ideas today."
"Every little girl wanted a pony when she grew up, but not for breakfast."
"I am not an animal! I am a hunan being!" - best when shouted by Chinese delivery boy
5. Evn's dream post inspired me to tell you about the weirdest dream I ever had, when I was fifteen. (1995)
It's Thanksgiving day, and the Rockets are playing the Knicks. For some reason, I'm in the Knicks' locker room with my friend Andy (NOT a basketball fan, by the way) listening to the game on the radio, where we hear Gene Peterson tell the audience listening in that after the game, the Knicks have arranged to have a Thanksgiving feast back in their locker room. Sure enough, there's an impressive spread there - everything you think is supposed to be a Thanksgiving food, it's there.
Suddenly, the phone rings. Andy answers, and it's our 9th grad algebra teacher, Mr. Pickering. Mr. Pickering asks, "What kind of food have they got back there?" So Andy answers, turkey, stuffing, etc., only to be interrupted by Pickering, "Do they have any pie?" We look around, and sure enough, there's a peach pie. Says Pickering, "I'll give you ten bucks if you steal that pie for me." So Andy does.
The game ends in a one point Rockets' victory, and the Knicks come back to enjoy their dinner. They are rather put out to discover that the pie is missing, and it comes to pass that due to some obscure rule about basketball being invented with peach baskets for the original hoops, theft of peaches is grounds for a double technical. Why it didn't matter that the game was over or that Andy and I had no ties to the Rockets' organization was apparently irrelevant, and Allan Houston sank the two free throws to win the game for New York. Needless to say, the city was pissed.
6. I once played the character of Mufaro in a production of
Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters. Let's just say there was no other choice that day, and Mufaro was PROBABLY cuckolded.
So there are my six things. Now, I just have to tag six people, and my list-making is complete!
However, instead of tagging people I know, I'm going to select six blogs at random from the blogosphere and tag them, just to see who I get to do it.
And the winners are...
Justin DriscollSkatterbrainMimi on the BeachWhen Tara Met BlogMatt B. ThompsonLowercase "l"That's four lists! And this blog took me just long enough for Pete to throw up right next to me, so I'll put conclusions aside and go pick this up.
All for now.
7. Time Bandits
