Tom T. Hall celebrates stuff like that. (Seriously.) The Great American Burger, however, did not make it to Hall’s list of things he loves:

I love … little baby ducks,
Old pickup trucks,
Slow movin’ trains,
And rain.

It goes on from there. Nothing complicated, nothing particularly out of the ordinary — and nothing you couldn’t relate to yourself. And it probably has nothing to do with the fact that Dick Stanley is asking some of us for seven things we love.

For my purposes here, I’m defining “things” in such a way as to exclude persons: off go my children, my grandchildren, and Whoever’s In Charge Up There. Which leaves the following:

1. My house. It was the 11th one I looked at when I went shopping in 2003, and I didn’t need to see anything else: it was just big enough, just quirky enough, and just inside my budget limitations. If the expense of late has been larger than I might have hoped, well, geez, the place is 61 years old; it’s cheaper to maintain than I am, and I’m five years younger.
2. My music. This covers a lot of ground; I quipped on a message board somewhere last week that in iTunes alone I had stuff from 1940 to last month. While I never cared much for Edward Bellamy’s socialist utopia in Looking Backward: 2000-1887, I did like his idea of piped-in music, and well before 2000, I was able to provide rather a lot of my own. (Major regret: I can’t play music worth a damn.)
3. The Great American Burger. Variations on this theme are legion, and justifiably so. Maybe half a pound of ground round is overdoing it, or maybe not. For reasons utterly unrelated to calorie count, I always hold the mayo. (Your mileage may vary.)
4. Mobility. I can walk, and I can drive. I cherish both of these functions, despite the expense. (I had knee surgery a few years back; I don’t need to tell you how much it costs to own a motor vehicle these days.) And I will be despondent should I lose either.
5. My position as a member of the community. It’s not much of a position, at least in any official sense, but since I gave up the title of Perennial Renter (see item #1), I feel I have much more invested in this town, this neighborhood, and perhaps in my own sense of self.
6. The Bill of Rights. I cherish the notion of a list of things a government can’t legally do. I’d like it even better if there were some way to force them to stop doing them. (Which perhaps argues for the primacy of the Second Amendment.)
7. Switchable connectivity. I bought my first computer specifically as a communications tool, a quarter-century ago. I’ve been online more or less ever since. For those of us afflicted with, or delighted by, occasional spates of misanthropy, it’s a comfort to know that we can switch off various channels that annoy us.

I depart from Hall orthodoxy in one particular: as a matter of fact, I’m not so crazy about beer. How this happened, I’ll never know.

Following the lead of Xrlq, who did this with his B list, here’s a list of the artists in the C section of my CD tree. (This does not include classical stuff, which is filed by composer, and which would be tricky, what with all the compilations and such.)

• Glen Campbell
• The Capitol Steps
• Captain and Tennille
• Kim Carnes
• Carpenters
• Johnny Cash
• Charly Cazalet
• cc: Diva
• Ray Charles
• Catherine Marie Charlton
• The Charms
• Chicago
• Susan Christie
• June Christy*
• Suzanne Ciani
• Circus Maximus
• The Dave Clark Five
• Petula Clark
• Marc Cohn
• Natalie Cole
• Sam Cooke
• Jonathan Coulton
• Creedence Clearwater Revival
• Julee Cruise

* Includes one set with Stan Kenton.

Incidentally, said tree looks like this, except mine has the cherrywood finish.

We all thank Marko for asking, but I’m not in a position to list the five most embarrassing albums on my iPod, for the following reasons:

1. I don’t have an iPod. I have a Sony MP3 Walkman and a couple of iTunes installs, the bigger of which is on my work box.
2. No actual albums were uploaded to the Walkman; it’s all singles.
3. That large iTunes install (4,563 tracks) is mostly singles. Apart from classical sets, there are only six complete albums:
   • Ory Chalk, Queen of Hearts
   • Miles Davis, Kind of Blue
   • Jethro Tull, Thick as a Brick
   • Local H, Twelve Angry Months
   • Mike Oldfield, Tubular Bells
   • She & Him, Volume One

I don’t find any of those particularly embarrassing. Then again, this comes from someone who owns four Enya albums.

Aside: I did an experiment last week during the commute: two days with Enya on the stereo (Watermark and Shepherd Moons), followed by two days with Nine Inch Nails (both discs of Ghosts I-IV). If my driving was at all affected by what was playing, I didn’t notice.

(Suggested by Mark Alger, who has even more Enya than I do. Then again, I still have all those Debbie Deborah Gibson albums.)

Oh, those wonderful names on National Public Radio:

[W]e’ve often wondered what it would be like to be one of them. A Nina Totenberg or a Renita Jablonski. A David Kestenbaum or a Lakshmi Singh. Even (on our most ambitious days) a Cherry Glaser or a Sylvia Poggioli.

So finally, after years of Fresh Air sign-off ambitions, we came up with a system for creating our own NPR Names. Here’s how it works: You take your middle initial and insert it somewhere into your first name. Then you add on the smallest foreign town you’ve ever visited.

(Via Nicolle Guanabo’s husband.)

Well, not really. But play along with Francis W. Porretto here:

1. Michael Anthony (if you’re too young to remember the old TV show The Millionaire, look it up) has come to your home and offered to buy you the car of your choice, no matter what that car might be or cost. But there are conditions:

• It has to be in current production;
• You have to foot all running and maintenance expenses;
• It will be the only car you’ll get to drive or use in any way for the next ten years, no matter what happens, where you might need to go, or why.

What would your choice be?

2. Defend that choice, with specific reference to your circumstances — and remember that you’re not allowed the use of any other car, including that of your spouse if you have one.

3. Now describe a set of circumstances you could plausibly face in which, no matter how carefully you chose your new car, you’d rather have some other car for those conditions.

Under present-day circumstances, I think I’d opt for Infiniti’s small crossover, the EX35. Justifications:

• It’s essentially a wagon version of the G sedan, a highly-covetable little darb in its own right;
• It still drives like a G, apart from a couple extra inches of height, separating it from the general run of SUVs that aren’t really SUVs;
• It should fit nicely in my existing garage;
• Operating expenses would likely not be much different from what I’m spending now on Gwendolyn. (The EX will burn a tad more fuel, but most repairs will be covered under warranty for four years.)

The EX is not a particularly good off-road vehicle, though, so were I to move way out into the sticks, I’d be better served by something with more rock-hopping capability.

Prompted by Michele, I have determined that as far as the Chinese are concerned, I am a consumer of cheap crap a Snake. Let’s see about that:

Snakes have always been the seducers of human beings. If you know the story of “The White Snake”, you will understand what I mean. In reality, Snake people are born charming and popular. Snakes are spotlight magnets, and they will not be ignored. Peer group attention and public recognition are the least of what he expects. Yet Snakes are never noisy or deliberately outspoken, and they have have excellent manners.

This has, of course, nothing to do with Whitesnake. And while I insist that I don’t seek the limelight and don’t care a fig for fame, readers might point out that not only do I have a SiteMeter, but I actually pay for it.

I have been outspoken at times, occasionally even deliberately.

Most people are secretly or hopelessly in love with Snakes. Gather those frustrated folk you know and most likely, they are probably in love with a Snake. Irresistible as they seem, the Snake never wastes time in idle gossip. He thinks often and deeply. He is an intellectual, a philosopher, a cerebral person. Snake people rely heavily on first impressions, on their own feelings, on their sympathies, rather than on facts, on the advice and opinions on others. He seems to have a kind of sixth sense in this way.

If I seem to have a sixth sense, it’s because the other five aren’t working correctly, or something. And this description seems to conflict with my established INTJ status.

In money matters, the Snake has good luck: he doesn’t have to worry — he’ll always be able to lay his hand on money when he needs it. Generally, Snakes are careful but generous with friends and family. The Snake should stick to careers that won’t involve him in any risk — even the risk of working too hard, for to tell the truth, the Snake is a bit lazy.

I think I have all of $35 in my PayPal account. (I suppose I could stash a few more dollars in there, but I’m too lazy.)

In love, the Snake male is romantic and charming. He has a sense of humor and the female is usually beautiful and successful. but if a Snake chooses a partner, he’ll be jealous and possessive — even if he no longer loves her. Rejection is the worst blow his delicate ego can suffer. The Snake must be received, welcomed, accepted and approved by those with whom he comes in contact. They need a lot of security.

Hmpf. If it weren’t for rejection, I’d get no reaction from those beautiful and/or successful females at all.

As with real snakes, which hibernate in the cold season and come out when it’s warm, Snake people shine in the hot months. And the Snake born at midday in the heat of a tropical summer will be happier than one born in the middle of an icy night in winter. The destiny of those born under this sign is so sensitive to the inclemencies of climate that the almanac warns Snakes born on a stormy day that they will face danger throughout their lives.

Well, I do have a fairly-advanced case of Seasonal Affective Disorder. And I don’t recall what the weather was like the day I was born; I wasn’t allowed to go outside back then.

There’s a lot more to the description, but I think I can dismiss it with a hiss or two.

Suggested by Steph Waller:

Go into your archives and post the first sentence from the first post you made each month last year.

Okay, will do. Let’s see what sort of crumby stuff I’ve been casting on the waters:

January: “Worst titles of 2007″ contains no full sentence until the very end: “Some marginally-acceptable turns of phrase are recounted here.”

February: “The City Sentinel broadsheet is adopting a time-honored method of hyping sales: they’re cutting the price.”

March: “Space is precious in Japan, which has five times the population of Texas in about half the area.” [On unusual farming techniques.]

April: “In a lifetime of klutziness, I’ve broken lots of light bulbs, even a socket or two, usually with no ill effects other than finding that one last shard of glass three weeks later.”

May: “During a one-hour period yesterday, someone’s botnet planted about 100 bogus TrackBacks here, connected to a whole link farm full of Yahoo! 360 blogs which were probably created by a botnet.”

June: “Patterico recommends Michael J. O’Gara for Office No. 94 of the Los Angeles Superior Court.”

July: “You don’t give a damn about us, but we’re your biggest customer.” [By "you," I mean "television."]

August: “In my opinion, the 45 rpm record is the greatest invention in the history of popular culture because it meant that for the first time in history, anyone — especially kids — could buy art — real art — with just the change in their pockets.” [This was a blockquote from elsewhere.]

September: “I started doing this about three years ago, and it proved to be relatively popular among the readership, by which is meant that not one of them has commanded me to cut it out or face the Wrath of [insert name of presumably wrathful entity].”

October: “This odd-looking contraption is nothing more than a strap for your cell phone or other electronic gizmo, made up to look like a blood drip, available in your blood type unless you have some wacky antigen that maybe five or six people on earth share.”

November: “Yes, it’s time for another DST rant: not mine, though.”

December: “If you were wondering ‘When’s the next time we get to look at some more weird search strings?’ the answer is ‘Right about now.’”

And it’s probably as well that I do this myself from my position at the very Heart of Obscurity, for no biographer would get within three meters of this unfocused detritus.

As seen here:

Just list all the jobs you’ve had in your life, in order. Don’t bust your brain: no durations or details are necessary, and feel free to omit anything that you feel might tend to incriminate you. I’m just curious. And when you’re done, tag another five bloggers you’re curious about.

Nice to know that blogdom, at least, still pays heed to the Fifth Amendment.

That said, I’ve done all of the following:

• Newspaper carrier
• Fast-food drone, including burger-griller and taco tucker
• Personnel clerk
• Infantryman [more or less contemporaneous with "personnel clerk"]
• Inventory specialist
• Accounts-receivable clerk
• Customer-service specialist
• Tape librarian
• Accounts-payable clerk
• Destroyer of used equipment
• Telephone order-taker
• Server operator
• Website backend management [recently contemporaneous with "server operator"]

I need hardly point out that I was better at some of these than at others. And the order is not always precisely chronological: for one thing, I had two stints at “newspaper carrier,” roughly nine years apart.

My belated Christmas/on-time Boxing Day present: I’m not gonna tag you.

Courtesy of the DADA Server:

Your secret name is Stubbed Toe.
The animal which symbolizes you is Beer Thirty.
The color of your soul is Round.
The celebrity you most resemble is Nutmeg.
Your special pain or illness is Hans.
Your most important time of day is platypus.
The shape of your life is twighlight.
And the flavor which identifies you most is hitler.

Possibly even “hitlest.”

On a related subject: how many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? [Answer: The bicycle's broken.]

(Suggested by Scribal Terror.)

Seen at Og’s, and followed up by Andrea and Mark, so I figured I’d give it a shot myself. Items in bold are items I actually have done, with notes where necessary.

1. Started your own blog [Duh.]
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than you can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland [I assume Disney World counts.]
8. Climbed a mountain [Only if bicycling counts.]
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sang a solo [If karaoke counts.]
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea (from land)
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch [If Web work is any sort of art.]
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown your own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitch hiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors [First generation, anyway.]
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught yourself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had your portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten Caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had your picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating [Well, a squirrel, anyway.]
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby [Technically, she had the baby, but it was a joint production.]
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee
100. Read an entire book in one day

Some of these seem a lot more mundane than others, which leads me to believe that the person who originally conceived this list was writing up his own list of things in the hope of finding people who had had similar experiences at all levels.

I find it surprising that I’ve done roughly a third of them — and not surprising that most people seem to have done more than that.

No, it’s not some new athletic conference.

(With thanks to Rita.)

I saw this at Nina’s and for some reason thought I had to try it for myself. Here’s the premise:

The scale you completed is the Experiences in Close Relationships Scale, created by Brennan, Clark, and Shaver (1998). The scale is a measure of an individual’s “attachment style” in romantic relationships. It yields scores on two dimensions of attachment that together explain a lot of the variability in how people relate to their romantic partners. The first dimension is called attachment-related Anxiety and it represents the extent to which an individual is secure vs. insecure about whether his/her partner will be available and responsive to his/her needs. A high score on attachment anxiety suggests that a person is afraid of rejection and abandonment. The second dimension is called attachment-related Avoidance and it represents the extent to which an individual is uncomfortable being close to others vs. secure and comfortable with depending on others. A high score on avoidance suggests that a person likes to keep his/her distance in romantic relationships and strongly dislikes depending on a romantic partner.

The reason why we are interested in romantic attachment is because several recent studies show a connection between moral values and attachment, as well as between political ideology and attachment. These studies however have produced conflicting results, and we hope to shed some light on the controversy.

The graph below shows your scores on attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety as they compare to those of the average liberal and the average conservative who have taken this survey on our website. Scores range from 1 to 7 and higher numbers indicate more attachment avoidance and anxiety. Your score is shown in green. The score of the average Liberal survey respondent is shown in blue and that of the average Conservative respondent is in red.

The difference in scores between Liberals and Conservatives, judging by the table, is fairly insignificant, though there are rather a lot more Liberal respondents, which I suspect is due to a greater fondness on the left for filing out surveys of this type. At any rate, I’m quite a bit more anxious than either.

Terry has requested half a dozen “unspectacular things” about me, which shouldn’t be difficult, inasmuch as I tend toward the dull end of the spectrum anyway. Let’s see what comes up:

1. The last time I owned a car with a stick shift was 1995; still, every time I approach an intersection, my right arm goes for the gear lever. Old habits die hard, if they die at all.
2. I’ve had the same set of flatware (undistinguished stainless) for twenty-six years; I think I’ve lost one fork during that time.
3. I have two functioning wristwatches: an early-80s clunker, which I wear, and an up-to-date model which checks in with an atomic time signal every morning, which I don’t wear because (1) it’s way too chunky and (2) despite its daily corrections it keeps really lousy time.
4. I’ve bought four copies of the Beach Boys album Pet Sounds since its 1966 release; several other albums on my shelf are in their third incarnation.
5. In the manner of a Doting Dad, I once schlepped the kids all the way to the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. Unlike most such dads, I did this while the kids were in their twenties.
6. I’ve had a Bluetooth headset for about a year. I think I’ve used it once.

To be any drabber, I’d have to have worked at Accountemps. Which, incidentally, I have.

Addendum: Someone on Tumblr has a photograph of a watch essentially identical to the one I’m wearing.

Further addendum: Which photo apparently I linked to last year sometime. So much for my memory.

Your result for The Bem Sex Role Inventory Test…

Masculine

You scored 57% masculinity and 30% femininity!

Take The Bem Sex Role Inventory Test at HelloQuizzy

(Via this real girl.)

Your result for The Perception Personality Image Test…

NBPS – The Idealist

Nature, Background, Big Picture, and Shape

Take The Perception Personality Image Test at HelloQuizzy

(Poached from Melessa. There is a statistically non-zero chance that you may have already seen this on MySpace.)

(Transplanted from Kay’s Thinking Cap.)

Let’s see how far this goes. It seems to have started around here.

So far as I can tell, if someone Spreads It from this point, it will show up here; I presume I left some sort of trace at Outside the Beltway.

Update: From the actual FAQ:

Each node represents a blog/website whose author chose to spread Happy Flu, the background circle’s size depends on the number of hits (number of times the applet was displayed on a given website). An edge is a path along which the applet travels from page to page and its length represents the time it took for one page to contaminate its neighbor.

So there.

I swiped this from Jennifer Harvey at Thursday Drive. It requires a little work, but not so much, and the results can be amazing.

How it’s done:

• Answer each of the questions below.

• Surf over to Flickr (set up an account if you don’t have one — it’s quick and easy) and type your answers (one at a time) into the search bar.
• From the choice of pictures shown only on the front page, click on the one that moves you.
• Once the page with your picture opens, copy the URL.
• Surf over to the Mosaic Maker, set up your mosaic, and paste your URLs.
• Click “Create!”

Here are the questions:

1. What is your first name?

2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you attend?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. What is your favorite drink?
7. Where would you go on your dream vacation?
8. What is your favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. Choose one word to describe you.
12. Your Flickr name?

You won’t get exact hits all the time, or even most of the time, but that doesn’t matter so much: what you want is something that sums you up, and if there’s an occasional departure from literal truth, well, who’s going to complain? Not me.

Here’s mine (click here for a larger version):

Photo credits:

1. Charles by night

2. Spaghetti junction . .
3. The Vigorous Church at Fulbourn
4. green spar
5. Pleasantville
6. return for refund.
7. Ponte vecchio
8. homemade berry ice cream
9. Hey Unknown! (I want to go there with you)
10. The girl from Ipanema
11. Ooh look down there — a camera!
12. 100_3407

Some photographers have asked that their photos be withheld from the Mosaic Maker site; I lost one of my originals. It’s easy to swap in a new one, though.

Rachel dares, and I respond:

“Perhaps it wasn’t meant to be.”

(Photograph by Michael Sarver.)

A few days ago Lynn put out a list of Things She’d Like To Say to a million visitors to her site, and it’s a very good list, worth the multiple paragraphs.

But suppose you don’t have the time or the space to come up with multiple paragraphs. What’s left is this meme from Broadcasting Brain:

The name of this meme is “the one thing that I MUST say to the entire world.”

It’s very simple: you have up to 150 characters to say a message to the world.

In other words, you have to boil down a whole lot of philosophy to the size of a text message. For those of us for whom text bloat is an ongoing reality, this could prove to be exceedingly difficult. Besides which, I’m assuming spaces between words count against the total.

Still:

The mind begins to perish at the exact moment its owner becomes incurious: no matter how much you think you know, you will always have more to learn.

I got this from Writer Chick. Feel free to pass it on.

Swiped from Fillyjonk, this premise (the explanation apparently originated elsewhere):

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead (note 1)
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) (note 2)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield (note 3)
The Three Musketeers

Notes:

• How I finished Atlas Shrugged and not this is amazing.

• With apologies to Jim Steinman and/or Meat Loaf, one out of three ain’t good.
• This is David Copperfield with two Ps by Charles Dickens, not David Coperfield with one P by Edmund Wells.

And I could swear I’ve read Emma, but I can’t remember where I picked it up, so I left it off.

Update: First paragraph redone to clarify credits.

You mean to tell me that all those highly-scientific blog quizzes aren’t really scientific?

Holy substitution cipher, Batman!

Oh, I’m sorry: that’s supposed to be “a meme for a mundane evening.”

Favorite laundry detergent: The new Purex 2x concentrate in the white bottle. It’s cheap, it’s not loaded up with dyes and scents, and half the prescribed amount works just fine.

Favorite item used for an unintended purpose: Misburned CD-Rs and DVDs, often derided as “coasters,” get used as actual coasters around here.

Favorite way to buy music: Nothing quite compares with finding an actual record at an actual record store.

How clean is your car? Inside, very; outside, less so.

How clean is your apartment/house/room? Relatively hygienic, though more than a little cluttered.

How clean is your office? Relatively filthy, though more than a little cluttered.

Favorite weekly free time: Varies with the week, but usually it happens on Saturday.

Is there a word, phrase, or gesture that is identifiably yours? I start more sentences with “Not that” than anyone else I’ve ever seen. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Most effective medicine for one (or more) of your ailments: My superexpensive blood-pressure meds work far better than I’d hoped, although I pay through the nose for this efficiency, as it offends the cost-cutters who run all the drug programs these days.

A favorite thing you try to sell/push/encourage your friends to try: Woot.

Favorite new (or new-to-you) thing: Legal downloadable music without DRM.

This is open to anyone who’d like to play along; I swiped it from Terry.

You Belong in 1954

What Year Do You Belong In?

(Via the very contemporary Rachel.)

_{Created by OnePlusYou – Free Online Dating}

“Sometimes they say shoot. But they can’t kid me, man.” — George Carlin

(Via the angelic Tamara K.)

“It’s a bit spooky, innit?”

So saith Rick Astley, on the phenomenon of “Rickrolling”.

You wouldn’t get this from any other guy.

So there are lolcats in Wayne’s World:

(Original stolen from Dynamo Dave.)

I used to joke that I was a Bard with a -2 Charisma, which existence doth not inspire. Neither does this, particularly:

I Am A: Neutral Good Human Cleric (6th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength  -  11
Dexterity  -  11
Constitution  -  11
Intelligence  -  16
Wisdom  -  13
Charisma  -  9

Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment because because it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Clerics act as intermediaries between the earthly and the divine (or infernal) worlds. A good cleric helps those in need, while an evil cleric seeks to spread his patron’s vision of evil across the world. All clerics can heal wounds and bring people back from the brink of death, and powerful clerics can even raise the dead. Likewise, all clerics have authority over undead creatures, and they can turn away or even destroy these creatures. Clerics are trained in the use of simple weapons, and can use all forms of armor and shields without penalty, since armor does not interfere with the casting of divine spells. In addition to his normal complement of spells, every cleric chooses to focus on two of his deity’s domains. These domains grants the cleric special powers, and give him access to spells that he might otherwise never learn. A cleric’s Wisdom score should be high, since this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

(Found at Dodgeblogium.)

I will, of course, buy anything with Writer Chick’s name on it, and for that matter, here are a baker’s dozen other tomes I would happily buy if someone had the temerity to write them:

1. Lawn Care for the Lazy

2. Historical Stock Market Prices, 2020 [2009 edition]
3. Catch-33: The Saga of President Minderbinder
4. The In-Sink-Erator Guide to Biodiesel
5. Let’s Move New Orleans to Minnesota!
6. Fred Thompson’s Dating Tips
7. How Tim Blair Beat Cancer
8. Crush That Libido Once and For All
9. How to Be Decisive — Or Should You?
10. Giuliani’s 9/11 Handbook, Volume 12
11. A Connecticut Yankee in King Solomon’s Mines
12. How to Get People to Pay You Not to Blog
13. The Case for Sterilizing Britney Spears

For some reason, I couldn’t add these to my Amazon Wish List.