The Stupid Files, part 2

I'm a big fan of Tea Party Cat on Facebook and Twitter. For a few months now, she (cats are all girls, right?) has been giving us "Asshole of the Day" inductees. When there are multiple candidates for AotD, I always take time to carefully consider each candidate's contribution and vote. In a few short months I've Tea Party Cat go from a tweet, to a tweet and an FB page, to two tweets and FB pages to a blog, to a http://winkprogress.com/  I've supported TPC every step of the way. This morning, while inducting Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) into "The Stupid Files," it occurred to me that I have a blog, I have a twitter account, I have an FB page, and I have a recurring political meme with humorous and outrage du jour potential. Maybe, I thought, maybe I could write up a small blog post for each inductee and, like, let you all know what I'm doing. Then I'd post it on Twitter and FB and become as popular as TPC*.

So here's the deal: as I see it, the only thing that my "Asshole of the Day" has over "The Stupid Files" is a catchy logo stolen from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I need a logo**. Send me your suggestions, either as an actual image or as something within my artistic abilities to create. Ideally, the image should be simple enough to make into a Twitter icon. I'll post your suggestions here and we'll have a contest to pick the winner.

Meanwhile, tomorrow I'll tell you why Rep. Rohrabacher made it into the Stupid Files.

* Yes, I realize this part is sad, sad self-delusion. Humor me.
** My catch phrase will be "The stupid is out there."

I'm not part of the elite after all

The selective use of the word "elite" as an insult is a pet peeve of mine, as I'm sure it is for all of us in the elite. In response to an op-ed piece in the Washington Post by Charles Murray (author of the appalling Bell Curve), Claire Berlinski has created a quiz to identify who belongs in the "elite", as defined Murray's use of the word.

1. Can you talk about "Mad Men?" No.

2. Can you talk about the "The Sopranos?" No.

3. Do you know who replaced Bob Barker on "The Price Is Right?" No.

4. Have you watched an Oprah show from beginning to end? No.

5. Can you hold forth animatedly about yoga? No.

6. How about pilates? I know it's an exercise program, but not what it entails.

7. How about skiing? No.

8. Mountain biking? No.

9. Do you know who Jimmie Johnson is? No.

10. Does the acronym MMA mean nothing to you? Yes.

11. Can you talk about books endlessly? Yes.

12. Have you ever read a "Left Behind" novel? No.

13. How about a Harlequin romance? Yes, when I worked in a book store.

14. Do you take interesting vacations? Very rarely.

15. Do you know a great backpacking spot in the Sierra Nevada? No.

16. What about an exquisite B&B overlooking Boothbay Harbor? I don't even know where that is.

17. Would you be caught dead in an RV? I've been caught alive in one.

18. Would you be caught dead on a cruise ship? I can't afford to go on a cruise ship.

19. Have you ever heard of of Branson, MO? Yes.

20. Have you ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club? No.

21. How about the Rotary Club? No.

22. Have you lived for at least a year in a small town? Depends on your definition of small. Does Idaho Falls, ID count?

23. Have you lived for a year in an urban neighborhood in which most of your neighbors did not have college degrees? I never polled them, but probably yes.

24. Have you spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line? Yes, if I count as a family.

25. Do you have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian? I don't have very many close friends at all, but I do have friends who are.

26. Have you ever visited a factory floor? Yes. I'm counting a fish processing ship as a factory.

27. Have you worked on one? Yes.

You're a member of the elite if you answered yes on 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14 or no on any of the others. I get an elite score of seven out of twenty-seven. I guess that makes me a non-elite, real American, just like the millionaire media personalities on Fox.

We could go on and on about all the things that are wrong with Murray's article, but I'll hand this over to you guys for now. How did you do?

I are smart

I know as much about science as Greg Laden and he's a real science guy.


How much do you know?

Too easy

David Neiwert (who is finally getting some of the media attention he deserves) asks:

Is there anyone more congenitally dishonest than Jonah Goldberg working in the right-wing media? Deeply, appallingly dishonest?

No.

This has been another edition of Simple Answers To Simple Questions.*

* "Simple Answers To Simple Questions" concept created by Duncan Black.

No surprise here

The Center for American Progress has an interactive quiz to measure how liberal or conservative you are on the current big issues. It consists of forty questions that you rate on a ten point scale of agreement / disagreement. It only takes a few minutes. My score is in the comments. What's yours?

Luxury or necessity?

Here's a fun little poll to play with and ponder during the resolution season. Chris at AmericaBlog came across this Pew Research Center survey from two years ago that asks which everyday consumer products are luxuries and which are necessities. The items on the list are:

• Cable or Satellite TV
  
• Car
  
• Car Air Conditioning
  
• Cell Phone
  
• Clothes Dryer
  
• Clothes Washer
  
• Dishwasher
  
• Flatscreen TV
  
• High Speed Internet
  
• Home Air Conditioning
  
• Home Computer
  
• I Pod
  
• Microwave Oven
  
• TV

I've alphabetized the list to randomize it a bit. Glancing over it, you'll see that some items are dependent on others; you're not likely to have air conditioning in your car if you don't have a car or to have cable unless you have a TV (unless you're using it for your internet connection).

For me there's nothing on the list that I couldn't live without, and I have, in fact, lived without every item on the list at one time or another in my life. I currently do not have a cell phone, home air conditioning, flatscreen TV, iPod, or dishwasher. I lived without a car until I was 42 (that's not a big deal in a city with decent mass transit, but it's quite an accomplishment in most of the West). Even though I live in the middle of Seattle, I've only had a high speed connection for a short while (the connectivity in my neighborhood is terrible). Since I use the computer both for work and play, a computer with some kind of connectivity is probably the only really indispensable thing on the list. After that, either a car or a washing machine is important. Having neither and hauling your laundry on the bus to the nearest laundromat really sucks (though I have done that).

A few of the others, while not necessities, are good ideas if you can afford them. A good washing machine, dishwasher, or microwave can be a lot more energy efficient that the manual alternatives. They're also genuine time saving devices. I've considered dropping my land line for a cell phone just to eliminate the solicitations and robocalls. In Seattle, there are only about ten days out of the year when I could really use air conditioning, so there is no way I could justify a complete system, but I have considered getting a tiny portable unit to cool the bedroom enough so I can sleep during those ten days (I don't sleep and become very cranky during those days, so people around me might consider it a necessity). Among the rest, beyond the things I already don't have, the ones I could give up the easiest would be the clothes dryer and TV.

Of course, when you get right down to it, the only "real" necessities are food and shelter. But who wants to live by hiding in a hole in the ground and sneaking out at night to steal turnips from the farmer down the road? So, how enslaved are you by your gadgets?

The geologists' 100 things meme

This is one of those lists where you bold the things you've seen or done. I was surprised at how well I did (26 and a couple halves) considering I'm not a geologist and not especially well traveled. Fortunately, the northwest corner of North America is a very geologically rich territory. I could have done even better. When I was a kid, my family traveled through a few more places on the list and either didn't stop or had no idea what we were seeing. Chris Rowan, the main geology blogger over at ScienceBlogs got 38 and a couple halves.

1. See an erupting volcano. [I've seen Mts. Illiamna and Spurr in Alaska spew ash and smoke]
2. See a glacier. I've stomped around on several in Alaska and British Columbia]
3. See an active geyser See an active geyser such as those in Yellowstone, New Zealand or the type locality of Iceland. [Yellowstone several times as a kid]
4. Visit the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) Boundary.
5. Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage.
6. Explore a limestone cave. [Lewis and Clark Caverns in Montana]
7. Tour an open pit mine. [I visited the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana when it was still operating]
8. Explore a subsurface mine. [I've never been deep inside one, but I have nosed around the opening to some abandoned mines in Alaska, Idaho, and Montana]
9. See an ophiolite, such as the ophiolite complex in Oman or the Troodos complex on the Island Cyprus.
10. An anorthosite complex, such as those in Labrador, the Adirondacks, and Niger (there's some anorthosite in southern California too).
11. A slot canyon. Many of these amazing canyons are less than 3 feet wide and over 100 feet deep. [Tokkum Creek in Kootenay National Park, British Columbia]
12. Varves, whether you see the type section in Sweden or examples elsewhere.
13. An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada.
14. A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana or the Skaergaard Complex in Eastern Greenland. [not sure if this counts. I went camping in the Stillwater as a kid, without knowing what it was]
15. Coastlines along the leading and trailing edge of a tectonic plate. [Only one side, so far]
16. A gingko tree, which is the lone survivor of an ancient group of softwoods that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the Mesozoic.
17. Living and fossilized stromatolites (Glacier National Park is a great place to see fossil stromatolites, while Shark Bay in Australia is the place to see living ones)
18. A field of glacial erratics. [Alaska, of course]
19. A caldera. [Yellowstone again]
20. A sand dune more than 200 feet high.
21. A fjord. [Southeastern Alaska and British Columbia]
22. A recently formed fault scarp. [we moved to Alaska a few years after the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 and there were two good fault scarps still visible in Anchorage]
23. A megabreccia.
24. An actively accreting river delta. [not a big one, but lots of little ones on Alaska]
25. A natural bridge.
26. A large sinkhole.
27. A glacial outwash plain [Alaska and Canadian Rockies.]
28. A sea stack. [Oregon and Washngton coasts]
29. A house-sized glacial erratic. [the biggest I've seen was about the sise of an old Buick]
30. An underground lake or river.
31. The continental divide. [many, many times]
32. Fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals.
33. Petrified trees. [no whole sections of trees, but I have some chunks of petrified wood that I collected as a kid]
34. Lava tubes. [in a couple places in sotheastern Idaho].
35. The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back.
36. Meteor Crater, Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, to see an impact crater on a scale that is comprehensible.
37. The Great Barrier Reef, northeastern Australia, to see the largest coral reef in the world.
38. The Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada, to see the highest tides in the world (up to 16m). [Cook Inlet Alaska has the second highest tides, up to about 14m]
39. The Waterpocket Fold, Utah, to see well exposed folds on a massive scale.
40. The Banded Iron Formation, Michigan, to better appreciate the air you breathe.
41. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania,
42. Lake Baikal, Siberia, to see the deepest lake in the world (1,620 m) with 20 percent of the Earth's fresh water.
43. Ayers Rock (known now by the Aboriginal name of Uluru), Australia. This inselberg of nearly vertical Precambrian strata is about 2.5 kilometers long and more than 350 meters high.
44. Devil's Tower, northeastern Wyoming, to see a classic example of columnar jointing.
45. The Alps. [I flew over them, they look a lot like the Canadian Rockies, but smaller]
46. Telescope Peak, in Death Valley National Park. From this spectacular summit you can look down onto the floor of Death Valley - 11,330 feet below.
47. The Li River, China, to see the fantastic tower karst that appears in much Chinese art.
48. The Dalmatian Coast of Croatia, to see the original Karst.
49. The Gorge of Bhagirathi, one of the sacred headwaters of the Ganges, in the Indian Himalayas, where the river flows from an ice tunnel beneath the Gangatori Glacier into a deep gorge.
50. The Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Utah, an impressive series of entrenched meanders.
51. Shiprock, New Mexico, to see a large volcanic neck.
52. Land's End, Cornwall, Great Britain, for fractured granites that have feldspar crystals bigger than your fist.
53. Tierra del Fuego, Chile and Argentina, to see the Straights of Magellan and the southernmost tip of South America.
54. Mount St. Helens, Washington, to see the results of recent explosive volcanism.
55. The Giant's Causeway and the Antrim Plateau, Northern Ireland, to see polygonally fractured basaltic flows.
56. The Great Rift Valley in Africa.
57. The Matterhorn, along the Swiss/Italian border, to see the classic "horn".
58. The Carolina Bays, along the Carolinian and Georgian coastal plain
59. The Mima Mounds near Olympia, Washington
60. Siccar Point, Berwickshire, Scotland, where James Hutton (the "father" of modern geology) observed the classic unconformity.
61. The moving rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley
62. Yosemite Valley
63. Landscape Arch (or Delicate Arch) in Utah
64. The Burgess Shale in British Columbia. [This is one we drove past, when I was a kid, without knowing what was there]
65. The Channeled Scablands of central Washington
66. Bryce Canyon
67. Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone
68. Monument Valley
69. The San Andreas fault
70. The dinosaur footprints in La Rioja, Spain
71. The volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands
72. The Pyrenees Mountains
73. The Lime Caves at Karamea on the West Coast of New Zealand
74. Denali (an orogeny in progress)
75. A catastrophic mass wasting event.
76. The giant crossbeds visible at Zion National Park .
77. The black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand-olivine beaches).
78. Barton Springs in Texas.
79. Hells Canyon in Idaho
80. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado.
81. The Tunguska Impact site in Siberia.
82. Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0. [several in Alaska and one in Seattle]
83. Find dinosaur footprints in situ.
84. Find a trilobite (or a dinosaur bone or any other fossil).
85. Find gold, however small the flake. [gold panning was one my regular summer pastimes as a kid]
86. Find a meteorite fragment
87. Experience a volcanic ashfall.[Mts. St Augustine and Spurr in Anchorage]
88. Experience a sandstorm.
89. See a tsunami.
90. Witness a total solar eclipse. [only partials]
91. Witness a tornado firsthand (Important rules of this game).
92. Witness a meteor storm, a term used to describe a particularly intense (1000+ per minute) meteor shower
93. View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope.
94. See the Aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights. [many times]
95. View a great naked-eye comet, an opportunity which occurs only a few times per century. [Hyahkutake in 1996]
96. See a lunar eclipse. [both full and partial]
97. View a distant galaxy through a large telescope
98. Experience a hurricane.
99. See noctilucent clouds. [maybe]
100. See the green flash.

If they're going list atmospheric phenomena, I think I should get credit for sundogs and solar halos.

A food meme

Chad Orzel has a food meme up on his blog. This is the usual list style meme where you bold the items that you have experienced.

1. Venison (deer and elk)
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses (maybe, I never pass the cheese samples in the market without tasting)*
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl (I've had them each separately)
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects (yes, but not intentionally. Eating mosquitos in your dinner is part of camping)
43. Phaal
44. Goat's milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald's Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S'mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin (I'm not sure what this means. The only kaolin I know is a type of clay used in ceramics and pharmaceuticals. I have taken pills with kaolin clay in them. There is a mental illness called pica that involves compulsive eating of dirt. Some soils are used in traditional medicines. And, of course, no childhood is complete with a certain amount of dirt-eating.)
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs' legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash (In Budapest, no less)
88. Flowers (Nastutiums, roses, artichokes, lavender)
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa (I've had regular harissa)
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox (I prefer the stronger, dry style smoked slamon from the Northwest)
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake


That's 59; not very impressive. Items not on the original list, but that I think I deserve credit for:

101. Moose
102. Bear
103. Caribou
104. Retsina
105. Ćevapčići
106. Postum
107. Fried halibut cheeks
108. Cracklin
109. Injera
110. Home brewed wine or mead

What belongs on your list?

* It would be possible to do separate memes just to name all of the types of cheese a person has tried, or spices, or animal species (fish, fowl, and mammal), or animal parts. Another possibility is how many of the items on the list have you cooked.

All the latest polls

TPM has a round up of the latest polls. Most predict Obama taking North Carolina and Clinton taking Indiana tomorrow. That means they cancel each other out and the fight continues. Oh, and we'll get to hear why Indiana voters are more authentic and matter more than North Carolina voters. I want to be the first to welcome our North Carolina friends into the bi-coastal elites. Sure, you might miss being part of the real America of the heartland, but the coffee here more than makes up for it.

If, as it appears, Obama gets to the 2025 magic number before the convention, what do you think the Clinton campaign will do?

1. Gracefully give in to the will of the party.
   
2. Try to start a fight at the convention.
   
3. Accept the nomination from the Lieberman Party.

A very strange list

ABC has a photo feature on great war films as a tie-in to the release of Kimberly Peirce's new Iraq War film Stop Loss. The list is attached to the link "Hollywood's Best War Movies" and has the headline "Hollywood Goes to War" and bothers me for two reasons.

First, the movies are not all products of Hollywood. Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion is a movie that belongs on any list of great war movies (or great movies, period), but it is a French movie. It has no connection whatsoever with Hollywood except for occasionally being shown there. Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket was filmed entirely in Britain by a British director, but it was co-produced by an American company (Warner) so it does have a partial connection with Hollywood. Is that enough to make it a Hollywood movie? Okay, they are using the word Hollywood to mean movies in general. But why then are other great French, Russian, German, and Japanese movies left out?

My other complaint is the same complaint I always have about best-of-all-time lists: The list makers have almost no sense of historical or geographic perspective. War to them means twentieth century American wars. No version of War and Peace made the list. No Civil War movies, Alamo movies, British colonial movies, no Ancient or Medieval movies. Of the fourteen movies, only three were made before 1970. That's just weird. Before 1970, war movies were one of the great staples of Hollywood. Then, in the space of about three years, war, westerns, and musicals all but disappeared from the screen. Hollywood made hundreds--possibly thousands--of movies about WWII between 1942 and 1970. Exactly one made the list: "Patton."

For just WWII made before 1970, shouldn't at least one of these ten films replace something more recent?

• The Bridge on the River Kwai
  
• Stalag 17
  
• From Here to Eternity
  
• The Caine Mutiny
  
• Run Silent, Run Deep
  
• The Great Escape
  
• Casablanca
  
• The Longest Day
  
• The Diary of Anne Frank
  
• Catch 22

And where the heck is Battle Beyond the Stars??

I'm sure you can name as many films for other years, other wars, and made in other countries. I know I can.

Obsolete Skills II

While writing the last post, I once had, but am now long out of practice on. Who knows the skill that includes the following jargon?

• Thread
  
• Soft ball
  
• Firm ball
  
• Hard ball
  
• Light crack
  
• Hard crack

Does anyone still use that skill?

Obsolete Skills I

Coturnix's Obligatory Readings of the Day for yesterday included a link to a list of obsolete technical skills. Both sites have interesting discussions and the concept has spawned, not one, but two wikis on the subject. I had most of the skills on the list at one time, but can't guarantee doing some of them anymore without poking someone's eye out. However, among thew amazing skills I can claim are:

• Dialing a rotary phone
  
• Counting change
  
• Changing the ribbon in a typewriter
  
• Threading a 16mm projector
  
• Cuing a track on a vinyl record
  
• Running a mimeograph machine
  
• Doing long division
  
• Trimming the tip on a quill pen
  
• Tuning the picture on a television set

What amazing technical skills do you have?

Pop Quiz

I may be muscling in on Mustang Bobby's act here, but today seems like a good day for a completely irrelevant question. Sometime relevance is overrated. So, here goes:

Who were the great pop music composers of the twentieth century--the ones who will last well into the next century, or should?

The only rules are these: we're talking pop music, not serious music; we're talking writers, not performers or producers; and we're talking about a body of work, not just one or two great songs. Since most of our experience is likely to be Anglo and rock/jazz/show centric, extra points will be awarded for other culture, other genres, and forgotten masters. I'll spot you, what I think are, ten obvious ones.

Cole Porter
Duke Ellington
Irving Berlin
Lennon and McCartney
Bacharach and David
Richard Rogers
Holland-Dozier-Holland
Stevie Wonder
Anonio Carlos Jobim
Fats Waller

Who else belongs on the list?

The real me

Mustang Bobby started this. Thanks to HeroMachine 2.5, camera-adverse bloggers can create a reasonable facsimile of what they look like in their minds. In real life I'm shorter and dumpier, my head is larger than my fist, and the cat would be hiding behind my leg.


Michael of Musing's Musings is also playing and much more interesting than Bobby or me. If we can get one more to play, we'll have enough for a set of blogger trading cards or a meme.

I been tagged!

The Ridger tagged me for the meme of four. It's an old meme, but a good one. Here we go:

4 jobs I have had:

1. Salesclerk in a bookstore
2. Bouncer at a disco
3. Technical Writer
4. Private Librarian

4 movies I love to watch over and over:

1.The Wizard of Oz
2. Blade Runner
3. Casablanca
4. Galaxy Quest

4 places I have lived:

1. Spenard, Alaska
2. Idaho Falls, Idaho
3. Seattle, Washington
4. Spokane, Washington

4 TV shows I enjoy watching:

1. Law and Order reruns
2. CSI (but only the Vegas version)
3. The Daily Show
4. old cartoons

4 places I have been on vacation:

1. Jasper, Banff, Yoho, and Kootenay Parks, Canada
2. Denali (Mt. McKinley National Park), Alaska
3. Riga, Latvia
4. The Oregon coast

4 websites I visit daily:

1. Scienceblogs
2. Bark Bark Woof Woof
3. AmericaBlog
4. Orcinus

4 favorite foods:

1. Chocolate
2. Strong coffee with fresh cream
3. Hot Italian sausage
4. French fries with the skin still on them

4 places I would rather be:

1. San Juan Islands
2. Whistler, British Columbia
3. Powell's Bookstore in Portland
4. Exploring somewhere I've never been

I'm number one and you are, too

David Ng at The World's Fair has created a great meme. He calls it the "I rank number one on Google" meme. The rules are much simpler than the last meme. Find five statements, which when typed into Google, will return your blog as the number one hit.

So far I have found four on archy but, taken together, I think they display such synergistic power that they are worth at least six and a third.

1. "Nazi Yeti in flying saucers"
   
2. "Nazi mammoth"
   
3. "frozen mammoth penis"
   
4. "nude photos of Ann Coulter"

As you can see, I run a classy and very intellectual blog.

I am rather cheesed to find out that I am not number one for "balloonosphere" since I invented that word.

So, dear friends, what search terms give you a number one?

The Pharyngula mutating genre meme

I haven't done a meme in a while. Coturnix just sent me this one created by Pharyngula to demonstrate evolution in cyberspace. It's a little trickier than most. Here are the rules.

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

* You can leave them exactly as is.

* You can delete any one question.

* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...", or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".

* You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".

* You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My parent is A Blog Around the Clock.

The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is: The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.

The best scary movie in scientific dystopias is: Blade Runner.

The best sexy song in pop is: "Fever" as performed by Peggy Lee.

In order to keep mutation alive, I'm passing the meme on to:

Mustang Bobby
Martin Langeland
BadTux the meme-orific penguin
Bryan Dumka

Cultural markers

Razib over at Gene Expression brings up an interesting observation:

Hung with old college friends last night. We kept referring to South Park episodes to illustrate a point or make an analogy so as to clarify an issue. Interesting that this is a common touchstone for my generation.

I'm mid-boom: born 1956, high school class of 1974, college 1978. Of course, I don't see any number of school friends at the same time any more, but I think teevee as a common language fades fairly quickly over time. That is, people I went to grad school with in the last decade might refer to teevee episodes, but high school friends and college friends from thirty years ago would be more likely to refer to song lyrics or movies for cultural references.

There're two or three possible conclusions you can draw from that: Razib's generation is more teevee oriented than mine, his teevee is more memorable than mine, or teevee fades from our cultural language faster than movies or music. I'm inclined towards the latter, but maybe you have your own theory. When you get together with old friends of the same generation, what cultural references do you use for a common touchstone?

I'll add a complication. The group I graduated from high school with were very close in age and clearly of the same generation. In college, our age spread was much larger, but most of us were of the same generation, just different parts of it. By the time I went to grad school in the nineties, the group I socialized with covered two generations with a few outliers from a third generation. When you get together with people from your past, in a group who are not from the same generation, what common cultural markers do you share?

Memed

The other day Coturnix tagged me for a meme: the eight random facts meme. I haven't done a meme in a while, so I thought I'd give this one a shot. This one is a pretty basic blog meme, tell us eight things about yourself and tag eight more people to carry the meme forward.

This is me:

1. I have never been east of Montana.
   
2. My first job out of college was as a bouncer in an Alaskan bar during the construction of the pipeline.
   
3. Although I have worked as a professional writer for most of the last ten years, I still type with two fingers.
   
4. I strongly dislike hot weather.
   
5. Clever wife and I knew each other for nineteen years before we got married.
   
6. I have no measurable talent at music or languages.
   
7. I try, as much as possible, not to wear shoes.
   
8. I'm still looking for a regular job.

I'm going to skip the tagging eight more people part, though if you want to participate, take this as your invitation. These things have to stop somewhere. Going up by powers of eight, this one would tag every man, woman, and child on the planet and be working its way into another species in ten iterations. Who would we pick? Cats? Moose? Ha! Have you ever tried to make a cat or a moose do anything?

I suppose it's not the worst way to go

Yet another quiz.

You'll die from an Unlikely Illness (like the plague).

You will unfortunately succumb to a random and unlikely disease. Only to find out after death that eating more broccoli would have cured you.

'How will you die?' at QuizGalaxy.com

I'd rather have made it further on the young/old scale, but if I have to go, mysteriously is the way to go. I'm hoping it's such an unlikely and mysterious disease that they will have to name it after me.

(via Pharyngula)