14 posts tagged “meme”

Kelly had a good meme this weekend and I thought I'd give it a shot.

Bookishly Fabulous had a good rainy-day meme today that I thought I’d copy.  The rule is put your iPod on shuffle and write the first line of the song and see if folks in your neighborhood can guess.  I chose our “Happy Hour” playlist, which includes songs from the 1940s until today.  A few are dead giveaways.  The only songs I skipped past were instrumentals (of course).

1. Well, you can’t turn him into a Company Man, and you can’t turn him into a whore… (Last DJ, Tom Petty, Saris)
2. Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away… (Come Fly With Me, Frank Sinatra, Hannahbanana)
3.  His head was a city of paper buildings and the echoes that remain…(Long Division, Death Cab For Cutie, Grandma-P)
4.  Heading up to San Francisco, for the Labor Day Weekend show… (Come Monday, Jimmy Buffet, Eli's Dad)
5.  Come up to meet you, and tell you I’m sorry.  You don’t know how lovely you are. (The Scientist, Coldplay, Saris)
6.  Well, well, well… here it is again. (Well Well Well, Lucinda Williams.)
7.  I may not always love you, but as long as there are stars above you, you never need to doubt it. (God Only Knows, The Beach Boys, Hannahbanana)
8.  The lights go out and I can’t be saved… tides that I tried to swim against. (Clocks, Coldplay, Joie)
9.  Don’t know why… there’s no sun up in the sky…stormy weather (Stormy Weather, Etta James, Kevin Wolf)
10. I’ve been a long, long way from here.  Put on a poncho, played for mosquitoes. (If It Makes You Happy, Sheryl Crow, Little Odd Me)
11.  Well, it’s been almost a year to the moment… when I finally realized it was over. (Bleed, Anna Nalick)
12,  People… keep on learning.  Soldiers… keep on warring… (Higher Ground, Stevie Wonder, Kevin Wolf)
13.  I hold you in my arms, as the band plays... (Brilliant Disguise, Bruce Springsteen, Little Odd Me)
14.  Here comes the weather… it’s looking like another storm (Angelyne, The Jayhawks)
15. Left behind everything I knew.  All the colors are bone-white and sky blue…(Antarctica, The Weepies)
16.  If you came to make some trouble, better make it good. (Trouble, Over The Rhine)
17.  You keep sayin’ you’ve got something for me… (These Boots Were Made For Walking, Nancy Sinatra, Bookishly Fabulous)
18.  So the saying says… an elephant never forgets…(People Have a Lot of Nerve, Neko Case)
19.  Sit back, matter-of-fact, tease and toy and turn and chat and charm and hiss and play the crowd (A Million Ways (To Be Cruel), Ok Go)
20.  Well, there’s a light in your eye that keeps shining, like a star that can’t wait for the night. (Fool In The Rain, Led Zeppelin, Bookishly Fabulous)

I'll mark them off as they're guessed.  Time's up -- good job though -- not many left.  Unguessed answers in blue.

A few other folks in my neighborhood have done this one.  I sort of liked it:

1. What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before?  Oh – a few things… mostly involving work or travel.  How about combining one.  Gave a scientific presentation at a major international meeting.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?  I didn’t really make any last year, and this year the only thing I want to do is get back down to my “fighting weight” – which would be about 15-20 pounds.  I’ve slacked off too much on the exercise.  Boo.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?  Several people actually.  Late ’07 – early ’08 must have been a fertile time.

4. Did anyone close to you die?  No, thankfully.

5. What countries did you visit?  Germany.

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008?  More focus on keeping up with exercise and not allowing myself to get easily distracted by bright, shiny objects.

7. What dates from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? September 26th – that was the day I sprang our Secret Weekend in Chicago on The Beloved.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?  Probably work-related which I won’t go into here… also posting every day for NaBloPoMo… ;)

9. What was your biggest failure?  Dropping out of my running habit.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Not really.

11. What was the best thing you bought?  My piano.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?  So many people.  I have so many great friends, I feel really blessed and I feel a little guilty that I don’t give as good as I get.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?  Political pundits.

14. Where did most of your money go?  Two big expenditures this year – our yard re-do and the piano.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?  Traveling – seeing new places, meeting new friends.  And the piano.

16. What song will always remind you of 2008?  “I Will Possess Your Heart” – Death Cab For Cutie

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder?  Happier – I’ve got it pretty damn good.
b) thinner or fatter?  Fatter.  That’s gotta get fixed.
c) richer or poorer?  Counting retirement funds?  Poorer.  Otherwise, pretty much break even.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?  Exercised.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?  Stressed out about less-important things.

20. How did you spend Christmas?  Relaxing at home with the Beloved.

21. Did you fall in love in 2008?  Does falling MORE in love count?

22. What was your favorite TV program?  Here.  Oh – and I forgot to mention in that post, the HBO drama “In Treatment”.

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?  I don’t really hate anyone, thankfully.

24. What was the best book you read?  Here.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery?  Really didn’t add that much music from new artists.  Maybe The Weepies, or Adele.

26. What did you want and get?  To love and be loved.

27. What did you want and not get?  Nothing really.

28. What was your favorite film of this year?  Here.

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?  The Beloved was traveling back from a business trip and I actually had a business dinner on my birthday.  Hrm.  I turned 43.

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?  Immeasurably?  Nothing.  Not gaining the weight that I did would have been nice.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008?  I’m not really sure that I have one, except that I want to dress in a way that The Beloved is happy to have me on her arm.

32. What kept you sane?  Happy Hour.

33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?  I kind of have a man-crush on Bobby Flay.

34. What political issue stirred you the most?  Prop-8.

35. Who did you miss?  I miss my friend.  A few frenetic hours per year is not enough.

36. Who was the best new person you met?  That’s an odd question?  New people?  Probably some of the new folks in my vox-neighborhood.

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008.  Kill The Mammoth.   This was something we said at work to make sure that we kept our focus on the most important goal.

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

Isn’t it funny?
Isn’t it funny?
Isn’t it simple, after all?
--Lucy Wainwright Roche, Chicago

I was tagged by Nacwolin for seven things about me that might not be known.  Since these pop up with some regularity, I beginning to think I'm running out of things to say about myself.  Nevertheless, here we go...

1. I dislike artichokes.  Dislike isn’t strong enough, I think they’re nasty.  (And I get a lot of crap for this from the Beloved and some other friends of ours that really like them.)

Nope

2. I have never broken a bone, nor have I ever had to stay in the hospital.  The worst was ER room stitches after a collision at home plate during softball game in my 20s.

Nope

2 comments

3. I attended the first Live-Aid concert in Philadelphia in July, 1985.  It was incredibly hot and man, did I get a heck of a sunburn.

Yep

1 comment

4.  My initial major in school was chemical engineering, which I thought was boring.  I wanted to change to psychology, but my parents dissuaded me (thinking there was no future in it) and so I changed it to chemistry, which I found marginally more interesting than ChemE.

Nope

5.  My BS and PhD are in organic chemistry, but I haven’t synthesized an organic molecule in 15 years, maybe more.

Nope

6. I am a terrible swimmer. I nearly drowned once when I had waded out to a sandbar (Wildwood, NJ) and the tide came in making the water deeper than I could stand in.

Nope

7. I always come out as “Jack” on “which LOST character are you?” quizzes.

Yep

I won't tag, but feel free to play along!

BTT was a meme this week:

A good meme for BTT today:

What was the last book you bought?

“The Eight” by Katherine Neville and “Lisey’s Story” by Stephen King

Name a book you have read MORE than once

Hrrmm… there’s been several, but one book I’ve read more than twice is “The Illearth War” by Stephen R. Donaldson.  Maybe the best fantasy book I’ve read.

The Illearth War

Stephen R. Donaldson

Has a book ever fundamentally changed the way you see life? If yes, what was it?

I suppose that The Bible is the easy answer, but I don’t think that’s the point of this question.  Otherwise, probably not.

How do you choose a book? eg. by cover design and summary, recommendations or reviews

Usually by author, if known.  Recommendations from friends, occasionally if it looks interesting sitting on the shelf.

Do you prefer Fiction or Non-Fiction?

Oh, fiction, for sure.  I’ll read the occasional non-fiction book and enjoy it, but mostly I read for entertainment tending to escapism.

What’s more important in a novel - beautiful writing or a gripping plot?

Neither one alone can save a book.  .  I will appreciate great writing in a so-so story (“Kite Runner” anyone?) more than the inverse (“The Da Vinci Code” – really interesting idea, dreadful writing).  That’s why they’re called writers, not plotters.

Most loved/memorable character (character/book)

Too many to count: Atticus Finch, Thomas Covenant, Frodo Baggins, Roland Deschain, Edward Feathers

Which book or books can be found on your nightstand at the moment?

The two mentioned above (currently reading and up next) and “Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West” by Benazir Bhutto.

 

What was the last book you’ve read, and when was it?

“Old Filth” by Jane Gardam.  I’ve been meaning to blog about it.  It’s superb – especially for those that like sparse English wit – a wonderful story of life, love, sacrifice, the idea of success and that still waters can run very deep.

 

Old Filth

Jane Gardam

Have you ever given up on a book half way in?

Yes – in a recent post, I mentioned giving up on “John Adams” rather early on.  I also punted on “It” by Stephen King about half-way through.  I thought it was gratuitously bloated.

“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”

1) Bold: I have read.
2) Italics: Those I intend to read.  Actually, it would seem that there aren’t any…
3) Underline: Books I love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.  Given #2 above, I think that we can assume that if I haven’t read it by now, I’m not going to read it.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (Note: one benefit of 12 years of catholic education, though EVERY WORD might be a stretch)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Phillip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Note: I’m saying that having read several, doesn’t count)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (Note: I know its sort of sacrilege for nerds to say this, but I really didn’t find this book very funny at all…)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Note: shoot me)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I own)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (please…)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple, Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (How many of them?  ½ point to me for a lot)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine de St. Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare  Note: At least I get one out of not reading “The Complete Works”
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So, 33 of 99 (because there is no 58), a count that I’m okay with given the quantity of Jane Austen (and Austen-like books on this list…), though clearly I will get schooled in the Brown Trivial Pursuit questions by Cori, Noelle and Ancora Impara.

Nothing cures a blogging slump like a good meme....

The rules of the game get posted at the beginning. Each player answers the questions about themselves. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

1) What was I doing 10 years ago?

Wow 10 years ago I was living in Northern Illinois and working in drug discovery for Abbott Laboratories.  I had just finished my first NMR structure of a protein that was pretty important at the time.  Important enough that the group that beat us to the structure by a few months published their structure in Nature, and so I had to settle for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* -- but that’s cool.

I was also about the mid-span of my time with She Who Must Not Be Named, though at that point I think she was more like She Who Is Causing You To Second Guess This Whole Thing – but that would still take a couple of years to play itself out.

2) What are 5 things on my to-do list for today?

Prepare for upcoming prioritization meeting with direct reports
Write up latest results
Meet a friend I haven’t seen in a year for lunch
Prepare slides for upcoming presentation
Practice piano

3) Snacks I enjoy:

Cheese and crackers (I’ve been really digging the big block of manchego cheese from Costco – though I will consistently mispronounce it as ma-cheng-o for reasons that I can’t quite identify), nuts (almonds and crunchy peanuts), gin.

4) Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

The self-indulgent things I would do would be to have a house on the shore, in the mountains and in a big city, and travel travel travel.  Once I scratched that itch enough I’d donate a lot of my time (and that extra dough) to literacy programs, food programs for the poor and natural-space conservation efforts.

5) Places I have lived:

Camden NJ, Newark DE, Chapel Hill NC, Wilmington DE, Gurnee IL, San Diego CA.

6) Jobs I have had:

Janitor, paperboy, car buyer for leasing agency, college cafeteria worker, mass spec technician, organic chemist, biochemist-biophysicist, research program team leader

7) Bloggers I am tagging who I will enjoy getting to know better:

I thought I'd tag a few of the newer folks in my Neighborhood....SinCity Blonde; Jack Yan; Kellysouth; and Eli's Dad

*which has the unfortunate (and snicker-inducing) acronym: PNAS

If you had to write your autobiography in 6 words, what would you write?
Submitted by mitzie.

I left this as a comment the first time ancora impara did this, but I'll recycle it here...(and I don't even need six words)

True to myself.  Finally.

Tamzen tagged me the other day to come up with eight random things about myself.  I’ve done a couple of these before, so this weekend I tried to think of some stories/events/traits that I might not have previously discussed.  As I went through them, I realized they clustered into a couple of sub-categories.

Education
1. I am a product of 12 years of Catholic school education (I never went to kindergarten, and no, I don’t know why – my school had it, I just never went.).  During that education, I saw a 3rd grader punch a nun in the stomach, a teacher dangle a 6th grade student by the ankles from a third story boys bathroom window (it was not me), and knew an ~80 year old nun (Sister Narcissus. Really.) that would smite bad children with her rather hefty cane (occasionally, that was me).  I’m sure parents today would sue the pants off the school for the last two – we just thought it was Standard Operating Procedure.

2. In my high school, there was a fairly high preponderance of students drinking (gasp!).  A couple friends and I decided one day that it would be fun to be drunk while at school, so we went over behind a nearby 7-11 and got drunk at ~7:30 a.m.  One poorly-planned aspect of this was that I had a chemistry test 1st period.  In science classes, I was the nerd that always finished first, but not that day – I was the last person to turn my test in and my teacher asked me if I was feeling okay.  I got a 94.

3. When I was in graduate school at North Carolina – I was fairly active in my Church and one year decided that I would teach CCD (religious education).  Because I was a guy, I was given 7th grade students (in the hope that they would “respect” a male teacher more) b/c these classes had been discipline problems in the past.  I never used the textbook (which always peeved my coordinator) but decided to challenge the young adults with discussions about “issues and choices” – drinking, academic cheating, gossiping, violence, consumerism, etc.  I did it for last two years I was there.  I thought it worked.

Entertainment
4. I like gambling.  I always have – cards, casinos, football bets – I’m probably pretty interested.  One of my earliest vacation memories is when I was 6-years old, my family took the Great American Road Trip vacation – New Jersey to California and back by car.  On the return we stopped in Las Vegas and stayed at what was then the brand-new Flamingo.  My mom snuck me in the back of the gambling floor and let me play the slot machines.  I think we got fussed at by security after a while, but it was pretty fun for me!  Maybe that’s where it all started.

5. I like B-movies.  You know, cheesy black-and-white horror movies.  I’m pretty sure that this is derived from often watching them on Saturday afternoons with my mom (this was back in the ~10 channels of broadcast TV days, and there was a horror movie shown on one of the UHF channels every Saturday).  My dad worked six days a week, so my mom would make us a late-lunch and we’d set out trays and eat in the living room and watch them together.  Still a pretty special memory for me.

Poor Dating Behavior
6. One of my less-proud male moments was when I went to our freshman “prom” with a girl that I didn’t really like all that much.  But you see, I had a crush on her friend (who’d suggested to me that I take the girl) and my 15-year-old mind thought that if I took the girl I didn’t like all that much that I might score points with the girl I was interested in.   The dance was fine, but afterwards I must have said something stupid to someone, because word got back to my date about my motivations and I was forced to endure the public in-the-hall crying and recriminations.

7.  One of my less-proud male moments came when I was in college when I made the dubious decision to “go steady” with two different girls concurrently.  One was a girl that lived in PA – we had gotten close when we were sophomores, but she transferred to a small school near where she lived.  So, I’d drive up to see her, while I also pursued a relationship with another girl in my class (think at-school girlfriend and away-from-school girlfriend).  Once, while PA-girl and I were walking in the mall, I casually called her by the other girl’s name.  I was then forced to endure the public in-the-mall crying and recriminations.

8.  In graduate school, I had an ex-girlfriend that waited for me in my parking lot one night, confronted me when I arrived home, and became so demonstrably angry during the ensuing argument that she punched the side of her car and broke her hand.  She was convinced that I had cheated on her when we were dating – I hadn’t, but that jealous-streak was the main reason she was my ex-girlfriend.  She is fondly referred to now as Broken Hand Girl.

Consider yourself betagged if you liked reading these at all!