Tagged!

[mmcirvin]

Tagged by The Editors (thanks to glitter_ninja for alerting me; the notation below notwithstanding, I'd slipped a few days).

Four jobs I've had:
1. Algebra tutor
2. Intern who injects the deadly venom of the South American poison-arrow frog into a gas chromatograph
3. Chump who tries to get the other graduate students to show up at their hour staffing the Physics Question Center (my most spectacular professional failure)
4. 3D scientific visualization programmer

Four movies I could watch over and over:
1. Brazil
2. A Chinese Ghost Story
3. Metallica aka Space Odyssey aka The Captive Planet aka Sette uomini d'oro nello spazio
4. The Miracle Fighters

Four places I've lived:
1. Overland Park, Kansas
2. North Ridgeville, Ohio
3. Chantilly, Virginia
4. Cambridge, Massachusetts

Four TV shows I love to watch (Sam's recent forays into British TV are apparent here):
1. Doctor Who
2. QI
3. Black Books
4. SCTV (this list needed Canadian content)

Four places I've been on vacation:
1. Paris
2. Barcelona
3. Bridgeport, Nebraska
4. Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania

Four blogs I visit (sort of) daily:
1. Pharyngula (change your bookmarks!)
2. Brad DeLong
3. The Poor Man Institute for Freedom and Democracy and A Pony
4. Uncertain Principles

Four of my favorite foods:
1. Pho
2. Grilled salmon
3. Raw tuna
4. Asparagus

Four places I'd rather be (if Sam can come along):
1. Boulder, Colorado
2. Florence
3. Someplace with a better commute
4. Boulder, Colorado

Four albums I can't live without, in the alternate universe in which people actually need specified items of recorded music to survive:
1. They Might Be Giants, Factory Showroom (yes! It is underrated!)
2. Talking Heads, The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads
3. David Amram, Triple Concerto
4. Interröbang Cartel, Needs More Wanger

Four vehicles I've owned:
1. 1996 Nissan Altima (or is it '97? I'll have to go check)
2. Wheels of my childhood: red three-speed Schwinn
3. The Tell-Tale Mountain Bike
4. BROWN CAR (I think I may have misidentified the make here, but never mind)


I tag nobody, because otherwise when will the madness end?

Update: I take it back: I tag The Claw! Because somebody has to!

Comments

[spasmsproject.livejournal.com]

"A Chinese Ghost Story!" One of my favoritest movies ever. And is "QI" the BBC show? 'Cause that's an incredible program.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yes indeedy.

[spasmsproject.livejournal.com]

Good choices.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

"A Chinese Ghost Story" is one of the few films that actually lives up to the cliche: it is a Movie That Has Everything. Action, romance, horror, special effects, music, wild fantasy, goofball comedy and heartbreaking tragedy. Normally you would not expect all this to hang together, but it does.

Swordsman Yin, the movie's Fonzie, may be the coolest cool guy who ever appeared in fiction. After a while you no longer become surprised when he shoots fireballs out of his palms or casually cuts a trans-universal gateway in the air with his sword. He's just THAT COOL.

[spasmsproject.livejournal.com]

Have you ever seen it in a theater, or only home viewings? It's fantastic on video (I have VHS tapes of the original and the first sequel), but the cinema experience was utterly jaw-dropping. I saw it at Film Forum in Manhattan about twelve years ago and I loved it so much I came back and saw it again.

Perfect Yin:Fonzie analogy, by the way.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Only on DVD.

"A Chinese Ghost Story II" is, surprisingly, also a solidly entertaining movie. But it would be difficult to top the first one.

[spasmsproject.livejournal.com]

Have you seen "A Chinese Ghost Story III?" I've heard it was also quite good.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I haven't.

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

I think we've all had a job where the official description was "chump".

Anyhow, WHEN IN THE HECK DID YOU LIVE IN KANSAS? What the hell? This week I have learned a lot of new things about some people on my friends list, and I'm disappointed (disappointed!) that I didn't know these things before.

I don't think I've been to Boulder since I was about 9. Is it nice? All I remember is seeing lots of groundhogs on a campus building site.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I was, I am afraid, a little baby person at the time. I retain a strongly Midwesternish accent, but I think it's a combination of Cleveland-area dialect from when I was a few years old, and my mother's Iowa accent.

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

I actually find Iowa accents to sound more "southern American" than mine. I suspect you have a variation of the Midwestern non-accent accent if you grew up in Cleveland. I mostly lost the hillbilly southern Missouri accent I grew up with; saying things like "rye-cheer" for "right here" and such. In a lot of ways I wish I hadn't lost the accent but the precision of the Midwestern non-accent accent really appealed to the language nerd in me. Sometimes in my head I can still hear myself with my childhood accent, but if I try to speak with that accent I sound very fake.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

As I said a while ago, reading the Harvard Dialect Survey results made me realize that I had actually changed a lot of my language usages from Great Lakes to Mid-Atlantic dialect as I grew up, without consciously knowing what I was doing. I just thought everyone was using different words than they used to.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...by the way, I was actually born in St. Louis, though my parents didn't live there for long after. We were in the KC area for about a year or so, then moved to Ohio and Dad started working for GE in Cleveland. So my earliest memories are of Ohio, with the first obviously dateable milestone seared into my head being the birth of my sister in 1972, when I was almost four. We moved to Virginia soon after that.

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

My mom's family is from the St Louis area. The city itself is not real fun right now, lots of crime. But the outlying areas have a lot of German settlers, and mom's family is all German, baby. It's so German, if you're not German then they think you're weird.

(I once had to ask for the spelling of the funeral home I used for mom, because I couldn't understand what the secretary was saying. The secretary spelled it out for me: T-O-E-D-E-M-A-N-N. Feeling kind of dumb, I said, "Oh, right! It's German!" The secretary actually replied, "Uh, duh!" Hey, I'd forgotten, it's been so long since I was there.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...As for Boulder, my experience is limited to being there in the summer, but at that time of year it is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been, as well as having a Bay Areaish hippie/yuppie/nerd culture that I liked, though I'm sure it would irritate many for different reasons.

[sirreality.livejournal.com]

As someone who was there for four years (for the obvious reasons), Boulder is one of the few places in the world I could have seen a white guy in dreads driving a ford explorer blasting Paul Simon out his open windows.

Compared to Massachusetts, the winters are somewhat nicer -- more variety, both colder and warmer. Still quite beautiful.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...By the way, I was a good little boy and only put one movie on my list (#3) that I love for its hypnotic badness. #4 is kind of like a so-bad-it's-good movie, except that the extreme jawdropping wackiness in it is entirely intentional, and actually works on the intended level.

[(Anonymous)]

But I don't have a blog anymore. :( Maybe The Editors will give me a little cyberspace this weekend. Thanks for the tag. :)

The Claw

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I was wondering about that. I miss your blog.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I also tag samantha2074 because she seems to want to do this stupid thing too!

Vacation?

[(Anonymous)]

You vacationed in Bridgeport Nebraska???? There is nothing there.