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

[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.)