February, 2006

So this one time, on my blog, I did a quiz, but I totally drew the line there and promised none of that dumb meme business. No way. Not here. But I’ve been tagged. Twice (though once was a while back). And I’m starting to worry that this is like getting those chain letters and I’m not going to get the great internet bounty of good luck that’s waiting just around the corner for me if only I’ll spread the virus (I mean, meme). So here goes, two memes I’ve been tagged with, and one I just feel like doing. Making three. A magic number.

Tangential Cold passed me the musical baton ages ago.

Total volume of music on my Apple iPod: 13.6G
(13.6G on tuzanor, my laptop, as well)

According to iTunes these are my latest aquisitions:

• Hooray for Santy Claus – Senor Tonto
• Yeah, The Deranged Millionaire – They Might Be Giants
• I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With a Dalek – Go-Go’s (UK)
• K-Hole – Silver Jews
• Chicka Chicka Boom Boom – Bill Martin And John Archambault
• Woman King – Iron & Wine

I promise I’m not as weird as those tracks make it seem. I’ve never even seen an episode of Dr. Who! I take full responsibility for They Might Be Giants, however.

Song playing right now: Cruelty – Kosheen

Five songs I listen to a lot, or mean a lot to me:

• Mayan Pilot – Splashdown
• Haunted – Poe
• Shaolin Satellite – Thievery Corporation
• Only Thing That Shines – Shriekback
• Sleeping in The Flowers – They Might Be Giants

I did this off the top of my head and then checked my audioscrobbler stats and I scared myself with how closely the two agreed.

I’ve no idea who may have done this when it was current (about ten months ago), but hey, if you’ve done it once you can do it again, right? So…

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:

• John Newmark
• Bookwoman
• Legomancer (turnabout’s fair play)
• Kostia
• Shasticon

One down, two to go. Follows the “four things” meme, foisted onto me by Legomancer.

Four jobs I’ve had:

1. Pancake (and other breakfast items, but what I remember was making pancakes) Cook at a University Cafeteria
2. Pizza Delivery Girl
3. Systems Librarian at a University
4. Electronic Records Archivist

Four movies I can watch over and over:

1. Lord of The Rings Trilogy
2. Barton Fink
3. The Princess Bride
4. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

In the past I would have answered “Heathers” and “A Clockwork Orange”, but I think I overdid it on those two because they’ve lost most of their attraction. I’d watch them again, sure, but not over and over. It was also kind of a tossup between “Barton Fink” and “Oh Brother Where Art Thou?” but I elected to list the one I don’t own.

Four places I’ve lived:

1. Pineville, Louisiana
2. Baton Rouge, Louisiana
3. Cleveland, Mississippi
4. Jackson, Mississippi

Perverse of me not to say Buenos Aires, wasn’t it?

Four TV shows I love:

1. Firefly
2. The Invisible Man
3. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
4. Mission: Impossible

I’m not totally sure I could stand to watch The Man from U.N.C.L.E. or Mission: Impossible in english, but I should give it a try sometime.

Four places I’ve vacationed (and would return to in a heartbeat):

1. Ravenna, Italy
2. Salvador da Bahia, Brazil
3. Cataratas de Iguazu, Argentina
4. Basel, Switzerland

Four of my favorite foods:

1. good, dark chocolate
2. cheese
3. sushi
4. empanadas – I love all kinds (even corn!) but I look back especially fondly on a dessert empanada my mom used to bake with dulce de membrillo for a filling. Delicious.

Seems criminal to leave out tea, but that’s a beverage, right, not a food?

Four sites I visit daily:

1. Google
2. Wikipedia (all hail Wikipedia!)
3. Gmail
4. either Amazon or IMDB, depending on what I’m looking up

Kind of scary how much of that is reference work. OTOH, I do almost all my pleasure reading via Sage (an RSS aggregator), so I guess that’s to be expected.

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Sierras de Cordoba
2. The British Museum
3. Narnia or Alice’s Wonderland
4. Walking on the beach

Four bloggers I am tagging:

1. Noahvale (dude, you haven’t posted in AGES).
2. Tangential Cold (likewise)
3. Anonylanf (so he won’t feel left out of all this tagging nonsense)
4. and last but not least, Miss Braces herself, the lovely Esthela!

And to round things out, as an exercise in cat-waxing, I ran the main characters for both my novels, as well as the proto-character, the one I know is a Mary-Sue, through the litmus test designed for that purpose.

The results : Chelia of Cualcotel is a Borderline-Sue with 25 points (although maybe for that question about being related to royalty I should have answered no. Does working for them qualify as related to them, or is that for blood ties only?). Hannah from YWGYSL is also a Borderline-Sue with 24 points. I’m not sure I should have given her credit for being named after me (20 points!). She isn’t named for me, strictly speaking, but we share a name, so I felt it more honest to ding her for that, even though it’s not really my fault there’s a dearth of biblical names that are for girls. Still, all technicalities count, etc. I guess I should have tried Lawrence or Marie instead. No name sharing there. Meanwhile, Tatiana, who was practically designed as a Mary-Sue from my middle-school brain, came up, oddly, as only a Mary-Sue, and not the Uber-Sue or Irredeemable-Sue that I expected. However, considering the slimness of the margin (she scored 54 and 56 is the lower limit for Uber), maybe it’s not all that odd. Nonetheless, though I love you, dear Tatiana, you will never see print.

The Scoreboard:

• 0-10 points: The Anti-Sue. Your character is the very antithesis of a Mary-Sue. Why are you even taking this test?
• 11-20 points: The Non-Sue. Your character is a well-developed, balanced person, and is almost certainly not a Mary Sue. Congratulations!
• 21-35 points: Borderline-Sue. Your character is cutting it close, and you may want to work on the details a bit, but you’re well on your way to having a lovely original character. Good work.
• 36-55 points: Mary-Sue. Your character needs some work in order to be believable. But despair not; you should still be able to salvage her with a little effort. Don’t give up.
• 56-70 points: Uber-Sue. You’ve got one hell of a Mary-Sue on your hands here, and it’s not going to be easy to set things right. But do your best. There may be hope for you yet.
• 71 points or more: Irredeemable-Sue. You’re going to have to start over, my friend. I know you want to keep writing, but no. Just no.

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