Archive for the 'Memes' category

Don’t Speak

A cute little meme that I scarfed from Poppy Z. Brite (whose books I’m currently reading, but more on that later).

Directions:
1. Put your iTunes, Windows Media Player, iPod etc. on shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS

1..IF SOMEONE SAYS “IS THIS OKAY” YOU SAY?
Don’t Stop – Fleetwood Mac

2..HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF?
Black Math – The White Stripes

3. WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
Werewolves of London – Warren Zevon

4..HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY?
Love is Stronger Than Justice – Sting

5..WHAT IS YOUR LIFE’S PURPOSE?
Pibroch (Cap in Hand) – Jethro Tull

6..WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
The Dark End of the Street – The Commitments

7..WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
Waves (Take Me Alive) - Rhea’s Obsession

8..WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
Tishialuk Girls Set (Father’s Jig/Buffett Double/Tishialuk Girls) – Great Big Sea

9..WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
Show Me – The Pretenders

10..WHAT IS 2 + 2?
The Chain – Fleetwood Mac

11..WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR EX?
Lazy Bones – Leon Redbone

12..WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
On Board a 98 – David Coffin

13..WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
El Amore de Mi Vida – Warren Zevon

14..WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
Hitsum Kitsum – Louis Prima

15..WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Cup of Wonder – Jethro Tull

16..WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
Big Stripey Lie – Kate Bush

17..WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
Dreams – Fleetwood Mac

18..WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST FEAR?
Just a Girl – No Doubt

19..WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
O My God – The Police

20..WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
Beat the Drum – Great Big Sea

Now press Next one more time and use it as your title.

  
Mood: sillysilly

My Band. Our Album.

Really fun little meme I’ve seen around lately. Most recently over on Whistling in the Dark.

The rules:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Using your favorite graphics program combine these three elements to design your album cover and post the result.

Here’s mine:

album-meme-08.jpg

  
Mood: amusedamused

100% Browncoat



Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with?
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Serenity (Firefly)
You like to live your own way and don’t enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you.

Serenity (Firefly)

100%

Moya (Farscape)

94%

Babylon 5 (Babylon 5)

94%

Deep Space Nine (Star Trek)

81%

Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica)

81%

Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)

75%

Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)

69%

FBI’s X-Files Division (The X-Files)

56%

SG-1 (Stargate)

56%

Enterprise D (Star Trek)

56%

Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix)

50%

Bebop (Cowboy Bebop)

44%

Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda)

31%

Via Emma Bull.

  
Mood: amusedamused

Rational Is Boring?

What kind of extremist are you?
Your Result: Rational Person
 

You consider these questions obvious straw men, designed to distract people from a meaningful investigation of facts and a serious discussion of relevant political issues. How boring.

Right-Wing Extremist
 
Moderate Extremist
 
Left-Wing Extremist
 
What kind of extremist are you?
See All Our Quizzes
  
Mood: amusedamused

Ah, Yes. I Remember It Well.

Thank the great god Balki! You’re finished! You scored 25 out of a possible 30 Accuracy Points, and you earned an extra 10 Bonus Points!

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

free online dating free online dating
You scored higher than 99% on Accuracy
free online dating free online dating
You scored higher than 99% on Bonus

The Think you remember the 80’s? Test written by jahazarak on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test.

  

Witches Weekly: The Start

It’s been ages since I did a Witches Weekly.

When did you first realize that the pagan path was for you?

I started questing at a pretty young age. My parents raised me Catholic, but were very encouraging of my curiosity about other religions. Maybe that’s because Mom was raised Methodist, but her mother was originally Lutheran and her father Catholic. Or maybe it was that Dad was non-practising himself, though he took my brother and me to Mass when Mom couldn’t.

I’d read the entire Man, Myth & Magic encyclopedia by the time I was 12. I was especially fascinated by the articles on European magical traditions, from folk magic to the Golden Dawn. And growing up in Salem, Massachusetts, attending the same junior high school as Laurie Cabot’s daughter Penny, I was exposed early on to Wicca. Or at least to the existence of Wicca. From what I’d read in MM&M, though, it seemed to me that Witches did an awful lot of naked dancing, and I wasn’t so interested in that.

So I leaned toward Golden Dawn-style ceremonial magick first. I guess its Qabalistic roots and Judeo-Christian overtones made it a good intermediate stage for me. I didn’t have to let go of my early monotheism but I could explore the magickal nature of the universe. I read Eliphas Levi, Israel Regardie, and Dion Fortune. I devoured the poetry of W.B. Yeats. I even attempted to slog through Aleister Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice in high school. I learned the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.

Eventually, though, the lack of a real feminine divine in all of this wore me down. Somewhere deep down inside, I knew that God was not exclusively male nor sexless nor manifest in only one form. And I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that the physical aspects of the world were not necessarily an impediment to spirituality, something to divest oneself of in the quest to “ascend” to enlightenment; that the dualities that monotheistic symbolism was rife with didn’t always line up for me the way they were supposed to. So I thought maybe I just wasn’t spiritually cut out for a magickal path.

And then I happened to pick up a copy of Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon. And I discovered that there was a lot more to Wicca than I’d previously thought. And that there were more flavors of modern Paganism out there than I had ever dreamed. Which got me exploring again and eventually put my feet on my current eclectic path.

  

Time’s 100 Best: I’ve Read 13

Yes, another book meme. This one I picked up from Twenty Sided. (The intend-to-read category is my own addition.)

In 2005, Time magazine picked the 100 best English-language novels. Mark the selections you have read in bold. If you liked it, add a star (*) in front of the title; if you didn’t, give it a minus (-). If you feel totally indifferent or just can’t remember, give it a question mark (?). If you haven’t read it but intend to, mark it with a plus (+). Then, put the total number of books you’ve read in the subject line.

The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
All the King’s Men - Robert Penn Warren
American Pastoral - Philip Roth
An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
*Animal Farm - George Orwell
Appointment in Samarra - John O’Hara
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
At Swim-Two-Birds - Flann O’Brien
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Beloved - Toni Morrison
The Berlin Stories - Christopher Isherwood
+The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder
Call It Sleep - Henry Roth
*Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
*The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
*A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
The Confessions of Nat Turner - William Styron
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
A Dance to the Music of Time - Anthony Powell
The Day of the Locust - Nathanael West
Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather
A Death in the Family - James Agee
The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen
Deliverance - James Dickey
Dog Soldiers - Robert Stone
Falconer - John Cheever
The French Lieutenant’s Woman - John Fowles
The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing
Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin
Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Gravity’s Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
*The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
Herzog - Saul Bellow
Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul
I, Claudius - Robert Graves
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
+Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Light in August - William Faulkner
+The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
?Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
*Lord of the Flies - William Golding
**The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Loving - Henry Green
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
Money - Martin Amis
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
+Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
Native Son - Richard Wright
+Neuromancer - William Gibson
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
*1984 - George Orwell
+On the Road - Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Ken Kesey
The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
Play It As It Lays - Joan Didion
+Portnoy’s Complaint - Philip Roth
Possession - A.S. Byatt
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
Rabbit, Run - John Updike
Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
The Recognitions - William Gaddis
*Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
*Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
+Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
The Sot-Weed Factor - John Barth
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
The Sportswriter - Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold - John le Carré
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
*To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
Ubik - Philip K. Dick
Under the Net - Iris Murdoch
Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
**Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
White Noise - Don DeLillo
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

I actually wasn’t going to to do this meme, but then I saw Watchmen on the list, and I just had to. Yay for the folks at Time, for realizing that graphic novels can be as important/meaningful/enjoyable as prose-only novels!

  

Statistically Nonexistent

HowManyOfMe.com
Logo There are:
0
people with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

Scarfed from Barb.

  

Time Waster

Scarfed from PZB.

1. The phone rings. Who do you want it to be?
At this hour (6:30am) any phone call is bad news.

2. When shopping at the grocery store, do you return your cart?
Always.

3. In a social setting, are you more of a talker or a listener?
Listener, usually. Unless I’m with very close friends or have been drinking.

4. Do you take compliments well?
No. I blush and get all inarticulate.

5. Are you an active person?
Mentally. Not so much physically.

6. If abandoned alone in the wilderness, would you survive?
Depends on where I am, what time of year, and for how long. I did earn my Girl Scout firebuilder merit badge, and I can recognize quite a few edible berries in New England.

7. Do you like to ride horses?
Did it once, when I was about 12. It was fun, once I got used to the scary unbalanced feeling and learned to trust that my horse wasn’t trying to dislodge me every time she went into a trot. Would love to do it again one day, and learn to do it properly.

8. Did you ever go to camp as a kid?
Sleep-away camp? Just once, for 2 weeks. I spent the first week homesick and the second week dreading having to go home.

9. What was your favorite game as a kid?
Make-believe. I had a whole army of imaginary friends, most of them talking animals.

10. If a sexy person was pursuing you, but you knew he/she was married, would you get involved with him/her?
Not unless it was Sean Bean, Johnny Depp, or Alexander Siddig. Actually, I’m pretty sure Sid is single.

11. Are you judgmental?
My husband says that I’m always looking for reasons to excuse people’s behavior, but there are some issues I get very judgmental over.

12. Could you date someone with different religious beliefs than you?
I don’t think I ever dated anyone whose beliefs matched mine. Andy’s certainly don’t.

13. Do you like to pursue or be pursued?
I always preferred being pursued. It took the uncertainty of does-he-like-me away. All in past tense, of course.

14. Can you speak another language?
Ein bißchen Deutsch. I’ve studied Esperanto, too, but not enough to speak it without a dictionary handy. Same with Latin and Sindarin, and my two conlangs.

15. If you had to choose, would you rather be deaf or blind?
Deaf. I love music, but I’d die without the written word. (Yes, I know there are books on tape and such, but it’s not the same.)

16. What’s your favorite food?
That depends on my mood. Right now I’m craving peanut butter on honey-oatmeal toast.

17. Do you know how to shoot a gun?
No.

18. If your house was on fire, what would be the first thing you grabbed?
Assuming I’m not needed to evacuate my husband, mother, and pets, then I go for the genealogy files and the laptop that has my novel manuscript in it.

19. How often do you read books?
Constantly. I’m currently in the middle of four (I think).

20. Do you think more about the past, present or future?
The past, probably. I’m a history junkie and a genealogist, after all. I probably spend more time thinking about stuff that doesn’t/hasn’t/won’t ever exist, though.

21. What is your favorite children’s book?
The Hobbit.

22. What color are your eyes?
Bluish-grey.

23. How tall are you?
5′10″

24. Where is your dream house located?
Near both the woods and the water, but reasonable driving distance from at least one decent sized town.

25. Last person you talked to on the phone?
Andy.

26. Have you ever taken pictures in a photo booth?
Probably.

27. When was the last time you were at Olive Garden?
I don’t think I ever have been.

28. What are your keys on your key chain for?
I have four keychains:
(1) My apartment, my mother’s apartment, the Honda, and the broken stub of one of my Bug keys. Yes, I know I should take that last one off.
(2) The intact Bug key.
(3) The spare Bug key.
(4) The front door of my office building, the front door to my floor in the office building, the WP center, the print room, my office, my filing cabinet, and the office of the supervisor down the hall.

29. What’s your favorite color?
Black.

30. Where was the furthest place you traveled today?
To the coffee maker.

31. Where is your current pain at?
No pain today. A little sinus pressure that shows promise, though.

32. Do you like mustard?
Occasionally.

33. Do you prefer to sleep or eat?
They’re pretty evenly matched.

34. Do you look like your mom or dad?
Dad.

35. How long does it take you in the shower?
Usually about 15 minutes from closing the bathroom door to opening it again.

36. Can you do splits?
No, but I used to be able to do cartwheels and handstands.

37. What movie do you want to see right now?
I’m looking forward to The Prestige.

38. Do you put lotion on your dog or cats?
Why?

39. What did you do for New Year’s?
This past year? Damned if I can remember. Probably watched the ball drop on TV.

40. Do you think The Grudge was scary?
Haven’t seen it. Don’t intend to.

41. What was the cause of your last accident?
Stepping into the shoulder strap of my backpack rather than over it.

42. Do you own a camera phone?
No.

43. What are you drinking?
Coffee.

44. Was your mom a cheerleader?
No.

45. What’s the last letter of your middle name?
E.

46. Who did you vote for on American Idol?
Bwaa haa ha!!!

47. How many hours of sleep do you get a night?
6 during the week. 7-9 on weekends.

48. Do you like care bears?
No.

49. What do you buy at the movies?
Tickets. Often popcorn, too.

50. Do you know how to play poker?
Yes. Doesn’t mean I’m any good at it.

51. Do you wear your seatbelt?
Always.

52. What do you wear to sleep?
In summer, an oversize t-shirt. In winter, flannel pajamas.

53. Anything big ever happen in your hometown?
Historically? The Salem Witch Trials. Nathaniel Hawthorn’s literary career. We were the capital of Masachusetts when Boston was occupied by the British during the Revolution, too.
Currently? Halloween for an entire month every year.

54. How many meals do you eat a day?
The usual three.

55. Is your tongue pierced?
No. That fad didn’t start until I was too old to fall for it.

56. Do you always read MySpace bulletins?
No. I do have an account, but I hardly ever use it.

57. Do you have pets?
A dog and a cat.

58. Do you like funny or serious people better?
Funny.

59. Ever been to LA?
Los Angeles? Once. It’s like an alien planet.
Louisiana? No.

60. Did you eat a cookie today?
I haven’t eaten anything yet today. Breakfast will be soon, though.

61. Do you use cuss words in other languages?
I’ve been known to swear in French, German, and Finnish, but not regularly. Once I invent my conlangs’ profanities, I may use them occasionally.

62. Do you steal or pay for your music downloads?
My laptop is 5 years old. I save my disk space for my writing and buy my music on CD.

63. Do you hate chocolate?
No.

64. What do you and your parents fight about the most?
Mom and I don’t agree about everything, but it’s probably been 20 years since we regularly fought about anything. Y’know, since I grew up and got a life of my own.

65. Is your cell usually on vibrate or ring?
Ring. It plays the theme from The Avengers.

66. Are you a gullible person?
About some things. Not about others.

67. Do you need a boyfriend/girlfriend to be happy?
I hope not. My husband wouldn’t like it.

68. If you could have any job (assuming you have the skills) what would it be?
Writer.

69. Are you easy to get along with?
I think so.

70. What is your favorite time of day?
The quiet time in the morning before even the dog is up.