25 MORE Random Things About Baron Dave
Feb. 6th, 2009 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
barondavePorted, with minor edits, from Facebook.
I'm a rebel. No, that's not one of the Random Things. Too many articles have come out complaining about the 25 Things virus. How ridiculous! One of the more interesting and useful networking ideas is being slammed by a generation desperately wishing for crank telephones and cheap gas. Ha! I follow no crowd. Well, okay, I'll follow Jane Yolen and do another set, but without tagging anyone. So there. Neener neener.
1. One of my favorite lunchtime deserts is a bowl of vanilla ice cream and a cup of coffee, dipping a spoonful of the cold dish into the hot liquid and finishing off the spoon in one or two slurps. Yum! See 2.
2. Caffeine keeps me awake, and I never have coffee for dinner. See 1.
3. I have five fingers on my left hand.
4. My car is named the Emerald Starship because the dark green paint is officially "Emerald Mica" and the letters "ES" are emblazoned on the side (for the model of Protegé).
5. I'm mildly allergic to cats. Mostly, I'm allergic to the Siamese Seal Point I grew up with, now long gone, and am more allergic to Siamese than others.
6. Someone stole my sneakers at the most recent MN-StF New Years party. Haven't found the culprit or tracked down the errant footwear.
7. My jaw is in some dental textbooks for an operation they DIDN'T perform when I was a child. It's a long story.
8. Aside from the state in which I was born, I've never lived in any state that didn't border Canada. And where I lived as an infant in Mass. was farther north than some of the other places. I can't imagine living in a place where it didn't snow. See 9.
9. See 8. Yes, I lived briefly in Berkeley, CA, but not long enough to miss winter. On the other hand, I might be able to live in Berkeley despite the rarity of snow. My kind of weather.
10. I recently watched, for the first time since their initial release, Blade Runner and The Princess Bride. Both were good enough for me to sit all the way through the movie and both commentaries (a first and second), but neither is really high on my list. *shrug*
11. For a long time, you could (or someone could, perhaps you) define my life by the songs Pamela Brown by Leo Kotke and Streets of London by Ralph McTell. I don't know if this is still true.
12. I keep a large file of quotes, to use as .sigs or to slip into LiveJournal/Facebook posts. In fact, I have kept these files since college, and have a box of old notes that hasn't been typed in. Every few years I go into the box and enter a few pages, but it's annoying.
13. I have had formal lessons in three instruments: Piano, clarinet, guitar. None took.
14. I consider myself a musician. I am a conceptual aural artist, as anyone who has seen me do karaoke knows. Mostly, though, I'm a reviewer and impresario.
15. I have already live to long to be considered "a beacon of genius who died too young" such as Mozart or Bix Beiderbecke. Indeed, I'm at roughly the age where such luminaries as Jerry Garcia, Frank Zappa and George Harrison died during (not after) a long career.
16. I had a paper route when I was 12. Kept it for 5 years. It paid for my comic collection and at least a semester in college.
17. I was Richard Kiley's paperboy.
18. I just got new glasses. Now, maybe I can see well enough to delve into iridology.
19. I have a black thumb. I've been known to kill lichen.
20. One of my goals is to walk on the moon. As that becomes less and less likely due to age and NASA cutbacks, I can only hope for advances in technology.
21. I'm probably the least gay person you know. I'm neither in favor nor against anyone's sexuality: it's that I don't really care. I'm secure in my own sexuality. I just wish I were better at it.
22. I came that close to taking a 15-credit summer course in Biblical Hebrew. As it is, I don't consider myself much of a Biblical scholar but am constantly astonished by how little people know about their own religion's sacred texts.
23. I like weirdness, but there are limits. It's one of the major sub-themes of the Shockwave Radio Theater production When The Chips Are Down. script
24. One time I had a trip planned to New Orleans. I went to the Mississippi River here in Mpls and waved to the water. A few days later in NO, I went to the Mississippi and waved at the water again. I can't speak to how the river's experience, or even if I timed it right to approximate the flow, but I felt good.
25. Long ago, after years of looking at weirdos and cult theories, I came up with a formulation: "Just because you're a crackpot doesn't mean you're wrong." After even more years of tracking down unpopular and stupid-on-the-surface-of-it theories, I have added a codicil: "On the other hand, probably."
I'm a rebel. No, that's not one of the Random Things. Too many articles have come out complaining about the 25 Things virus. How ridiculous! One of the more interesting and useful networking ideas is being slammed by a generation desperately wishing for crank telephones and cheap gas. Ha! I follow no crowd. Well, okay, I'll follow Jane Yolen and do another set, but without tagging anyone. So there. Neener neener.
1. One of my favorite lunchtime deserts is a bowl of vanilla ice cream and a cup of coffee, dipping a spoonful of the cold dish into the hot liquid and finishing off the spoon in one or two slurps. Yum! See 2.
2. Caffeine keeps me awake, and I never have coffee for dinner. See 1.
3. I have five fingers on my left hand.
4. My car is named the Emerald Starship because the dark green paint is officially "Emerald Mica" and the letters "ES" are emblazoned on the side (for the model of Protegé).
5. I'm mildly allergic to cats. Mostly, I'm allergic to the Siamese Seal Point I grew up with, now long gone, and am more allergic to Siamese than others.
6. Someone stole my sneakers at the most recent MN-StF New Years party. Haven't found the culprit or tracked down the errant footwear.
7. My jaw is in some dental textbooks for an operation they DIDN'T perform when I was a child. It's a long story.
8. Aside from the state in which I was born, I've never lived in any state that didn't border Canada. And where I lived as an infant in Mass. was farther north than some of the other places. I can't imagine living in a place where it didn't snow. See 9.
9. See 8. Yes, I lived briefly in Berkeley, CA, but not long enough to miss winter. On the other hand, I might be able to live in Berkeley despite the rarity of snow. My kind of weather.
10. I recently watched, for the first time since their initial release, Blade Runner and The Princess Bride. Both were good enough for me to sit all the way through the movie and both commentaries (a first and second), but neither is really high on my list. *shrug*
11. For a long time, you could (or someone could, perhaps you) define my life by the songs Pamela Brown by Leo Kotke and Streets of London by Ralph McTell. I don't know if this is still true.
12. I keep a large file of quotes, to use as .sigs or to slip into LiveJournal/Facebook posts. In fact, I have kept these files since college, and have a box of old notes that hasn't been typed in. Every few years I go into the box and enter a few pages, but it's annoying.
13. I have had formal lessons in three instruments: Piano, clarinet, guitar. None took.
14. I consider myself a musician. I am a conceptual aural artist, as anyone who has seen me do karaoke knows. Mostly, though, I'm a reviewer and impresario.
15. I have already live to long to be considered "a beacon of genius who died too young" such as Mozart or Bix Beiderbecke. Indeed, I'm at roughly the age where such luminaries as Jerry Garcia, Frank Zappa and George Harrison died during (not after) a long career.
16. I had a paper route when I was 12. Kept it for 5 years. It paid for my comic collection and at least a semester in college.
17. I was Richard Kiley's paperboy.
18. I just got new glasses. Now, maybe I can see well enough to delve into iridology.
19. I have a black thumb. I've been known to kill lichen.
20. One of my goals is to walk on the moon. As that becomes less and less likely due to age and NASA cutbacks, I can only hope for advances in technology.
21. I'm probably the least gay person you know. I'm neither in favor nor against anyone's sexuality: it's that I don't really care. I'm secure in my own sexuality. I just wish I were better at it.
22. I came that close to taking a 15-credit summer course in Biblical Hebrew. As it is, I don't consider myself much of a Biblical scholar but am constantly astonished by how little people know about their own religion's sacred texts.
23. I like weirdness, but there are limits. It's one of the major sub-themes of the Shockwave Radio Theater production When The Chips Are Down. script
24. One time I had a trip planned to New Orleans. I went to the Mississippi River here in Mpls and waved to the water. A few days later in NO, I went to the Mississippi and waved at the water again. I can't speak to how the river's experience, or even if I timed it right to approximate the flow, but I felt good.
25. Long ago, after years of looking at weirdos and cult theories, I came up with a formulation: "Just because you're a crackpot doesn't mean you're wrong." After even more years of tracking down unpopular and stupid-on-the-surface-of-it theories, I have added a codicil: "On the other hand, probably."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-06 08:43 pm (UTC)I must admit this really piqued my interest, though it sounds like an unpleasant story.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-06 10:40 pm (UTC)As a kid, I had an underbite and a lisp.
One of the experts in the field, the head of the Dental School at NYU, iirc, wanted to break my lower jaw and remove the section with the eye teeth. A second opinion from a local up-and-coming dentist said that the problem was simpler: My tongue was too large (no comments, now). The solution was to simply wait, and as my bones grew the problem would correct itself.
I wore a retainer for several years circa first grade, again iirc. But we didn't do the surgery and eventually the underbite went away. I can still hear the lisp, though most don't.
No one ever showed me how it was written up in textbooks, but apparently this helped make the up-and-coming dentist's rep and didn't do much for the NYU guy.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-06 09:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-06 10:28 pm (UTC)Learning more about the Bible struck me as a good idea, but to fully understand the whole think I'd have needed to delve into Akkadian, Egyptian Hieroglyphics and the like. I wanted to grok the history, not choose a life's work. Besides, I'm not that good with languages...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-06 11:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-07 03:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-07 04:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-06 10:10 pm (UTC)#4 - I have never named my car. Many people do.
#18 - I just bought a set set of reading glasses but am not planning on studying iridology. I have never known someone who has studied iridology, AFAIK, but I do know practitioners of other alternative medicines, such as reiki and crystal healing. I know a vet who practices acupuncture on animals and has also studied Chinese herbal medicine for animals.
#22 - I have never studied Biblical Hebrew but I have studied the kabbalah (or choose your own spelling) a little. I don't suppose that counts though.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-06 10:45 pm (UTC)For purposes of this Note on Facebook, a thumb is a finger.
I rarely name inanimate objects, but between the letters printed on the side and the paint color (which I bought extra of, to cover up scratches; one of the best things I ever did for the car), it seemed Fate Had Conspired.
Last time I tried iridology, I got my usual stats: One dead on hit, one complete miss. It occurred to me that if I could see the eye a bit better and compare it to the chart I carry with me, I'd do better than 50%.
The Qabballah only counts. Indeed, I'd love to see Sesame Street have The Count talk about the system.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-06 10:53 pm (UTC)